Joseph to overlook the matter, blustering like a shameless cuckold. Then she enlisted the women’s help and had him imprisoned, while he said:

“My Lord, prison is dearer to me than what they invite me to. Unless You turn their plotting away from me, I may incline towards them and become one of the ignorant.”

Let the discerning reader reflect on these powerful inducements confronting Joseph: despite their number and strength, there was no one to deter him from yielding, nor any created being to save him if he did. He will then understand that Joseph’s trial was among the gravest, and that his piety and steadfast restraint from sin—refusing to commit it and enduring his oppressors’ wrongdoing rather than complying with them—were among the greatest good deeds and most momentous acts of obedience. Joseph’s soul, peace and blessings be upon him, was among the purest of souls. How, then, could he say:

“I do not absolve myself. Indeed, the soul persistently urges evil,”

when Allah knows that his soul was innocent and did not persistently urge evil? Rather, his was a pure soul, among the purest of all. The inclination he experienced increased his soul’s purity and piety. Through experiencing it yet renouncing it for Allah’s sake, he would be credited with one of the greatest good deeds that purify the soul.

“The sixth argument”

If the statement:

“That was so that he would know that I did not betray him in his absence,”

means, as they claim, that Joseph wanted al-ʿAzīz to know, “I did not betray him with his wife”—as most of them maintain—or that the king should know, or that Allah should know, then there was nothing here to which “that” could refer. Joseph had made no preceding statement to which he could thus refer, nor had there previously been