In the season of Advent and the days after Christmas, I typically tell Christians who are wanting to dive deeper into texts about Jesus’ birth to give the Qur’an a try. Not only is Jesus treated with reverence in the text, but facts like the virgin birth are even retained in the Qur’anic telling. In this season of the holy birth, the Qur’an even gives us a Jesus who speaks from the cradle and a Mary with even more importance than the biblical narrative.
That advice is usually met with a mix of skepticism and surprise, as Christians are not used to looking outside of their tradition for meaningful reflections on their most sacred figures. Yet, I have found as a pastor and a theologian that it is precisely by looking at other faiths and learning from them that we can come to better appreciate our own stories, even developing some of what Krister Stendahl and Barbara Brown Taylor call “holy envy.”
For such an important figure in Christianity, Mary gets startlingly little time at the narrative center of the Bible. It’s a little different in the Qur’an; Mary even has her own chapter called Surrah Maryam, the only chapter named for a woman. Jesus is even identified as the “son of Mary” in the Qur’an (Q 19:34), a subversion of the typical patriarchal naming patterns that we see in the Bible.
