Yusuf’s “Queer” Beauty in Persian Cultural Productions

In the Hebrew Bible, Joseph is one of Jacob’s twelve sons whose story is woven throughout the final chapters of Genesis. In the quranic account, Yusuf (Joseph) is the only prophet whose story gets a whole chapter of its own. According to tradition, the entire Sura Yusuf, which takes up 111 verses, was once revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. In Persian literature, Yusuf’s story appears in the works of almost every poet from the classical period (900–1500). The most famous work involving the story of Yusuf is the narrative poem “Yusuf o Zulaikha” by ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 1492).

Jami’s poem, which has generated numerous commentaries, is a reinterpretation of Sura Yusuf. The poem has been the inspiration for various literary and historical texts and continues to be a central narrative in Islamic cultures. However, the majority of these commentaries and works focus on the significance of female sexuality—feminine guile, fitna, and its negative implications—which is central to the understanding of sexuality as it is depicted in Islam, as opposed to male sexuality. For example, Denise A. Spellberg has discussed the political role of Zulaikha (Potiphar’s wife, whose name in the Hebrew and quaranic version is never mentioned). Fedwa Malti-Douglas draws on the importance of Zulaikha’s feminine guile in Medieval Arabo-Islamic literature. Barbara F. Stowasser, delineating the various interpretations of the Yusuf story in Arabic literature, suggests that studying female figures such as Zulaikha helps us understand how religious ideas are linked with social reality in affective relationships. Gayane Merguerian and Afsaneh Najmabadi, too, in examining the different views of Zulaikha, contribute to the understanding of female sexuality in Islamic literature. Although discussions of female sexuality are of utmost significance, consideration of masculinity and male sexuality is equally important for understanding the construction of sexuality in general.

This article, therefore, looks at descriptions of Yusuf’s beauty not only in Jami’s “Yusuf o Zulaikha” but in the portrayal of Yusuf’s masculinity in other Persian cultural productions: a 20^th century painting, two tile works from Qajar era (1779–1925), and two contemporary tableau rugs which tell the story of “Yusuf o Zulaikha.”¹ In these cultural productions, Yusuf is depicted as androgynous, and although his androgyny falls under the accepted standard of beauty in pre-modern Islamicate culture, to the contemporary viewer familiar with rigid conceptions of gender and sexuality, this type of portrayal seems disruptive. Furthermore, both in Jami’s poem, in the paintings, and in the tile works, while androgynous, Yusuf is portrayed as a passive recipient of female gaze, thus emasculating and feminizing him. This too seems disruptive to the pre-modern understanding of male-female, active-passive gender roles in the Muslim world. Therefore, this paper argues that these cultural productions “queer” Yusuf’s masculinity, and in so doing, they construct gender in a reverse manner, challenging gender categorization and illustrating the fluidity of sexuality for both pre-modern and modern readers and viewers, albeit in different ways.²

One of the most significant differences between the biblical and quranic versions of the story is in the character of Potiphar’s wife, and the way that in the quranic version, Potiphar’s wife tries to prove to Egyptian women that falling in love with Yusuf was not her fault. In Genesis 39, Potiphar’s wife becomes infatuated with Joseph and tries to seduce him. When Joseph refuses her, she claims that he had tried to seduce her. Hearing his wife’s story, Potiphar immediately believes her and imprisons Joseph. Afterwards, there is no mention of either Potiphar or his wife again in the Bible. The biblical account of the story highlights female desire, temptation, and vengeance. In the biblical account, Potiphar’s wife does not have a name. In the Quran, other than a few occasions where Potiphar is called al-‘Azíz, translated as “the master,” neither Potiphar nor his wife has a name. However, the character of Potiphar’s wife is greatly expanded in the Quran. She falls in love with Yusuf, attempts to seduce him, and later...