Given the importance of Surah 12 as the paragon of all storytelling in the Qurʾan, it should not surprise us to find refractions and transfigurations of the story in postdating religious and literary narratives. The texts examined in this chapter all borrow themes, rework structures and seek the cognitive reassurance of anagnorisis from the scriptural epitome and its apocryphal accretions. Each of the works – which range, in distinctive styles, from the mystical epic Conference of the Birds to the popular Arabian Nights’ Romance of Ghānim b. Ayyūb – features recognition and discovery either as a central theme or as an element more essentially contingent upon defining features of the generic cast in which the given story is fashioned.

These kinds of rewritings have been studied widely in the Christian and Jewish traditions. Such poignant samples as we find, in Friedrich Klopstock's (d. 1803 ad) Der Messias, to name but one example, exist also in the Arabic, and more broadly the Islamic, corpus. (Turkish and Persian romances are included below showing how Islamic materials work across a cultural palette of highly cognate texts.) Evocations of the Joseph story in narratives of recognition that we will examine below are of two kinds: (1) direct citation or reference (clear outcrops of textual influence, which can simultaneously operate as hidden seams); and (2) the more delicate, recondite and even sublimated allusions which can be woven into the entire structure of a text in a variety of ways. In the latter case we are reminded of remarks about the influence of the Arabian Nights on Coleridge: ‘[T]o attempt to trace the prints of the Arabian Nights … in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan,” were like seeking the sun and the rain of vanished yesterdays in the limbs and foliage of the oak. But the rain and sun are there.’

Comparison at a glance between the two versions of the full Joseph story in Genesis and the Qurʾan evinces a glaring omission in the latter. No account of the imbroglio between Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) exists in the Qurʾan nor, apparently, in the Islamic tradition at large.