Glimpses of a Mariology in the Qurʾan 533 Glimpses of a Mariology in the Qurʾan: from Hagiography to Theology VIA Religious

glimpses of a mariology in the qurʾan 533

Glimpses of a Mariology in the Qurʾan: From Hagiography to Theology via Religious-Political Debate*

Michael Marx

Two new contributions on Christian intertexts of the Qurʾan give cause to rethink the complex role that the figure of Mary plays in the Qurʾan: Samir Khalil Samir, “The theological Christian influences on the Qurʾan: a reflection,” and Suleiman A. Mourad, “Mary in the Qurʾan: a re-examination of her presentation.”1 It is a felicitous coin- cidence that a database of Qurʾanic intertexts, entitled “Texte aus der Umwelt des Korans” (Texts from the environment of the Qurʾan), is currently being established in the framework of the project Corpus Coranicum at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.2 This offers a welcome basis for a more in-depth examination of some of the questions raised in these papers. For theological issues in the Qurʾan—as highlighted in the title of Samir’s essay—still remain under-researched. Since the theological questions tackled in the Qurʾan form part of the still widely undetermined mass of pluricul- tural Late Antique debates, any discussion of these questions demands that the Qurʾanic text be contextualized within as broad as possible a spectrum of previously existing traditions. The methods and the individual stages involved in this contextualization procedure also need to be defined. The following contribution begins with a brief summary of the research carried out until now on the figure of Mary in the Qurʾan.3 In the main part, Suleiman Mourad’s and Samir Khalil Samir’s analyses of the pertinent Qurʾanic texts from Q 19 and Q 3

* I am grateful to Angelika Neuwirth for suggesting important revisions and extensive additions to a first draft of this article. Likewise, I am grateful to Yousef Kouriyhe for identifying the Syriac sources cited below, which will also be published as part of the Corpus Coranicum project. 1 Both published in Reynolds (ed.), The Qurʾan in its Historical Context. 2 Cf. Marx, “Koranforschungsprojekt.” 3 I will not include the late Qurʾanic anti-trinitarian polemics into the investigation. 534 michael marx will be discussed and their methodologies revisited. The results will reveal the need to re-examine Mary’s theological relevance in the Qurʾan itself—a topic addressed in the final section, which focuses on the religious-political and Mariological aspects of the texts. These do not receive an exhaustive treatment in the two papers, since they are primarily concerned with transmission processes. The intention of the present paper, thus, is both to reconsider the Qurʾanic texts and to review previous methods of working with intertexts. I will proceed from the methodological stance adopted by Sidney Griffith, who in a comparable investigation of reception history within the Qurʾan seeks to tread a cautious path between two ideologically charged positions. “It is hoped that the hermeneutical assumptions applied in this one study might suggest ways to avoid some of the extremes and the thematic methods of past inquiries into the pre- sumed foreign influences on the Qurʾan.”4 My aim is not to find evidence of “external influences”—which appears to be the objective of Samir Khalil Samir—nor to merely reposition Qurʾanic texts within Christian traditions, as attempted in Suleiman Mourad’s work, but rather to embark on a more hypothetical venture, i.e., to discover clues pointing to debates about the person of Mary that the Qurʾanic community might have engaged in.

An Outline of How the Figure of Mary is Developed in the Qurʾan

In Q 19:16–33, a middle Meccan text, Mary is presented as a semi- mythical, sacred figure—an image that remains prevailing not only in the later Qurʾanic texts, particularly Q 3:33ff., but throughout the later Islamic tradition,5 and which paints so poetic a picture6 that Mary might be said to possess a prophetic history of her own from the Meccan phase of the Qurʾanic communication onwards. This is in contrast with the figure of Jesus, whose image remains inconsistent and vague in the Qurʾan and who from the Qurʾanic text entered into Islamic historical tradition as a controversial figure. Not only does

4 Griffith, “Christian lore,” 131. 5 see Totolli, Biblical Prophets. 6 see Mourad, “From Hellenism to Christianity and Islam.”—For a juxtaposition of the images of Mary and Jesus in the Meccan texts see Neuwirth, “Imagining Mary.”