Mary in Islam
Maryam bint Imran holds a singularly exalted place in Islam. The Qur'an refers to her seventy times and explicitly identifies her as the greatest woman to have ever lived. Moreover, she is the only woman referenced by name in the Quran. In the Quran, her story is related in three Meccan surahs and four Medinan surahs. The nineteenth Surah, Maryam, is named after her.
According to the Quran, Mary's parents had been praying for a child. Their request was eventually accepted by God, and Mary's mother became pregnant. Her father Imran had died before the child was born. After her birth, she was taken care of by her maternal uncle Zechariah, a priest in the Temple. According to the Quran, Mary received messages from God through the archangel Gabriel. God informed Mary that she had miraculously conceived a child through the intervention of the divine spirit, though she was still a virgin. The name of her child, Jesus, was chosen by God—he was to be the Christ, the Promised Messiah in Islam. As such, orthodox Islamic belief has upheld the virgin birth of Jesus, and although the classical Islamic thinkers never dwelt on the question of the perpetual virginity of Mary, it was generally agreed in traditional Islam that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life, with the Quran's mention of Mary's purification “from the touch of men” implying perpetual virginity in the minds of many of the most prominent Islamic fathers. Mary is believed to have been chosen by God, above all "the women of the worlds" in Islam and is considered as one of the four "ladies of heaven" alongside Fatima, Asiya, the wife of the Pharaoh, and Khadija, first wife of Muhammad.
Modern scholarship often treats Christian apocryphal traditions mainly extant in the Gospel of James, and a later reworking of the same text called the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, as intertexts of the Quranic account of Mary's life.
Family
The Quran calls Mary,, not to be confused with , the father of Miriam and Moses. It also mentions that people called her, not to be confused with, the brother of Moses and Miriam. Her mother, mentioned in the Quran only as the wife of Imran, prayed for a child and eventually conceived. According to al-Tabari, Mary's mother was named and her husband died before the child was born. Expecting the child to be male, Anne vowed to dedicate him to isolation and service in the Temple. However, Anne bore a daughter instead, and named her Mary.In the Quran
Mary is mentioned frequently in the Quran, and her narrative occurs consistently from the earliest chapters, revealed in Mecca, to the latest verses, revealed in Medina.Birth
The birth of Mary is narrated in the Quran with references to her father as well as her mother. Mary's father is called ʿImrān in Arabic, a rendering of the Hebrew name Amram. He is the equivalent of Joachim in the Christian tradition as found in the apocryphal Gospel of James, considered one of the Quran's likely sources in modern scholarship. Her mother, according to al-Tabari, is called Anne, which is the same name as in the Gospel of James. Muslim literature narrates that Imran and his wife were old and childless and that, one day, the sight of a bird in a tree feeding her young aroused Anne's desire for a child. She prayed to God to fulfill her desire and vowed, if her prayer was accepted, that her child would be dedicated to the service of God.E.H. Palmer, in his late 19th-century translation of the Quran, included in the Sacred Books of the East series, noted that:
This view was further corroborated in the 20th century. According to N.J. Dawood, the Quran confuses Mary, mother of Jesus with Miriam, sister of Moses, when it refers to the father of Mary as Imran, which is the Arabic version of Amram, who is shown to be the father of Moses in Exodus 6:20. Dawood, in a note to Quran 19:28, where Mary is referred to as the "Sister of Aaron", and Aaron was the brother of Miriam, states: "It appears that Miriam, Aaron's sister, and Maryam, mother of Jesus, were according to the Koran, one and the same person." In the 21st century this view remains common in Islamic studies, for example in Gabriel Said Reynolds' work.
More recent scholarship by Angelika Neuwirth has argued that far from a genealogical mistake, the Quranic account is to be understood two-fold, first as a Meccan telling and later a politicized Medinan retelling of the same account—in its second form being a theological response to Christian objections to the initial Quranic account by incorporating polysemy found in Medinian Judaism. In her view the accounts draw on Christian traditions preserved in Byzantine hymns as sources. The complexities navigated by the accounts are mainly related to the patriarchal authority of the House of Abraham and the Quran's apocryphal adoption of the possibly competing House of Imran defined by its female members, as well as an adoption of a general concept of the Holy Family. The ultimate solution of the retelling process was an account which allowed prophetic revelation surrounding motherhood and scripture—which the Christian tradition attributes to Mary—to be recast as originating with Muhammad—with the Abrahamic prophetic lineage also being moved from the Holy Family to Muhammad himself. Michael Marx further builds on this analysis and identifies the Quranic account as a retelling of Mary the Temple from the Christian tradition as Mary the Temple. Thus in an attempt to eliminate the allegorical prerogatives of the Christian story to avoid the conclusion of a deified Christ, only traces of pre-Islamic Mariology remain in the text. Such a purposeful deviation from Christian accounts is further supported by Wensinck's argument regarding the figurative speech of the Quran and the Islamic tradition: Similarly, Stowasser concludes that "to confuse Mary the mother of Jesus with Mary the sister of Moses and Aaron in the Torah is completely wrong and in contradiction to the sound Hadith and the Qur'anic text as we have established".
