Description
The poet Nasr-ul din Abdulrahman, called Jami, from having been born in the town of Jam in Khorasan, was one of the most celebrated and prolific of Persian poets. Of his writings, the poem of Yusuf and Zuleikha, the latter commonly known as the wife of Potiphar, into whose house st Joseph was sold as a slave in Egypt, is the most widely known and most appreciated in the Eastern world, especially among Mussulmans. Joseph is es- teemed by them a type of manly beauty and virtue. Whereas the Jewish Scriptures in the Old Testament mention little in connection with him and Potiphar's wife but the fact of the temptation of the former, his resistance to it, and his consequent imprisonment, this poem enters into the details of the manner in which the latter became acquainted with Joseph in three dreams, in the last of which he informed her, rather prematurely, that he was Vazi'r of Egypt. As her health was suffering from her unrequited longing for Joseph, her father sends an embassy to Egypt to the Vazi'r to inform him of Zuleikha's state of mind, and obtains his consent to her marriage with him. The Vazi'r meets her on the road, and there Zuleikha novel, looking through a hole made by her nurse in the tent, finds, to her despair, that he is not Joseph,