who hears of Yusuf’s beauty and falls in love with him. Unlike Zuleikha,
she is driven not by the image but by the spoken word, which binds her
more loosely to the fetters of sight and allows her to relinquish her lust
more easily. When she meets him she asks the source of his beauty. He
explains:
I am the handiwork of that creator, in whose ocean I am content to be the merest
droplet. The whole sky is nothing but a dot from the pen of his perfection; the
whole world is merely a bud in the garden of his beauty; the sun is but a single ray of
the light of his wisdom; the vault of heaven a mere bubble in the sea of his
omnipotence.
Hidden behind the veil of mystery, his beauty was ever free of the slightest
trace of imperfection. From the atoms of the world he created a multitude of
mirrors, and into each of them he cast the image of his face; for to the
perceptive eye, anything which appears to be beautiful is only a reflection of
that countenance.
Now that you have seen the reflection, make all haste to its source; for in that
primordial light, the reflection is entirely eclipsed. Beware of lingering far from that
primal source; or else when the reflection fades you will be left in darkness.^41
Whereas Bazigha heeds his words and renounces her worldly life, the path
for the visually and oneirically inspired Zuleikha proves both more ardu-
ous and more rewarding. First, she sends her nurse to announce her love of
Yusuf, but to no avail: he refuses to betray his master. She gives him a
garden full of beautiful maidens to enjoy.“Though idols to look at,”Jami
explains,“They were in fact idolatresses.”^42 Yusuf has his preacherly way
with them: after a night of sermons, they all convert to monotheism.“The
idols had all been shattered: now allfingers were plying rosary beads, all
tongues were proclaiming the one true God.”^43
Told to do so by her nurse, Zuleikha builds a palace replete with images.
The magnificence of the palace underscores the theme of material tempta-
tion set against the internalized vision of immaterial, divine beauty as the
goal of faith.
She took by the hand the master artist:
From his hand’s everyfinger, a hundred arts and more!
Accomplished in architect’s rule,
A guide in astronomy’s laws
Hisfiguration made easy the Almagest’s toil
And his doubt might cause Euclid to fear;
If his grip lacked a compass,
(^41) Jami, 1980 : 56. (^42) Jami, 1980 : 73. (^43) Jami, 1980 : 74.
From Theology to Poetry 235