Despite likely being familiar with narrative traditions represented in the Gospel of James, the Quranic account of Mary's birth does not affirm the Immaculate Conception.
Early years
As mentioned prior the Quranic narrative imagines Mary in the Temple, however diverging from the apocryphal Christian version of the Presentation of Mary, which ultimately leads to her being educated as God-Bearer in the Temple and thereby becoming God's new Temple via the birth of the Christ. Like in said apocryphal accounts, the Quranic narrative lets her caregiver be decided by the casting of lots. Unlike them it places her in the care of Zechariah, not Joseph. However, much like in the Gospel of James, Zechariah in the Quran is imagined as a high priest. The Quranic narrative also borrows the Gospel of James' idea of Mary being miraculously fed in the Temple, unlike the former it however does not explicitly state that Mary had been fed by angels.Annunciation
In the Qurʾān, Mary receives an annunciation and conceives Jesus by God's command in two principal passages: the angels tell her she has been chosen to bear a "pure son", and conception occurs through God's "breath/Spirit" ; Scholars note clear points of contact with the Gospel of Luke—Gabriel’s role, the virginal conception by Spirit, Mary’s question "How can this be?", and the child's naming and destined greatness.Commentators on the Quran remark on the last verse that Mary was as close to a perfect woman as there could be, and she was devoid of almost all failings. Although Islam honors numerous women, including Hawwa, Hagar, Sarah, Asiya, Khadijah, Fatimah, Aisha, Hafsa many commentators followed this verse in the absolute sense, and agreed that Mary was the greatest woman of all time. Other commentators, however, while maintaining that Mary was the "queen of the saints", interpreted this verse to mean that Mary was the greatest woman of that time and that Fatimah, Khadijah and Asiya were equally great. According to exegesis and literature, Gabriel appeared to Mary, who was still young in age, in the form of a well-made man with a "shining face" and announced to her the birth of Jesus. After her immediate astonishment, she was reassured by the angel's answer that God has the power to do anything.
Virgin birth
According to the Quran, Mary was chosen twice by God: "And when the angels said, ‘O Mary, God has chosen you and purified you, and He has chosen you above the world’s women." ; and the first choosing was her selection with glad tidings given to Imran. The second was that she became pregnant without a man, so in this regard, she was chosen over all other women in the world.The Quran narrates the virgin birth of Jesus numerous times. In Surah Maryam, verses 17–21, the annunciation is given, followed by the virgin birth in due course. In Islam, Jesus is called the "spirit of God" because he was through the action of the spirit, but that belief does not include the doctrine of his pre-existence, as it does in Christianity. Quran also supports the virginity of Mary, revealing that "no man has touched ". states that Jesus was born when the spirit of God breathed upon Mary, whose body was chaste.
Barbara Regine Freyer Stowasser argues that Islamic scholars believed the Jewish restrictions against women entering the Temple, came down to menstruation, thus the aforementioned Qur'anic recasting of Mary in the Temple instead of the Christian Mary as the Temple was rationalised with her virginal ritual purity of not having bled.
According to the Quran, the following conversation transpired between the angel Gabriel and Mary when he appeared to her in the form of a man:
The Qurʾanic birth narrative closely resembles ones found in Christian apocryphal texts, which modern scholars consider the Qurʾanic account to be dependent on. The primary two accounts the Quʾran is thought to recount in some way are found in the Latin Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew which features a Marian date-palm miracle in Egypt and the Gospel of James which features a remote/cave birth narrative. Of additional importance are also the pictorial mosaics found in the Church of the Seat of Mary, which was converted into a mosque and served as the primary architectural inspiration for the Dome of the Rock. These mosaics already display the narrative conflation between the remote birth and the date-palm episode later found in the Quʾran. They thereby likely attest the Palestinian oral tradition recounted by the author of the Quʾran.
In the Qurʾān's nativity account, Mary withdraws "to an easterly place," encounters the divine "spirit" appearing in human form, conceives by God’s command, and—seized by the pains of labor beneath a date-palm—is consoled by a voice that provides water and fruit; returning to her people, she vows silence, points to the infant, and the newborn speaks in defense of his mother and in proclamation of his mission. Framed alongside the story of Zechariah and John, this composition echoes Luke's paired sequencing while diverging in setting and dramatis personae: both traditions affirm virginal conception by Spirit and announce the child’s name and destined role, yet Luke situates the birth in Bethlehem with Joseph present and a manger and shepherds, whereas the Qurʾān places Mary alone in a remote locale with the palm-tree and rivulet motif differing from Luke in the Quran and the tradition represented by the Gospel of James—similarly the newborn's cradle speech present in Islamic scripture and the Syriac Infancy Gospel is not found in Luke.
More recently Suleiman Ali Mourad began to venture beyond identifying these well-established pre-Islamic Christian intertexts and looking at broader mythological traditions of antiquity. He thereby identified divine birth narratives as general sources and particularly the birth of the Greek god, Apollo, as a prototype for the Quranic account.