Surah Yusuf, Joseph

Surah 12 · 111 verses · revealed at Mecca

Yusuf is the only surah in the Qur'an that tells a single story from beginning to end, in order, without breaking away. Everywhere else, episodes appear in pieces and in different places. Here there is one narrative of one family across a lifetime, and the third verse calls it the most beautiful of stories.

A boy tells his father a dream. His brothers, resenting their father's affection for him, throw him into a well and report him dead. He is sold into service in Egypt, accused of something he did not do, and imprisoned for years. In prison he interprets the dreams of two fellow prisoners, and is eventually called to interpret the king's. That reading — seven fat years, seven lean — puts him in charge of Egypt's grain. Famine brings his brothers to his door to beg for food, not knowing him. He knows them.

What the surah does with that recognition is the heart of it. Yusuf has absolute power over the men who tried to kill him, and the Qur'an lets the moment stretch before he uses it. What he finally says is that there is no blame on them today.

The surah is traditionally placed in a hard period of the Prophet's life at Mecca, after the deaths of his uncle and his wife, when the community was at its lowest. Read in that setting, a story about a man thrown into a well by his own family and delivered many years later is not a digression. It is the point.

Yusuf is also the surah most often read for its treatment of patience. The word the father uses for his own state — a beautiful patience, one without complaint to anyone but God — has passed into ordinary speech across the Muslim world.

Surah Yusuf on this site

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Surah Yusuf, Joseph

Surah Yusuf on this site

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