Assia Djebar published “La beauté de Joseph” in 1998. Though she originally envisioned a project that would become a film and described the piece of writing she ultimately crafted as a story, the work is a sustained reading of Sura Yusuf. My study takes up Djebar’s reading as an exegetical project. In addition to considering the work’s relationship to the genre of literary exegesis, I attend to Djebar’s strategies for engaging with biblical material, treatment of the gendered gaze, as well as speculation about the teachings imparted by the sura. To contextualize her reading, I engage interlocutors who have treated the sura using gender as a category of analysis and a range of mufassireen, some of whose texts become a site for the inscription of androcentric and misogynist readings of key verses. While Djebar is interested in Jami’s project to conceptualize Zulaikha’s desire in mystical terms, her reading works with the themes of the sura to try new trajectories of analysis and shed light on the manner in which received understandings have foreclosed interpretive possibilities of the text. Tracing these tensions, I contend that Djebar’s engagement pursues a remedy to gendered forms of epistemic injustice resulting from the diffusion of misogynistic perspectives embedded in received interpretive tradition. Looking beyond those horizons, Djebar articulates a reading that engages the sura to think about how Islam at once occupies a position of exile vis-à-vis Abrahamic tradition and acts as a reconfiguring force.