Is Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, a “bridge” between Islam and Christianity? That’s what a major Muslim scholar, the Ayatollah Ahmad Moballeghi, recently insisted.
On September 5, while addressing a conference on interfaith dialogue at the University of Pretoria, the ayatollah showered Mary, a revered figure in Christianity, with praise. Some of his remarks follow. (Confusing Arabic-Islamic honorifics and formulae have been removed for clarity.)
Maryam plays a crucial role in the history of divine religions; she was not only the mother of a great prophet but also the Quranic focus on her made her a bridge between Islam and Christianity… Her character contributes to strengthening solidarity and cooperation between Muslims and Christians…. Maryam serves as a bridge of purity and faith between Islam and Christianity and is regarded as a symbol of chastity and virtue in the world … Maryam is recognized as a model of piety and virtue among all women worldwide, and her life is filled with divine signs and miracles that have made her a bridge for bringing Islam and Christianity closer together.
Moballeghi, it should be noted, is a serious scholar of Islam: He is a professor at Qom Seminary, Iran; a member of the Assembly of Experts; and the president of the Majlis [Council of] Islamic Studies Center in Qom.
After saying that the Koran mentions Mary 34 times — with an entire surah dedicated to her — he continued:
The life of Maryam is full of divine miracles and signs, including her miraculous conception without human intervention, the divine sustenance provided to her, and the speaking of Jesus as a newborn, where he testified to his prophecy and the Oneness of God.
What to make of all this? Has a bridge for mutual cooperation between Muslims and Christians been found at last in the person of Christ’s mother?
Is Sharing Caring?
Considering that many on the Left are making the same claims, it would certainly seem so. For example, in May, Pope Francis stated that “Mary is a figure common to both Christianity and Islam. She is a common figure; she unites us all.”
In 2021, the Marian academy in Rome launched a 10-week webinar series titled “Mary, a model for faith and life for Christianity and Islam,” in collaboration with the Grand Mosque of Rome and the Islamic Cultural Center of Italy.
Based on his belief that Mary is “a Jewish, Christian, and Muslim woman,” Fr. Gian Matteo Roggio, a Catholic priest and organizer of that particular Muslim-Catholic initiative, said he hoped to use “Our Lady” as a model of “open borders” between religious and multicultural worlds.
While all this may sound promising, there is one problem: Islam does not “share” Mary — or any other biblical character — with Christianity. Rather, Islam appropriates the names and sacred auras of biblical figures, but then recasts them with completely different attributes, some which directly contradict their defining features in the Bible.
Revisionist History
For example, far from being the Eternal Virgin, as 1.5 billion Catholic and Orthodox revere her to be, Islam presents Mary as being “married” to Muhammad in paradise — a claim that would seem to sever rather than build “bridges.”
In a hadith that was deemed reliable enough to be included in the corpus of the renowned Ibn Kathir (1300 – 1373), Muhammad declared that “Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran,” whom Muslims identify with Jesus’s mother.
Nor is this just some random, obscure hadith. Dr. Salem Abdul Galil — previously deputy minister of Egypt’s religious endowments for preaching — affirmed its canonicity in 2017 during a live televised Arabic-language program. Among other biblical women (Moses’s sister and Pharaoh’s wife), “our prophet Muhammad … will be married to Mary in paradise,” Galil enthusiastically proclaimed.
If few Christians today know about this Islamic claim, medieval Christians living in Muslim-occupied nations were certainly aware of it. There, spiteful Muslims regularly threw it in the face of Catholic and Orthodox Christians who venerated Mary as the “Eternal Virgin.” Thus, Eulogius of Cordoba, an indigenous Christian of Spain under Islamic rule, once wrote, “I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her.”
As usual, it was Eulogius’s offensive words about Muhammad — and not the latter’s obscene words about Mary — that had dire consequences: Eulogius, along with many other Spanish Christians vociferously critical of Muhammad, were found guilty of “blasphemy” and publicly tortured and executed in “Golden Age” Cordoba in 859 AD.
More Like an Evil Stepsister
This is the main problem the purveyors of “Abrahamism” — the idea that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are “sister” religions — fail to acknowledge: Islam does not treat biblical characters the way Christianity does.
Christians accept the text of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it is. They do not add to, take away from, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also accept as sacred.
Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments — for the weight of antiquity and authority attached to their names — Islam completely recasts them with different attributes that reaffirm Muhammad’s religion as the one true and final “revelation,” as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, whose original biblical accounts on these figures are then seen as “distorted” because they are different from Islam’s later revisions.
Jesus is a perfect example. While Muslims are fond of saying that they revere Him as a sinless prophet and miracle worker born of a virgin — all clear commonalities between Muslims and Christians — lesser known is that the Koran rejects, and Muslims do not accept, the most important points about Jesus. They reject that He was the Son of God, that He was crucified and killed for the sins of mankind, and that He was resurrected. In fact, those who insist that Christ is the Son of God — namely, Christians — are accursed and deserve nothing but relentless jihad (e.g., Koran 5:72-73 and 9:29-9:30).
Far from creating “commonalities,” it should be clear that such appropriation creates conflict. By way of analogy, imagine that you have a grandfather whom you are particularly fond of and, out of the blue, a stranger who never even met your grandfather says: “Hey, that’s my grandfather!” Then — lest you think this stranger is somehow trying to ingratiate himself to you — he adds, “And everything you think grandpa said and did is wrong! Only I have his true life story.”
Would that create — or rather burn — “bridges” between you and that insolent stranger?