9. Love Covers the Heart - Story of Joseph

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'Some women of the city said, “The Chief Minister’s wife is trying to seduce her slave-boy. Love for him has enveloped her heart. Indeed, we see that she is clearly mistaken.”' (30).
Controversy is seldom contained. Despite the efforts to conceal this embarrassing affair, it spread among the women who could have been courtiers of the minister, or just women of the city. In any case, they talked of how her love for Joseph had enveloped her heart. The word, shigāf, which comes from the sh-g-f, refers to the skin that envelopes the heart. In other words, her love for him had enveloped her heart. Envelopes are sealed with messages, sometimes secrets even, to be delivered from lover to another. A similar sounding word, elope, means to run away secretly to get married without parental consent, considered to be a violation of a sacrosanct trust. Thus, it has the meaning of escape; can love be a form of escapism? Medically, this envelope is called the pericardium. It protects the heart from infections and injuries. The form -cardium ultimately comes from Greek kardíā, meaning “heart.” The Latin cognate, cor, “heart,” is the source of words such as cordial, courage, and discord. In Christian scripture it refers not to the physical heart but the seat and center of human life.
Another Arabic word ghilāf is often used, meaning the cover of the heart. The cube-shaped kaʿba is covered in a Kiswā - a black silk cloth embroidered in gold. The term Kiswā means ‘robe’ and is also known as the ghilāf. It symbolises our love for the One, the Source of all being. According Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), when Allah created the body, he placed the heart there as an aperture to the Divine realm. Above the cube-shaped kaʿba, in the seventh heaven is the ‘frequently-visited house’ (Bayt al-Maʿmūr) of seventy-thousand angels who are never to return. It is covered by spinning angelic light! What love! On earth, the kaʿba symbolises the beating heart of the umma while the bodily kaʿba is the noblest organ in the body. In the circumambulation (ṭawāf), done counter-clockwise, the bodily heart closes in and spins around the spiritual heart of the kaʿba. True love, they say, is blind; it burns the heart. In fact, some Arabs would replace the ghayn with the ʿayn to change it from shagaf to shaʿaf, which literally means the burning love of the heart with the pleasure that it brings!
The women, as outsiders to her heart, saw her as mistaken. How could someone with such a high standing become enamoured with a young slave! Scandalous! Having heard of their private gossip, she had to do something.
'When she heard about their gossip, she invited them and set a banquet for them. She gave each one a knife, then said ˹to Joseph˺, “Come out before them.” When they saw him, they were so stunned ˹by his beauty˺ that they cut their hands, and exclaimed, “Good God! This cannot be human; this must be a noble angel!”'
She extends an invitation to the womenfolk. Then she made them all comfortable, and each were given a knife perhaps for them to cut their fruits. Yet, once Joseph was ordered to appear before them, they were stunned, and thus cut their hands, exclaiming “Good God! This cannot be human; this must be a noble angel!”. The cutting of the hand could be understood as a metaphor of the women being stunned. To be stunned is a form of cutting both in the sense of being ‘cut out’ from reality even if for a moment, thus they did not feel the physical pain of what they were doing to themselves; they were certainly not cutting fruits! Think, O lovers! How bewildered you will be when you see Allah, the Source of all beauty!
They then described him as being an angel because it is not physically possible, according to them, for someone to be so beautiful in this world. God, has placed in our innate nature that nothing that exists can be more beautiful than angels; nor more distasteful than the devil. It could also be an indication of the pure state of angels, free from desires, plague of anger and the like. These women saw in Joseph the light of Prophecy.