Joseph  ·  Yusuf

Joseph in Islam

Joseph is Yusuf in Arabic, written يُوسُف. The two names belong to the same person, and the two traditions tell his story differently enough to be worth reading side by side.

English
Joseph
Arabic
يُوسُف
Read as
Yusuf
Status
Prophet in Islam
Where the English comes from
Hebrew Yosef, may God add or increase.
What the Arabic carries
Yusuf, the Quranic form of the same name.
Full name page
Yusuf on AsrNaam

Is Joseph the same as Yusuf? Yes. Joseph is the English form and Yusuf the Arabic form of one name. His is the one story the Quran tells whole, in a single chapter it calls the most beautiful of stories.

Yusuf in the Quran

Yusuf has something no other prophet in the Quran has: a chapter to himself, told once, in order, from beginning to end. Surah Yusuf, the twelfth chapter, opens by calling itself ahsan al-qasas, the most beautiful of stories, and then gives the dream, the brothers, the well, the caravan, Egypt, the accusation, the prison, the famine and the reunion without interruption.

The Quranic telling is more interior than the Genesis account. It lingers on the moment the women of the city cut their hands, on Yaqub going blind from grief, and on Yusuf choosing prison over what was being asked of him. When the brothers finally stand in front of him he says only that there will be no reproach on them today.

Yusuf is also the name Islamic tradition attaches to beauty. A hadith describes him as having been given a share of it, and Persian and Urdu poetry has spent a thousand years using his name as the measure.

Using the name

The full entry for Yusuf carries the Arabic spelling, the Urdu, the pronunciation, the lucky number and the letter-by-letter Ilm ul Huroof reading, along with every romanisation the name is written in.

Open the full Yusuf page →

Questions about Joseph and Yusuf

Is Joseph the same name as Yusuf?
Joseph is the English form and Yusuf is the Arabic form of the same name. They refer to the same figure.
Is Yusuf the same as Joseph?
Yes. Yusuf is the Arabic form of the Hebrew Yosef, and Surah Yusuf and Genesis 37 to 50 tell the same story.
Why is Surah Yusuf called the most beautiful of stories?
Because the chapter says so of itself in its third verse, and because it is the one narrative in the Quran given unbroken from start to finish.
Can a Muslim family use the name Yusuf?
Yes. Yusuf is used as a given name across the Muslim world. AsrNaam carries its full page with the Arabic spelling, the pronunciation, the lucky number and the letter-by-letter Ilm ul Huroof reading.

Other names the two traditions share

Every one of these is one figure under two names.

Jesus and IsaMoses and MusaMary and MaryamAbraham and IbrahimDavid and DawudSolomon and SulaymanNoah and NuhJohn and YahyaJacob and YaqubJonah and YunusJob and AyyubAaron and HarunIsaac and IshaqIshmael and Ismail

Or start from the full list of Biblical names in Islam.

The letters of Yusuf

Ilm ul Huroof reads a name through the Arabic letters it is written with. Each carries a traditional numeric value and a principle. Yusuf is written يوسف, and reads as follows.

ي10the hand and the bondو6joining, the link betweenس60support, the spine that carriesف80opening, the mouth that speaks

The values total 156, which reduces to 3. This is a reading of the name's written structure in the letter-science tradition, not a claim about anyone who carries it.

How one name became two

Joseph and Yusuf are not translations of each other. They are two descendants of the same Semitic word. The Hebrew is יוֹסֵף (Yosef), meaning he will add. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages built on shared three-letter roots, so the name passed into Arabic as Yusuf with its consonants largely intact. It reached English by the longer road: Hebrew into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English, each language reshaping the sounds it could not make. That is why Joseph and Yusuf look unrelated on the page and are the same name underneath.

The same name, other languages

José, Giuseppe, Josef, Yosef, Youssef, Yusuf, Yusof, Jusuf.