Yusuf · Makki · ayah 94 of 111

Yusuf 12:94

وَلَمَّا فَصَلَتِ ٱلْعِيرُ قَالَ أَبُوهُمْ إِنِّى لَأَجِدُ رِيحَ يُوسُفَ ۖ لَوْلَآ أَن تُفَنِّدُونِ

“And when the caravan departed [from Egypt], their father said,[616] "Indeed, I find the smell of Joseph [and would say that he was alive] if you did not think me weakened in mind."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Before any messenger arrives, an old man catches his lost son's scent on the wind, and says so knowing he will be called senile.

A reflection

The stray, found by scent

The verb Ya'qub uses is ordinary in translation. I find the scent of Yusuf. In Arabic it carries a whole history.

The lexicons say the first picture of this root is finding something you had lost. The Arabs said: I found the stray animal. They paired the word with another, for the calling out of a man searching for a lost camel. From finding came perceiving: finding a taste, a sound, a feeling. The same letters also name the heat of strong emotion, of grief or love.

So when Ya'qub says innī la-ajidu, he uses the word for the end of a search. A man who has spent decades calling out for something lost says: I have found it. And what he has found is not a body, or a letter, or a witness. It is a scent, carried on moving air.

The commentaries describe the moment. As the caravan passed beyond the walls of Egypt, a wind rose and carried the scent of Yusuf's shirt to his father. One report puts the distance at eight nights' travel. A linguistic commentary says simply: Allah made him find it.

That is the held image of this ayah. An old man, blind, sitting in Canaan, lifting his face. The thing he has been calling out for across the years arrives not where he can see it, but where he can breathe it.

The search did not end with the lost one walking through the door. It ended with the first sign, carried ahead of everything else, to the one person who had never stopped expecting it.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.