8 The Transgressive Image
Acquaintances often express surprise at my combined Jewish and Muslim
background. This reflects a common assumption of opposition between
Judaism and Islam, obliviousness to the historical frequency of intergroup
marriage (particularly under Islamic hegemony), and a startling religious
identitarianism even in supposedly secular environments. If secularity
leads to the claim that we abandon religion while nonetheless cleaving to
it as identity, religion becomes a variant of nationalism. Yet if we take
secularity as an opportunity to rethink religious boundaries beyond the
surfaces of habit and through their histories, religion can become a much
more intersectual realm of shared faith, where the sacred matters more
than the path.
Not only does Islam trace its heritage to Judaism, the two religions
developed in dialogue within contexts of Islamic hegemony from
Baghdad to Cordoba. Appearing in both the Talmud and the Quran, the
story of the prophet Joseph and the wife of the Egyptian official to whom he
is enslaved reflects this intimacy. It is the longest sequential narrative in the
Quran. Its importance expanded through tenth- and thirteenth-century
popular tales of the prophets, thirteenth-century Quranic commentary,
and subsequent Persian poetry. The most famous rendition of the story
emerged when Nur al-Din Abu al-Rahman Jami, a leading theologian and
Sufishaykh who worked at the Timurid courts of Herat and Samarkand,
elaborated it as an epic poem fashioned after Nizami’s romances. The story
weds the visual to the sexual as a paradigm for the journey of faith. It points
to a discourse of transgression less as sin than as part of the human
navigation of divine intention mediated partly, but not exclusively, by the
image. In contrast, the development of the same theme in Protestant
Christian exegesis and European painting shifts away from the theme of
idolatry toward a prudish yet prurient iconography of feminine vice and
masculine virtue.
This chapter examines the convergences and divergences of the story’s
interpretations through the arts in the Eastern and Western Abrahamic
traditions. Thefirst sectionfirst looks to the elaboration of the story in a
collaborative Judeo-Islamic hermeneutical framework. The second section 223