Yusuf · Makki · ayah 92 of 111

Yusuf 12:92

قَالَ لَا تَثْرِيبَ عَلَيْكُمُ ٱلْيَوْمَ ۖ يَغْفِرُ ٱللَّهُ لَكُمْ ۖ وَهُوَ أَرْحَمُ ٱلرَّٰحِمِينَ

“He said, "No blame will there be upon you today. May Allāh forgive you; and He is the most merciful of the merciful.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Yusuf refuses to strip his brothers bare with blame, asks Allah to cover them instead, and points past his own mercy to a greater one.

A reflection

Even our mercy is partly for ourselves

Yusuf has just done the most merciful thing anyone in this story does. He has the men who threw him into a well at his feet, and he lets them go. Then, in the same breath, he hands the title away. He is the most merciful of the merciful.

A later commentary explains why the title cannot belong to Yusuf, or to anyone else. Everyone who shows mercy, it says, does so only by Allah's mercy. And human mercy is never pure. It is mixed with hoping for some benefit, or avoiding some harm. At the very least, it relieves the pain the merciful person feels at the sight of suffering.

That is an uncomfortable thing to be told about our kindest moments. A man at a red light hands a coin through the window to someone with a cardboard sign. Part of him is generous. Part of him simply wants the awkwardness at the glass to end. He drives off feeling better, and some of that feeling was the point.

Allah's mercy has none of that in it. He is not soothed by being merciful, or relieved, or repaid. Sahih al-Bukhari records the Prophet ﷺ watching a captive mother find her baby and press it to her and feed it. Allah, he said, is more merciful to His servants than this woman is to her child.

This is not praise that Allah needs. Nothing is added to Him by being called merciful. It is a correction that we need. It shrinks the pride of even our best forgiveness. Yusuf, at his most magnanimous, refuses to let the moment make him large. He points past himself, to a mercy his own could only borrow from.

The full entry has 7 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.