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When Love Gives You Lemons: The Yusuf and Zulaikha Story

When the Qur'an describes something as "the most beautiful of stories," it's worth checking out. (And, really, what doesn't look more gorgeous calligraphed in Arabic?)

The Biblical Joseph and Potiphar's wife become Yusuf and Zulaikha in the Qur'an. The story was most famously explored by the Sufi poet Jami in the Haft Awrang ("Seven Thrones"), written in Persian sometime around 1480.

The Turkish-French writer Elif Shafak believes that "In the history of Islam, perhaps no woman has been as widely (mis)interpreted as Zulaikha... a despicable symbol of lust, hedonism, and, ultimately, feminine evil." However,

As wicked as Zulaikha might be in the eyes of the conservative Muslims, she was considered in a completely different way by the Sufis. For the Sufi mystic, Zulaikha simply represented someone purely and madly in love. Nothing more and nothing less....

For the [Sufi] dervish, as Ibn Arabi stated, there was no religion more sublime than the religion of love. The Islamic mystic would "follow the religion of Love, whichever way his camels take."

In a lecture titled "Spiritual Liberty", given in London in 1914, the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan said, "from the story of Yusuf and Zulaikha we learn what part beauty plays in the world of love."

Yusuf was so beautiful that Zulaikha, the wife of his master (interesting how in this lecture Zulaikha's husband, "the Aziz" or "the chief", is the one who goes nameless, in contrast with Potiphar's wife), "raised him in her eyes from a slave to a king," saying, "Those crowned with beauty are always kings, even if they are in rags or sold as slaves."

As the growing gossip of her friends and relations "eventually put Zulaikha in a difficult position," she

invited all her relations and friends, and put into the hands of each of them a lemon and a knife, and told them all to cut the lemons when she should tell them, and then called Yusuf.

When he came she told them to cut the lemons, but the eyes of everyone among them were so attracted by the appearance of Yusuf, that many instead of cutting the lemon cut their fingers, thereby stamping on their fingers also the love of Yusuf.

'Beauty takes away from the lover the consciousness of self.'

In this version, it seems, it's not the sexual advances that offend Yusuf so much as the Egyptian woman's religious faux pas:

When the shadow of passion fell upon the soul of Yusuf, Zulaikha happened to think of covering the face of the idol, which was in her room. This astonished Yusuf and made him ask her, 'What doest thou?' She said, 'I cover the face of my god that seeth us with his eyes full of wrath.'

This startled Yusuf.... 'Stay, O Zulaikha, of what hast thou put me in mind! The eyes of thy god can be covered with a piece of cloth, but the eyes of my God cannot be covered. He seeth me wherever I am.'...

Zulaikha, blinded by the overwhelming darkness of passion, would not desist, and when he still refused, her passion turned into wrath. She hated him and cursed him and reminded him of his low position as a slave. On this he began to leave the room.

From here the story pretty much parallels Genesis, with the false accusation and the angry husband and the prison and all. But in a happy ending that Nahum Tate would envy, years later, having interpreted Pharaoh's dream and become "chief over all his treasures,"

Yusuf, riding with his retinue, happened to pass by the place where [the now widowed] Zulaikha in her utter misery was spending her days.

On hearing the sound of horses' hoofs many people ran to see the company passing, and all called out, 'It is Yusuf, Yusuf!' On hearing this, Zulaikha desired to look at him once again. When Yusuf saw her he did not recognize her, but he halted, seeing that some woman wished to speak with him.

He was moved to see a person in such misery, and asked her, 'What desirest thou of me?' She said, 'Zulaikha has still the same desire, O Yusuf, and it will continue here and in the hereafter. I have desired thee, and thee alone I will desire.'

Yusuf became very convinced of her constant love, and was moved by her state of misery. He kissed her on the forehead, and took her in his arms and prayed to God. The prayer of the prophet and the appeal of long-continued love attracted the blessing of God, and Zulaikha regained her youth and beauty.

Yusuf said to Zulaikha, 'From this day thou becomest my beloved queen.' They were then married and lived in happiness.

'Verily God hearkens attentively to the cry of every wretched heart.'

The Smithsonian has a sumptuous online feature on their manuscript of Jami's "Seven Thrones". Click through to find "Yusuf and Zulaykha", and don't forget that on the navigation arrows, "Next" turns the Arabic text's pages right-to-left (the first time, I read it backwards).

An unhappy footnote to this story is the fate of Hazrat Inayat Khan's daughter, Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan. Years after her father's death, her family fled Paris when the Germans invaded in 1940. Noor became a British Special Operations Executive agent and, under the code name "Madeleine", the first woman operator to be infiltrated into Nazi-occupied France.

In his lecture, Hazrat Inayat Khan noted that Yusuf

was thrown into a well by his elder brothers, who were jealous of his beauty and the influence that it had on their father and everyone that met him.

'Not love alone, but beauty also has to pay its forfeit.'

Noor Inayat Khan was eventually imprisoned and executed after being betrayed to the Gestapo, in one theory, by Renée Garry, the sister of her network organizer. The story goes that Garry, despite being paid 100,000 francs, acted mainly out of jealousy, believing she had lost the affections of SOE agent France Antelme to Noor.

So: Hippolytus loves, but loves not me....
I will not tolerate their happiness.

Posted by Alison Humphrey at April 19, 2009 02:50 PM