said: ‘O Mary! Allah has chosen you and purified you —
chosen you above the women of all nations’ ’’ (Sura
3:42).[27] The purity of Mary in Islamic thought is equated
with sinlessness. This is echoed in the Hadith, where
Muhammad says, ‘‘Every person to whom his mother gives
birth [has two aspects of his life]; when his mother gives
birth Satan strikes him but it was not the case with Mary and
her son [Jesus Christ].’’[28] The Koran even affirms the
Virgin Birth of Jesus, echoing Mary’s response to the angel
Gabriel from St. Luke’s Gospel: ‘‘She said: ‘O my Lord!
How shall I have a son when no man hath touched me?’ ’’
(Sura 3:47).
Muslim theologians, however, do not explore the
implications of Mary’s sinlessness or the Virgin Birth. They
do not want to pursue a line of thought that might lead to the
affirmation that Jesus was divine, a very disturbing
conclusion for the Muslim. If Jesus could be shown to be
divine, then the entire foundation of Islam (that is, Allah’s
revelations to Muhammad in the Koran) crumbles under the
weight of such a truth. Why should God need to reveal
Himself and His truth to Muhammad when he had already
come in the person of the God Man, Jesus?
The Koran’s narratives about Mary and Jesus Christ are
mixtures of legends, apocrypha, and certain canonical
books. There is even confusion between Miriam, the sister
of Moses and daughter of Amram (see Num 26:59), and
Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Both names are Maryam in
Arabic, and Muhammad seems to have thought that Jesus
was Moses’ nephew, the son of his sister. Jesus’ Mother is