Pulchra Ut Luna: Some Reflections On The Marian Theme In Muslim-Catholic Dialogue

Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Summer-Fall, 1999 by Tim Winter

On these grounds, classical Islam rejected the idea that virgin motherhood might be a condition for the purity of either mother or child. Little could be more remote from patristic ideals than the Muslim narratives of the conception of the Prophet Muhammad, which have his father entering the chamber of the Prophet's mother Amina with a bright light shining from his forehead, which vanishes once he has slept with her. [40] While affirming the virginal delivery of Christ, Islam empties it of any Christian meaning, viewing it simply as one of Mary's miracles, no more dogmatically significant as such than the miraculous appearance of fruit and water in her cell, or the visitation of Gabriel. [41]

Hence, Mary's most eminent title is not so much the virginal "al-'Adhra''' -- the term commonly used by Christian Arabs for the Virgin -- but "al-Batul": the "detached," in the sense of living in isolation from men as a pious worshiper and, hence, a virgin only by implication [42] (an implication that is further weakened by the application of the same epithet to the nonvirginal Fatima). Exegetes recount how Mary fasted and prayed in her chamber in the Temple so unceasingly that her body wasted away, while her feet were swollen from standing in prayer. [43] The Qur'an commands her to prostrate. Schleifer, pointing Out the rarity of references to prostration in biblical tradition, sees this as a rhetorical stress on her unprecedented abjection before God. [44] She memorized the Torah and outstripped all men in her sanctity -- hence, Joseph's willingness to believe her claim to an innocent conception. Some commentators interpret her "purity" as a reference to an absence of menstruation, which has been construed by jurists in Islam, as in rabbinic Judaism and some pre-modern Christian traditions, [45] as a disqualification from formal worship or entry into sacred spaces. Most exegetes, however, hold that she did menstruate, perhaps twice before the conception, and would leave the Temple precincts at that time [46]

The related issue of ancient theories of conception sheds additional light on these differing understandings of Mary's purity. The Christian tradition that culminated in Aquinas had inherited the Aristotelian teaching that the mother's function is confined to providing the "prime matter" for the embryo, while "the power of the soul, which is in the semen, through the Spirit enclosed therein, fashions the body." [47] Modern feminist thinkers have been quick to point out the implication that the female body is thus associated with grossness and corporeality; the male, with the spirit. [48] Normative Islamic embryology, however, was derived for various historical reasons from the Hippocratic and Galenic opinion that a child is created by the conjunction of male and female semen, a position that is acknowledged by a hadith that reports that man is created from "the semen of the man and the semen of the woman. The man's semen is thick and forms the bones and tendons. The woman's semen is fine and forms the flesh and blood." [49] It would have been difficult to use this view in support of ideas of the inherent grossness of the female body or of its reproductive mechanisms.