"Then the angels said: O Mary, truly God has chosen you and purified you and chosen you over the women of mankind. ... God gives you glad tidings of a Word from Him: his name will be Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, held in honor in this world and the Hereafter and of those nearest to God."
This is not a quote from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. This quote is taken from the holy scripture of Islam, the Quran, believed by Muslims to be the word of God.
It would surprise some to know that Islam holds in common most holy figures with Judeo-Christian tradition, from Abraham and Moses to Jesus and Mary.
The case of Mary is particularly fascinating. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is mentioned more than any other woman in the Quran. Indeed she is the only female to be mentioned in the Quran by name. One of the Quran's 114 chapters, "Maryam," is named for her. Mary's story is in fact given significantly more space in the Quran than in the Gospels. The narrative surrounding the birth of Jesus -- unequivocally presented as a virgin birth -- is replete with additional details. The Quran relates how Mary, unwed with her newborn child, stands accused before her people. The infant Jesus, able to speak, explains how he was conceived as a result of a miracle of God. In the Quran, Jesus' first public act was to defend the chastity of his mother.
The position of Jesus and Mary in Muslim belief has been elaborated in centuries of Islamic interpretation and commentary. One well-known tradition of the Prophet Muhammad states that "every descendent of Adam experiences the touch of Satan except Mary, daughter of Imran, and her son."
The reverence Muslims have for Mary can be seen in popular piety throughout the Islamic world. While in Turkey, I was invited to accompany a friend to "Mother Mary's house," situated atop a mountain outside the ruins of ancient Ephesus, now in southern Turkey. My friend, sounding less like a Muslim Turk and more like my Irish grandmothers, explained that she had to visit the shrine in order to fulfill a vow she had made to "Mother Mary," as she is generally known among Muslims.
What is believed to have been Mary's dwelling place during her last years on earth had been "discovered" in the 19th century by a group of French priests working from the descriptions revealed in the visions of a German nun experiencing the stigmata half a century before.
Eventually, the site was approved by the church as a place of pilgrimage. It has since then thrived as such, but the pilgrims are mainly from the local Muslim population.
The day I was there, I saw a few tour buses of Greeks, Italians and Poles, but the bulk of the pilgrims seemed to be locals.
In Turkey, it is a common practice for people to attach to holy sites something from their person, like a swatch of cloth, as a reminder to the saint of their visit and request.
Outside Mary's house, a stone fountain built over a natural spring is reputed to have therapeutic powers. Lacking anything nearby on which to tie a piece of cloth, people have affixed thousands of pieces of chewing gum to the fountain over the years.
The high regard in which Jesus and Mary are held by Muslims was not lost on those Christians of a missionary bent. Mary and Jesus were seen as a springboard from which to achieve the conversion of Muslims to the church.
However this, like virtually all Christian missionary efforts in the Islamic world, failed miserably.
The Quranic passages concerning Jesus, while proclaiming his miraculous birth, prophethood and second coming, at the same time vehemently deny any claims to his divinity.
Rather than fostering any kind of constructive dialogue, capitalizing on Muslims' reverence for Jesus and Mary for the cause of conversion has been a source of suspicion and resentment.
Muslims have often pointed out that, despite the respect and esteem with which they hold our holy figures, Westerners have consistently presented the Prophet Muhammad as at best a heretic, and at worst the Antichrist -- but usually somewhere in between, as a violent, decadent Oriental despot.
These characterizations of Muhammad are usually fashioned according to our simplistic conceptions of Islamic civilization in general.
In the latest example of this, Jerry Falwell recently spouted off his dopey, anti-historical, anti-intellectual view of the world to "Sixty Minutes." Based on all the books he's read, Falwell "thinks" the Prophet Muhammad was "a terrorist." In fact, Falwell and his ilk have more than a passing interest in the Islamic world and its role in the so-called End Times.
According to an enthusiastic and growing view among certain Christian groups, the Middle East is to be the likely venue of a very creepy Armageddon scenario, based on some whacked-out interpretation of the Book of Revelation.
The Muslims' story of Christmas is an appropriate point from which to reflect upon the current clash of civilizations -- a clash between us (formerly Christendom, now the "West") and the Islamic world. The demagogues of the respective sides would like to hasten this clash, envisioning a grand scheme of good versus evil, the saved and the damned.
We are being primed for this battle of good and evil in our culture, our media providing us daily images from the Islamic world, with the requisite women draped head-to-toe in no-nonsense black, men stopping traffic to prostrate themselves on the street in some menacing city, cheering after the Sept. 11 attacks in some refugee camp.
The warmongers on either side would rather not be reminded of certain inconvenient facts that point to a common heritage with the enemy.
But this common heritage is witnessed daily by the Muslim pilgrims to Mary's shrines across the Middle East -- in Algiers, Cairo, Ephesus and Baghdad. If it is anyone who will stave off this clash of civilizations, it is the mothers and grandmothers who humbly frequent these shrines. Hopefully, they will atone for the media-manipulating popular preachers, the religious demagogues of our time, who are attempting to foment a self-serving clash of civilizations.
I personally place infinitely more hope to avert this clash in a single piece of gum stuck to a fountain, more than in all the world leaders, UN officials and "concerned" Hollywood actors put together.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 23 2002 |