The dreams of Surah Yusuf: who dreamt, who read it, what happened

Surah Yusuf opens with Yusuf's dream in its fourth verse and closes the loop in its hundredth. Between them come three more dreams, and the retelling most people carry (a baker, a cupbearer, a famine) adds details the Qur'an never states. This page keeps to the text. It sets the four dreams in one table, looks at the words the surah uses for interpreting, and marks the places where it stops speaking.

Four dreams in one table

The surah gives each dream in the dreamer's own words, so the table follows the verses and leaves out everything the verses leave out.

Read down the last column and you see how selective the surah is. One fulfilment is announced, and it is announced by the dreamer. The first prisoner's outcome is only implied, the second's is missing, and the king's is shown through its effects, not counted out year by year. Yusuf's statement to the prisoners is the firmest sentence in the whole set: the matter you asked about has been decided (Qur'an 12:41). After that comes silence.

Interpreters who inform instead of decode

Look at the verbs. Nobody in the surah says "I interpret". Yusuf opens his reply to the prisoners by saying he can inform them of the meaning of the food they are given before it reaches them, and adds that this is from what his Lord taught him (Qur'an 12:37). The Arabic verb is نبّأ nabba'a, from the word for news. The prisoners ask for it in that verb (Qur'an 12:36), and the freed prisoner uses it when he offers to bring the answer to the king's dream (Qur'an 12:45). Outside this story, the only verse we found that sets an "inform" verb beside ta'wil is the promise of Musa's companion on the road, who says he will inform him of the meaning of what he could not bear (Qur'an 18:78). The report the Prophet gave of that meeting names the companion Khidr (Bukhari 74).

Yusuf does not hurry to answer. He spends the rest of Qur'an 12:37 and three more verses (Qur'an 12:38-40) on worship of Allah alone, and only then gives the two readings. The king's verb is also telling. He asks his court to give him an opinion, أفتوني aftuni, from the root of the word fatwa, and to interpret, تعبرون ta'buruna (Qur'an 12:43).

Something else is missing from Yusuf's answer to the king. He never says "the cows are years". He says you will plant for 7 years, then 7 hard years will eat what was stored, then a year of rain follows (Qur'an 12:47-49). The match between 7 cows and 7 years is a reader's inference, and the final year is not in the dream at all. The king saw 7 and 7 and nothing more (Qur'an 12:43), so the year of rain was added by the interpreter. The surah does not say how he knew, and the nearest statements it makes are that his knowledge was taught (Qur'an 12:37) and that Allah taught him of the interpretation of dreams, as Sahih International renders it (Qur'an 12:101). The verb for pressing in that last year is the one the first prisoner used for wine, and the translators' "olives and grapes" in Qur'an 12:49 is a bracket: the Arabic names no object.

The court that called the king's vision a muddle

The king said رؤيا ru'ya, a vision. The court answered أحلام ahlam (Qur'an 12:44). They made two moves in one sentence. The first was a verdict: a bundle of muddled dreams. The word for bundle, أضغاث adghath, is the plural of dighth, the handful of stalks Ayyub is told to take in his hand (Qur'an 38:44). The second was a confession: they were not learned in the interpretation of ahlam. Only the confession is borne out by the story, since the dream is then interpreted and acted on (Qur'an 12:47-49, Qur'an 12:55).

The same two words appear once more in the Qur'an. In Qur'an 21:5 the unbelievers dismiss the revelation itself with "adghath ahlam". Both times the phrase is used to wave away something the Qur'an presents as real, and both times by people who could not or would not read it. The Prophet's own sorting of ru'ya from hulm is set out in the three kinds of dreams.

The freed prisoner's delay is a second human limit. Qur'an 12:42 says Shaytan made him forget the mention to his master, and Yusuf stayed in prison for several years, as the verse puts it. Commentators read the pronoun in "the mention of his master" two ways: that the freed man forgot to speak of Yusuf to the king, or that Yusuf forgot to turn to his Lord and leaned on a man. Qur'an 12:45 says he remembered after a time. The Prophet ﷺ said that had he stayed in prison as long as Yusuf and the caller had then come, he would have answered (Bukhari 6992). Commentators read that as praise of Yusuf's patience, and Qur'an 12:50 shows it in practice: when the king sent for him, Yusuf sent the messenger back with a question about the women who had cut their hands.

When Yusuf's own dream came back

The surah's last scene returns to the first dream. Yusuf's parents are raised on the throne, people prostrate, and he tells his father: this is the تأويل ta'wil of my vision of before (Qur'an 12:100). Sahih International renders ta'wil as "explanation" there and as "result" in Qur'an 7:53, Qur'an 4:59 and Qur'an 17:35. In Qur'an 12:100 he is pointing at an event, not giving a reading, so the word is closer to "what it came to".

The warning that opened the story is vindicated in the same verse. Yaqub had told him not to relate the dream because Shaytan is an enemy to man (Qur'an 12:5), and Yusuf now speaks of Shaytan having stirred strife between him and his brothers (Qur'an 12:100).

For the images themselves, see stars in a dream and a cow in a dream.