Murāwadah in the Qurʾan: Drawing a Person Away from Himself

A Qur'anic study of a verb that is almost never mentioned without the preposition "ʿan" (away from), and of how the one being solicited is not a body to be obtained but a self that someone seeks to uproot from its place. By Dr. Ahmed Muhammad Ali Abouseif, President of the American Imams Academy (AIA).

The doors were bolted, the unbearable word was spoken, and a stranger, a young man in his mistress's house, stood with no support but what lay within his chest: ﴿وَرَاوَدَتْهُ الَّتِي هُوَ فِي بَيْتِهَا عَن نَّفْسِهِ وَغَلَّقَتِ الْأَبْوَابَ وَقَالَتْ هَيْتَ لَكَ ۚ قَالَ مَعَاذَ اللَّهِ ۖ إِنَّهُ رَبِّي أَحْسَنَ مَثْوَايَ ۖ إِنَّهُ لَا يُفْلِحُ الظَّالِمُونَ﴾ (Yūsuf 12:23) ("And she in whose house he was sought to draw him away from himself, and she bolted the doors and said, 'Come, I am yours.' He said, 'God forbid! He is my lord, who has made good my stay. Indeed, the wrongdoers do not prosper.'"). The scene is among the best known in the Qur'an, yet what stops the student here is not the event itself but the verb the Qur'an chose to describe it. It did not say "she asked him," or "she called him," or "she tempted him"; it said: "she murāwadah-ed him away from himself" (rāwadathu ʿan nafsihi). This expression, in all its precision, is almost exclusively the preserve of one sura among all the suras of the Qur'an.

The Occurrences and the Count

The root r-w-d occurs in the Noble Qur'an one hundred and forty-eight times, but the great majority of these, one hundred and thirty-nine, are the verb "arāda" in its familiar sense of intending and willing.^[1] That is a separate branch with no bearing on our subject. The form that concerns us, the verb of the mufāʿalah pattern, "rāwada," occurs only eight times: seven in Sūrat Yūsuf and one in Sūrat al-Qamar.

The seven occurrences in Sūrat Yūsuf are: ﴿وَرَاوَدَتْهُ﴾ ("and she sought to draw him," verse 23); ﴿هِيَ رَاوَدَتْنِي عَن نَّفْسِي﴾ ("It was she who sought to draw me away from myself," verse 26); ﴿تُرَاوِدُ فَتَاهَا عَن نَّفْسِهِ﴾ ("is seeking to draw her young man away from himself," verse 30); ﴿وَلَقَدْ رَاوَدتُّهُ عَن نَّفْسِهِ فَاسْتَعْصَمَ﴾ ("I did seek to draw him away from himself, but he held fast to his chastity," verse 32); then two occurrences in a single verse, the fifty-first: ﴿إِذْ رَاوَدتُّنَّ يُوسُفَ عَن نَّفْسِهِ﴾ ("when you sought to draw Yūsuf away from himself") and ﴿أَنَا رَاوَدتُّهُ عَن نَّفْسِهِ﴾ ("It was I who sought to draw him away from himself"); and finally one last occurrence in a different context, in verse sixty-one: ﴿قَالُوا سَنُرَاوِدُ عَنْهُ أَبَاهُ وَإِنَّا لَفَاعِلُونَ﴾ ("They said, 'We shall try to draw his father away from him, and we will surely do it.'"). The occurrence in al-Qamar is God's word about the people of Lūṭ (Lot): ﴿وَلَقَدْ رَاوَدُوهُ عَن ضَيْفِهِ فَطَمَسْنَا أَعْيُنَهُمْ﴾ (al-Qamar 54:37) ("And they had sought to draw him away from his guests, so We blinded their eyes").

The first thing that strikes the observer in these eight occurrences is that all of them, without exception, are joined to the preposition "ʿan": "ʿan nafsihi," "ʿan nafsī," "ʿanhu abāhu," "ʿan ḍayfihi." The verb is never mentioned bare, and it takes no object by any other particle. This is an observation that cannot be gleaned from reading Sūrat Yūsuf alone; it appears only by tracing the word through the whole Mushaf.

The Linguistic Root: Coming and Going Gently

Ibn Fāris states that the root "r-w-d" is a single origin indicating coming and going with gentleness.^[2] From this origin comes the "rāʾid," the one who goes back and forth in search of pasture and sources of water, and "ruwayd," meaning unhurried ease and gentleness. Murāwadah, by this origin, is neither assault nor open coercion, but circling around the target, moving round it, and a softness in asking that conceals insistence, like the movement of the scout who goes and comes until he obtains what he wants.

Al-Rāghib al-Aṣfahānī points to this meaning in al-Mufradāt when he makes murāwadah a contest of wills, in which one wants from another something other than what that other wants for himself, and strives with gentleness and persistence until he turns that person's will toward his own side. This is what makes "murāwadah" more exact than "enticement" (ighrāʾ) and more cunning than "compulsion" (ikrāh): it does not break the will but tries to turn it around.

