“They said to Yusuf, ‘O ‘Aziz, he has a father who is a shaykh and kabeer, so why don’t you take one of us instead of him? We see you to be of those who are very righteous and very noble.’”
Surah Yusuf #78
We had reached in our story of Surah Yusuf the point in time where Binyamin is now being held by Yusuf,
and the brothers are shocked and in astonishment – “What are we going to do now when Binyamin has been taken?”
Tafseer
The first thing they did was disconnect from Binyamin: “He is not of our tribe. He is not of our mother. He has a different mother, and his brother has been known to steal, so we expected him to steal.”
Then, they realize that they are in serious trouble because they have promised their father out of all of the brothers only for Binyamin, and out of all of the brothers, it is Binyamin who has been discovered to have stolen.
They realize that they are in trouble now.
What are they going to do?
Their first tactic is that they say, “O ‘Aziz,…” –
and from this, some scholars have derived that Yusuf became the ‘Aziz that was his master because they are using the same term.
His master was also called ‘Aziz, and now he is being called ‘Aziz, so from this a number of scholars have said that Yusuf took over the position of his master, and other scholars have said ‘Aziz means ‘person of honor,’ so it is just ‘O minister’ or ‘O his excellency.’
We will never really know for sure. It oculd be that he took over the position,
and if this is the case, then no doubt, Allah ‘azza wa jall had planned this that Yusuf was a slave in the house of the person whose job eventually he would take, and so he saw firsthand how to run the ministry.
It is as if Allah is preparing Yusuf for what is about to happen. And if it is just a position of honor, then this too is permissible.
They said, “O ‘Aziz, verily he has a father who is a shaykh and is very old.”
Why did they say ‘he has’?
He is their father, so they should have said, “We have.”
Two reasons can come.
The first is to bring about extra sympathy that the one that he has chosen, it is his father.
The second goes back to the issue that they didn’t feel that much connection as much as Yusuf and Binyamin did.
In the first interpretation it is as if they are making Yusuf more sympathetic – “the one that you took, his father.”
The second interpretation is as if they don’t feel that level of love that they want to feel, and so they dissociate and say “he has a father” and not necessarily “our father.”
They say, “He has a father who is a shaykh and kabeer.”
They use three adjectives: ab, shaykh, kabeer. All of them are meant to derive more sympathy.
The first is: this is his father.
The second is: he a shaykh. What does a shaykh mean?
A shaykh can, in their time, can mean ‘the elder of our tribe, the leader of our tribe.’ He is not just any person.
He is the son of the leader. Another interpretation of shaykh in our time is somebody of knowledge.
A third interpretation of shaykh is somebody of elderly age. All of them are equally valid in Ya‘qub. Ya‘qub is the leader of the tribe, a person of knowledge, and an old man.
They use a term that will bring about sympathy: he is the son of a nobleman, he is the son of a leader, he is an elderly man, an old man. All of this is used to extract sympathy from Yusuf (‘alayhi salaam).
“Take one of us instead because it is his old father who is a shaykh and beloved of the tribe. We see you to be of those who have great, excellent character.”
Once again, we find the characteristic of Yusuf being a muhsin over and over again.
From the prison and from the witnesses in the palace, he is being called a muhsin.
Everybody is testifying to the character of Yusuf. As we said over and over again, this is part of being a Muslim.
You have to establish your character before you are going to open your mouth.
Even these brothers don’t know that this is their brother and say,
“You are such a generous man.
Surely you will have sympathy for this old person, and surely you will have sympathy for his aban, shaykhan, kabeera. Why don’t you take one of us instead of Binyamin?”