In the Absence of the Face

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

Having proved her point, Zoleikha conspires to condemn and incarcerate Joseph into prison. Joseph seeks refuge from the wiles of Zoleikha in prison and prefers to be incarcerated than subjected to such trials. According to the Qur'an, the revelation of Joseph's Face immediately results in the recognition, "... after they had seen the signs," "... to imprison him for a time" (The Qur'an 12:35). The logical inconsistency that we read here, that Joseph is imprisoned though proven innocent, is over-compensated by the rhetorical consistency that Joseph is imprisoned after the revelation of the beauty of his Face results in the carnage of women cutting themselves into pieces, enraptured in the beauty of his Face.

In prison, Joseph becomes famous for his ability to interpret the dreams of his cell-mates. While interpreting their dreams, Joseph uses the occasion to proselytize for the One True Religion of the Solitary God, admonishing against polytheism. Among Joseph's monotheistic admonitions is one curious insistence that "Those whom ye worship beside Him are but names which ye have named, ye and your fathers. Allah hath revealed no sanction of them...." (The Qur'an 12:40). The narrative claim of the Qur'an at this point is of course that by and in Joseph's face, Allah has in effect revealed His hitherto Unseen Face, and thus it is now in a position to name all other deities as merely "... names which ye have named, ye and your fathers." The return of the repressed is here taken full advantage of by de-classifying the Faith in Allah as yet another Faith in a Name, but a Faith in a Face, namely the supreme repression of the Qur'anic narrative anchorage. In Joseph's Face, the Faith in Allah is no longer a Faith in just a Name. It is a Faith in a Face. al-Razi's commentary here is crucial:

   "O my two fellow-prisoners!," O my two friends in jail, "Are divers lords
   better," are scattered gods better or God the Almighty. He told them so
   because they had idols in the prison which they worshipped and to which
   they prostrated. The reason he called them "diverse" is that they came in
   all shapes and forms, big, small and medium, made of various things....
   "These, as they are, are helpless and impotent, while God Almighty is but
   One, without any match, rival, similitude, or equal. He is Omnipotent and
   Almighty, and can do whatever He wants." Then he admonished them for their
   practices and told them of the corruption of their belief, and told them
   that "if you think hard you are not praying to anything but names that you
   and your ancestors have given them, which is to say, you call these idols
   god, while a god is that which deserves obedience. But before a god
   practices magnanimity he would not deserve worshipping, and if he were not
   omnipotent he would not be able to grant such magnanimity, nor would he be
   able to do so, and unless he be alive he could do none of these things.
   These are all inanimate objects. Calling them gods is not but a meaningless
   name. The reason is that the Name is not the Named. Because if the Name
   were the Named, then by virtue of calling them god they would be god and it
   would be proper to worship them, and they would have been god by
   attributes, and yet that is impossible....

   -- al-Razi 1983, Volume Three, p. 134)