The Central Structure: Why "ʿan nafsihi" and Not "to the Indecency"?

Had the Qur'an merely wished to describe the incident, it would have said, "she asked him for the indecency." Instead it chose an expression that does not name the act sought at all: "she sought to draw him away from himself." What, then, does "ʿan nafsihi" mean?

The preposition "ʿan" signifies passing beyond and moving away: you "murāwad" someone "ʿan" something, that is, you try to remove him from it. The woman here does not say that she wants something from Yūsuf; she wants to pull him away "from himself," that is, from the soul that lies between his ribs, from his principle, his trustworthiness and his covenant with his Lord, so that he might become someone other than who he is. This explains why the sentence comes as "ʿan nafsihi," and not "min nafsihi" or "ʿalā nafsihi": what is sought is not a body to be taken, but a self that someone wishes to uproot from its place.

Other occurrences, in this very sura and beyond it, confirm that this meaning is not peculiar to the amorous scene. In verse sixty-one, Yūsuf's brothers say: "We shall try to draw his father away from him." Desire has no part here, yet the structure is the same: they wish to wrest from their father what he clings to, namely Benjamin, and to turn his will from its position by gentleness and persistence. In Sūrat al-Qamar the Qur'an uses the very same verb for the people of Lūṭ, who "sought to draw him away from his guests," that is, they asked that the guest be removed from the protection of his host. Murāwadah, in all eight occurrences, is thus an attempt to pull something precious from its owner's hand by means of softness, persistence and scheming.

From this it becomes clear that the word itself is morally neutral: the brothers' murāwadah of their father was not condemned by the Qur'an, for it falls within legitimate negotiation, whereas the murāwadah of the ʿAzīz's wife and that of the people of Lūṭ were censured. The moral judgment comes not from the act but from what a person is drawn "away from" and what he is drawn "toward."

A Qur'anic Model: A Murāwadah Dealt with in Three Circles

The Qur'an follows the murāwadah of the ʿAzīz's wife through three widening circles, in each of which the act takes on a different face. The first circle is private: the closed room, where "hayta lak" was said, and where in this circle alone enticement, locked doors and seclusion come together. The second circle is social: the gathering of the women, where the matter becomes the talk of the city: ﴿وَقَالَ نِسْوَةٌ فِي الْمَدِينَةِ امْرَأَتُ الْعَزِيزِ تُرَاوِدُ فَتَاهَا عَن نَّفْسِهِ﴾ (Yūsuf 12:30) ("And women in the city said, 'The wife of the ʿAzīz is seeking to draw her young man away from himself.'"). The third circle is judicial: when the king asks the women, ﴿مَا خَطْبُكُنَّ إِذْ رَاوَدتُّنَّ يُوسُفَ عَن نَّفْسِهِ﴾ (Yūsuf 12:51) ("What was your affair when you sought to draw Yūsuf away from himself?"), and the ʿAzīz's wife utters the confession that settles the case: ﴿الْآنَ حَصْحَصَ الْحَقُّ أَنَا رَاوَدتُّهُ عَن نَّفْسِهِ وَإِنَّهُ لَمِنَ الصَّادِقِينَ﴾ ("Now the truth has become manifest. It was I who sought to draw him away from himself, and he is surely of the truthful.").

In these three circles a striking difference appears in the form of the verb. In the first it comes in the third-person feminine past, "wa-rāwadathu"; in the second in the continuous present, "turāwid," as if the people were describing an act still in progress; and in the third in the first-person, "anā rāwadtuhu," where the act passes from the description of others to the confession of its doer. The murāwadah that began in secret ends in public, upon the tongue of the one who committed it.

Against this course, the Qur'an draws the course of the one solicited in five graded moments: holding fast by word ("maʿādha llāh," God forbid), then holding fast by movement ("wa-staabaqā l-bāb," and they raced to the door), then holding fast by stance ("fa-staʿṣam," and he held fast to his chastity), then preferring prison (﴿رَبِّ السِّجْنُ أَحَبُّ إِلَيَّ مِمَّا يَدْعُونَنِي إِلَيْهِ﴾, Yūsuf 12:33, "My Lord, prison is dearer to me than that to which they invite me"), then a supplication to be turned away from their scheming. Some of these moments will be treated in more detail in the articles "al-Istiʿṣām" and "al-Kayd" in this series.

The Prophetic Witness

In the two Ṣaḥīḥs there is the ḥadīth of the seven whom God will shade in His shade on the day when there is no shade but His, among whom is: «وَرَجُلٌ دَعَتْهُ امْرَأَةٌ ذَاتُ مَنْصِبٍ وَجَمَالٍ فَقَالَ: إِنِّي أَخَافُ اللَّهَ» ("and a man whom a woman of rank and beauty invited, and he said: 'I fear God.'").^[3] This ḥadīth portrays the very situation Yūsuf lived through, but adds a striking element: that the one who solicits is "of rank and beauty," meaning that the pressure comes not from a weak person who might be pitied but from a party possessed of authority and allure, which applies to the ʿAzīz's wife quite literally: the mistress of the house and the lady of the young man.

