Yasir Qadhi - Lessons from Surah Yusuf

Lessons from S u rah Y u suf

First published in England by

Kube Publishing Ltd

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Ratby Lane, Markfield,

Leicestershire, LE67 9SY,

United Kingdom

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PEARLS FROM THE QURAN

Copyright Dr Yasir Qadhi 2021

All rights reserved.

The right of Dr Yasir Qadhi to be identified as the author and translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84774-138-7 casebound

ISBN: 978-1-84774-137-0 paperback

ISBN: 978-1-84774-139-4 ebook

Editor: Lubaaba al-Azami

Cover Design by: Jannah Haque

Typesetting by:

Printed by: Elma Basim, Turkey

Contents

L

Transliteration Table

L

Arabic Consonants

Initial, unexpressed medial and final:

a	d	d	k
b	dh	t	l
t	r	z	m
th	z	[	n
j	s	gh		h
h	sh	f	w
kh	s	q	y

With a shaddah , both medial and final consonants are doubled.

Vowels, diphthongs, etc .

Short:		a		i		u
Long:		a		i		u
Diphthongs:		aw
	ay

Foreword

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All Praise is due to Allah, Who revealed the Book to His Servant to be the Only Guidance, And may prayers and salutations be upon our Prophet ( f ) in great abundance.

T he first time the Qur a n spoke to me, it was through S u rah Y u suf.

I was probably 11 years old, in the mid-1980s. Like most kids my age, I had a Qur a n teacher who helped me with reading and memorization (at this stage, I had only memorized maybe Juz [ Amma). I didnt understand Arabic then, and while, of course, I loved listening to my fathers cassettes of Abdul Basit Abdul Samad, I hadnt read any translation of the Qur a n. One day, in the summer break, completely bored at night, I curiously pulled out an old and tattered copy of the Qur a n from my fathers library a translation of Abdullah Y u suf Ali. I remember flicking through it, here and there, reading passages before losing interest and then turning to another passage (I was just a child after all!).

Then, seemingly at random but of course, it was Allahs qadr I came across the beginning of S u rah Y u suf. I remember it vividly: the opening line just caught me like a hook, and I spent the next hour or so way past my bedtime turning page after page, reading every verse, and following up with every footnote in Abdullah Yusuf Alis translation, until finally, I finished the s u rah. I was riveted with the story. At night as I lay in bed, my mind became filled with images from the s u rah: Y u suf alone in the well, the torn shirt, him sitting in the palace on the Kings throne. Thus began my journey into the Qur a n.

Five years later, I would be memorizing the entire Qur a n, and finishing S u rah Y u suf in a breeze. Around a decade after I first read it, I found myself studying at the University of Madinah. I would pick up little booklets in libraries and bookstores that went into more detail regarding this s u rah: some discussed bal a gha (Arabic eloquence), others concentrated on the morals and benefits of this story. It was here as well that I began building my personal library: every month, when the students got their modest stipend, the first thing I did was to rush to the bookstores and splurge on a book that I might have had my eyes on for a while. Slowly, my tafs i r collection began to grow, and whatever I could find about this s u rah, I would buy.

In the summer of 2001, I was invited for my very first trip to England (since then, to date, I have been fortunate to travel more than a hundred times to the UK), and my hosts asked what intensive class I would be interested in teaching at Masjid al-Tawhid in Leyton. Immediately, and without a moments hesitation, I said, I would like to teach a detailed tafs i r of S u rah Y u suf! Perhaps the child in me was still subconsciously imagining that story.

I spent a significant portion of that summer reading the classical tafs i rs and sifting through material to prepare for that course. It was the first time I taught the tafs i r of S u rah Y u suf, but it would not be the last, and I would go on to teach it half a dozen times, sometimes in various masjids of cities where I lived in over the course of the next two decades, and sometimes for some Islamic satellite channels for broadcast. (That class also happened to be the first time I taught an intensive tafs i r class; hence it was my first exposure to the art of teaching tafs i r in English.) On a personal note, soon after the cassettes of that lecture were released, I was blessed with my second child, and I named him after the prophet of this s u rah. Every time I taught the s u rah, I went back to even more references and contemplated the s u rah afresh, and every time the story continued to resonate with me.

When I was approached last year by Kube Publications to publish a tafs i r of this s u rah in English, it was the next logical step, and I eagerly took on this task.

Tafs i r is a multidisciplinary field and one that can be done from many different angles and at numerous levels of detail. There is no right or wrong level, and for every style and level of detail, there is an audience that will appreciate it. To write a tafs i r in any language other than Arabic is a compounded dilemma: to what level should each word be dissected, and how should one explain Arabics eloquence to a non-Arabic speaking audience?

For this work, I decided to choose a style that would be appropriate for the s u rah easygoing and smooth, concentrating on the morals of the story rather than specific examples of Arabic eloquence. I want the reader to be immersed in the morals of the s u rah, and not get bogged down with numerous footnotes or incidental benefits that might be beneficial for advanced students but would cause others to lose track of the main point. Hence, in this book (in contrast to some of my other writings), one will not find detailed discussions of differences of opinions or competing views regarding secondary issues or references. I wanted this book to be read , cover to cover if possible, with the same enthusiasm as a translation of this s u rah. It is not to say that one wont find academic benefit or tafs i r -based points in it. On the contrary, I have consulted many works while writing this tafs i r , but rather than separate them into points, I have tried my utmost to incorporate their ideas into the commentary without mentioning controversies or differences.