worship other than He”(Q17:23) functions as a description of reality, not
as a command. Since the oneness of God is absolute, all acts of worship are
de facto toward God, whether their practitioners possess the knowledge to
recognize the transcendental divine or not. Thus God made Harun unable
to stop the followers of the golden calf, so that God could be worshiped“in
every form.”^59
Similarly, Jami’s Yusuf articulates the power of the idol to remind him of
his devotion to the omniscient unseen.
You feel shame before a dead glance
And trouble your mind, disturbed
By this mere lifeless thing.
And should I not fear from the One
Who sees all, and knows all,
The Eternal, Almighty?
So he spoke,
And rose up from their fray,
Awoke from the couch of their merry dreams
And withdrew his letter aleph
(like to an upright stick)
From the twin prongs of her letters lam-aleph
(the calligram drawn like a fork)
And freed his candle scented with camphor
From her silver and wick-nipping scissor.^60
Yusuf unambiguously sins alongside Zuleikha. Yet the sin is neither for-
nication nor adultery, and the message is not that of the wiles of women.
Rather, the sin that both have committed equally isshirk: replacing God
with the idol Yusuf.
Jami underscores this distinction by using a vocabulary of letters even
more provocative than the graphic description by al-Thalabi, essentially
representing him as withdrawing his penis from her vagina. His choice of
aleph and lam in the poem are not arbitrary or simply anthropomorphic–
the chapter begins with the mysterious letters aleph lam re. The aleph,
shaped in Arabic like an upright stick, is thefirst letter of the word for God,
Allah. Michael Barry glosses lam-aleph as a calligram looking like a fork
(and thus the open legs/lips of the woman), particularly in the Thuluth
script often used to write Qurans. The letters (l-a) also mean no, articulated
at the beginning theshahada, the phrase of witnessing,“La ilaha illa Allah”(^59) Ahmed, 2015 :27–29. (^60) Barry, 2004 : 211.
242 The Transgressive Image