This book creates opportunities for dialogue between Muslims and Christians about the most revered woman in both religions.
Author Younus Y. Mirza is a Muslim who earned his PhD at Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic university in the U.S. His first name is the Arabic version of “Jonah,” the biblical and qur’anic prophet’s name, and Mirza is indeed prophetic with this book. He’s interested in how Mary — Maryam, in Arabic — is presented in the Qur’an, how the portrait of her there includes details from Christian sources, and how understandings of Maryam in Muslim theology and tradition has grown over the centuries.
Mirza builds upon previous Islamic scholarship by writing a book that focuses on Maryam, rather than allowing her to be “subsumed under Jesus/‘Isa” as she usually is. In the process, Mirza demonstrates Maryam’s importance in a way that’s similar to how a Catholic scholar might — out from under her son’s larger influence. Then Mirza goes further, showing how the qur’anic depiction of Mary helps us better see “how Islam views God, righteousness, comfort, and despair.”
There are almost too many details, including frequent differences between Shi’i and Sunni interpretations and hundreds of footnotes to source texts and journal articles, making this a book mostly for scholars. But there is still a lot for the rest of us.
Mirza devotes chapters to Maryam in Islamic theology, mysticism, art and film, and in a final chapter called “Maryam in Contemporary Times” that may be useful mostly to those involved in Muslim-Catholic dialogue. There are many fascinating insights in this final chapter, including highlights of recent commentaries on the Qur’an and the increasingly larger role that Maryam seems to play in their discussions; as well as an engagement with a Jesuit scholar today who “does not see Muhammad in competition with Jesus but rather as a type of Mary.”
This book shows how in both Catholic Christianity and historical and contemporary Islam, Maryam/Mary always seems to mean more than we at first imagine.