And in the ḥadīth of the three men trapped by the rock in the cave, the second says that he had a cousin who was the most beloved of people to him, and he sought her for himself, but she refused, until one of the years of drought afflicted her and she came to him in need. He gave her a sum of dinars on condition that she yield herself to him, and when he had power over her she said to him: "Fear God." He felt compunction about falling upon her, and turned away, leaving the gold he had given her.^[4] Here the situation is reversed: the one soliciting is a man, the one solicited a woman in need, and the rescue is the phrase "Fear God." Murāwadah is thus not the preserve of one sex over the other, and the means of deliverance from it is the same in both ḥadīths: calling God to mind.

A Maqāṣidī Reading

It will be noticed that the Qur'an does not treat murāwadah with a direct juristic ruling in Sūrat Yūsuf, but with a whole story, as though teaching that knowledge of the prohibition is not enough in situations where seclusion, power and enticement converge, and that a person needs an inner structure built beforehand. Yūsuf was not saved because he had memorized a ruling, but because he had already said, before the event came to pass: ﴿مَعَاذَ اللَّهِ إِنَّهُ رَبِّي أَحْسَنَ مَثْوَايَ﴾ ("God forbid! He is my lord, who has made good my stay"), that is, he tied his refusal to two favors: the favor of God, and the favor of the one among men who had treated him well. Among the subtleties of the verse is that loyalty to one who has been good to you can serve as a coat of armor among the armors of chastity, and that shame before the bounty of people may be a path to shame before the bounty of God.

In a second reading, the exegetes drew attention to the way the Qur'an closed the scene with a remarkable explanation: ﴿كَذَٰلِكَ لِنَصْرِفَ عَنْهُ السُّوءَ وَالْفَحْشَاءَ إِنَّهُ مِنْ عِبَادِنَا الْمُخْلَصِينَ﴾ (Yūsuf 12:24) ("Thus, that We might turn away from him evil and indecency. Indeed, he was of Our sincere servants."). The turning away here is a divine act, yet its cause is a quality in the servant: that he is among the sincere (mukhlaṣīn). Divine granting of success does not descend at random, but upon one from whom sincerity has preceded. This ties the concept of murāwadah to the concept of ikhlāṣ that was treated earlier in this series: the one solicited whose intention has been purified of the dross of this world is better able to hold firm than one who entered the situation with a breach in his heart.

The Contemporary Practical Dimension

The forms of murāwadah have widened today and its instruments multiplied, until it is no longer confined to the closed room. The advertisements that press upon a person on every screen, the social pressures that call him to abandon his principle "to be like everyone else," the financial offer that comes to him dressed as courtesy, all are forms of "murāwadah away from the self": they do not coerce him but turn his will round by gentleness and persistence until he becomes someone other than who he was. Whoever has lived in a minority environment knows this quiet pressure: you are not forced into anything, yet every day you are solicited away from your identity.

Against this, the Qur'anic model teaches three practical safeguards. The first is that a person should not wait for the situation to make his decision: Yūsuf said "maʿādha llāh" before matters grew complicated. The second is that he should flee by movement when speech fails, for the Qur'an says: ﴿وَاسْتَبَقَا الْبَابَ﴾ ("and they raced to the door"), meaning that flight is part of steadfastness, not its opposite. The third is that he should seek help, for after standing firm in deed he turned to supplication: ﴿وَإِلَّا تَصْرِفْ عَنِّي كَيْدَهُنَّ أَصْبُ إِلَيْهِنَّ﴾ ("And unless You turn away their scheming from me, I will incline toward them"), meaning that he did not count himself protected by his own strength, but feared for himself even after his victory.

As for the one who stands in the place of the solicitor, the lesson is for him as well: let him recall the Qur'an's words about the ʿAzīz's wife after the passing of years: ﴿أَنَا رَاوَدتُّهُ عَن نَّفْسِهِ وَإِنَّهُ لَمِنَ الصَّادِقِينَ﴾ ("It was I who sought to draw him away from himself, and he is surely of the truthful"). However long murāwadah is concealed, a day comes when the truth "becomes manifest," and a confession that comes early, by its owner's own will, is lighter than one wrung out after the scandal.

Conclusion

When the Qur'an chose to describe what took place in that room as "murāwadah away from the self," it did not describe an act committed but a struggle over a self that someone wished to uproot from its origin. Whoever knows that the most dangerous thing demanded of him under any pressure is not what he does but who he is, will know that the first line of defense is to know himself with a knowledge that keeps him from selling it for anything.