examines the story’s elaboration in Persian poetry and painting. The third
section discusses the increased emphasis on the story in Lutheran theology
and its subsequent depiction in European painting. Whereas in the Islamic
context, painting partook in textual and poetic analytic discourses in
Europe, painting developed a more independent interpretive role. The
comparison reflects how art-historical methods such as iconographic ana-
lysis and the sociopolitical contextualization of painting benefit from
concerted intermedial and intertextual analysis.8.1 Between Midrashic and Quranic Commentaries: Islam
and Judaism in Dialogue
The Quran refers to the story of Joseph as“the most beautiful of stories.”It
is not accidental, then, that Jami was able to develop his sophisticated yet
popular rendition from a plethora of sources. As a theologian, he would
have known Quranic commentaries (tafsir) including those by Jafar al-
Tabari, the Shi’ite shaykh Abu Jafar al-Tusi (995–1067), Nasir al-Din al-
Baidawi, and Isma’il ibn Kathir (1300–1373); and popular compilations of
tales of the prophets (qisas al-‘anbiya’) such as those by al-Thalabi (d. 1036)
and Muhammad al-Kisa’i (twelfth century). He may have read an anon-
ymous thirteenth–fourteenth-century Arabic poem about Joseph, and
would no doubt have read Suhrawardi’s discussion in his treatise“On the
Reality of Love or the Solace of Lovers,”as well as the short poetic rendition
in theBustanof Sa’di of Shiraz (1210–1292). Jami’s poem also mentions
details found in Jewish commentary, possibly reflecting shared sources
and/or familiarity with the commentary of al-Biqa’i (1407–1480), who
interpolated the Quranic rendition with biblical quotations in his
Quranic commentary, begun in 1456.^1 In Jami’s poetry, however,
Joseph’s dreams, central to biblical interpretations, recede. Romantic and
visual themes expand. This emphasis may reflect discussions concerning
the image at the Timurid court in Herat, where royal patronage enabled
theologians and scholars to work concurrently with an atelier for book arts.
Integrating elite theological discourse into the popular genre of a romance,
Jami’s poetic expansion of the story fostered widespread circulation of
basic ideas about the roles of the image and the dream, human and material
beauty, and aesthetic and sexual pleasure.(^1) Saleh, 2007. Muslim commentators readily cited the Bible as an earlier, weaker rendition of the
authoritative Quranic word of God.
224 The Transgressive Image