Orange knives

Abstract

Starting from Annemarie Schimmel’s remark that the central issue of the Sura on Joseph is the admiration of beauty, this study focusses on the scene in which Zulaykha invites the women of her town to a banquet representing them Joseph, planned to justify her attempt to seduce him. Overwhelmed by his beauty, in fact, they cut their hands with the knives while eating. The women’s exclamation “he is naught but an angel noble!” contradicts this quite fleshly experience, since the Quranic context – in which the appearance of angels is undoubtedly to be expected – precludes the possibility of interpreting it as naturalized metaphor. Thus, the question being considered here is: what does the beauty mean to Joseph and how does he experience himself as an ‘angel’? At the beginning of the Sura he reports a dream to his father that heavenly bodies throw down themselves before him. Even this motif cannot be interpreted as being metaphorical. It is an initiatic dream that represents a prefiguration of the human aspiration to reach perfection. In this sense the legend of Joseph can be read as a ‘Bildungsroman’. This story about the blurring of man’s boundaries – by stylizing him as a cosmical figure – seems to be an anticipation of the Sufi idea of the Perfect Man (al-insān al-kāmil). In other words, this concept can be regarded thoroughly as an original Quranic teaching and not as a later Sufi interpretation or invention.