Maryam bint Imran () holds a singularly exalted place in Islam. The Quran 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.Qur'an 3:42; cited in Stowasser, Barbara Freyer, “Mary”, in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC.J.D. McAuliffe, Chosen of all womenJ.-M. Abd-el-Jalil, Marie et l'Islam, Paris 1950 In the Quran, her story is related in three Meccan surahs (19, 21, 23) and four Medinan surahs (3, 4, 5, 66). 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,Stowasser, Barbara Freyer, “Mary”, in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC. 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.e.g. Rāzī, Tafsīr, viii, 46 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, the 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,Lejla Demiri, "Mary in the Qur’an" pp. 9-11 L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO, 51st year, No. 29 (2556) Friday, 20 July 2018. → Download pdf file here 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. 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 (Mary), 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.Yet the phrase “sister of Aaron” matches the Qurʾān’s description of Mary elsewhere (3:33; 66:12) as the “daughter of ʿImrān” [...] The Qurʾān thus departs from pre-Qurʾānic Christian tradition (e.g., in the Protoevangelium of James), which makes the father of Mary, mother of Jesus, Joachim. It is likely that the Qurʾān’s author has confused and conflated the two Biblical figures named “Mary.” [...]
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 (Surat al-Maryam) and later a politicized Medinan retelling (Surat al-Imran) 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 Quranic 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.Cleo McNelly Kearns. (2008), The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice, New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 254–5Malik Ghulam Farid, et al. (1988) Āl ʻImrān, The Holy Quran with English Translation and Commentary Vol. II, p.386–8, Tilford: Islam International
Early years As mentioned previously, 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 Christ. As said in 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 (or a "spirit") 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 (the) 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.Bosworth, C.E. et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Volume VI: Mahk-Mid, Brill: 1991, p. 629 Although Islam honors numerous women, including Hawwa, Hagar, Sarah, Asiya, Khadijah, Fatimah, Aisha, Hafsa many commentatorsTwo such commentators were al-Razi and al-Qurtubi. 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.R. Arnaldez, Jesus fils de Marie prophete de l'Islam, Paris 1980, p. 77. 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 (ayat) 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.Christianity, Islam, and the West by Robert A. Burns, 2011, ISBN page 32 Quran also supports the virginity of Mary, revealing that "no man has touched [her]". states that Jesus was born when the spirit of God breathed upon Mary, whose body was chaste.Understand My Muslim People by Abraham Sarker 2004 page 127
Barbara Regine Freyer Stowasser argues that Islamic scholars believed the Jewish restrictions against women entering the Temple, came down to menstruation, thus the aforementioned Quranic 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: