Is Mary Important for Herself or for Being the Mother of Christ in the Holy Qur’an?

Abstract

Christian interest in the exalted place of Mary in the Holy Qur’an derives from its resonance with discourse on women issues on the one hand and the centrality of Mary in the great encounter between Islam and Christianity on the other. Discourse on women issues – especially its feminist current – deals with the religious notion of women’s liberation (Ahmad, 1992). It undertakes a re-reading of the central foundational texts (the Bible in its two testaments and the Holy Qur’an), especially those that valorize women and their human, social, and political roles. This feminist discourse criticizes evaluating women only by their relationship to men as wives, to children as mothers and to parents as daughters, that is, by their relationships to the family structure instead of by who they are in themselves.