Heal and free mine own lust, hug me close to yourself
Because, while I thirst, you are Life’s very fountain–
Rather than the tension between evanescent worldly beauty and mortality
expressed in the seduction dialogues by al-Thalabi and al-Kisa’i, Jami
allows Zuleikha to conceptualize Yusuf through the architectural symbo-
lism of prayer.
By these twin arches of your archer’s double bow,
Like a MIHRAB–
Your twin eyebrows like an archer’s double bow
With its twinned arches like a Prayer Niche!^54
Like the confusion of lover and beloved, the description of eyebrows like a
double bow inverts the one taking aim with the target–his eyebrows both
thrust the arrow of lust, but also, as a mihrab, receive it. Sex and prayer
converge.
Yusuf responds by representing his prophecy as a mirror of the divine
that would be shattered through her demand. Instead, her demand must be
channeled into recognition of all the world as an image of the divine.
Today embrace me not, nor hold me tight
Nor with a stone presume to shatter
my pure mirror bright...
By him without the like–when every like is His image,
And all within, and all without, is His image!^55
The mirror is both the images on the walls, showing them in their love-
making, but also the pure mirror of Yusuf’s soul that will be defiled if they
complete the act. Yet every person and every act is also an embodiment of
the divine–there is no space outside the text for a God who is the absolute
embodiment of all creation and agency.
Jami articulates the delirium of this passion for the divine through
intensely erotic imagery that brings the lovers to the point of coitus.
With her lips she drank up the sugar from his mouth
And collared her neck with his arms
And belted her waist with his legs
And made herself a target for his shaft
In the lust of his pearl
To turn her body into his own shell.(^54) Barry, 2004 : 207. (^55) Barry, 2004 : 207.
240 The Transgressive Image