The same folks to bring you “Abrahamism”—the idea that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are intricately connected—have narrowed their sights on promoting Mary, the mother of Christ, as “a Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman,” in the words of Catholic priest Fr. Gian Matteo of the Pontifical International Marian Academy. In a ten-week webinar series titled “Mary, a model for faith and life for Christianity and Islam,” the academy will seek to present Mary as a bridge between the two religions.
This may be easier said than done — at least for those still interested in facts. For starters, the claim that Mary was a “Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman” is only two-thirds true: yes, she was a Jew by race and background; and yes, she was a Christian in that she literally birthed Christ(ianity); but she was most certainly not a Muslim — a term and religion that came into being 600 years after Mary died.
Worse, far from being the Eternal Virgin, as she is for 1.5 billion Christians of the Catholic and Orthodox variety, Islam presents Mary, the Mother of Christ, as “married” to and “copulating” with Muhammad in paradise — a depiction that would seem to sever rather than build “bridges.”
In a hadith that was deemed reliable enough to be included in the renowned Ibn Kathir’s corpus, Muhammad declared that “Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran,” whom Muslims identify with Jesus’s mother. (Note: The Arabic word for “marriage” (نكاح, or nikah) denotes “legal sexual relations,” connotes the “F” word (due to its etymological connection to nakah, which carries the same spelling, نكاح) and is wholly devoid of Western, “romantic,” or Platonic connotations.)
Nor is this just some random, obscure hadith. None other than 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 — prayers and be upon him — will be married to Mary in paradise,” Galil said.
If few Christians today know about this Islamic claim, medieval Christians living in Muslim-occupied nations were certainly aware of it. There, Muslims regularly threw this fantasy in the face of Catholic and Orthodox Christians who venerated Mary as the “Eternal Virgin.” Thus, Eulogius of Cordoba, an indigenous Christian of Muslim-occupied Spain, 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 offensive words about Mary and any number of other things — that had dire consequences: he, as well as many other Spanish Christians vociferously critical of Muhammad, were found guilty of speaking against Islam and publicly tortured and executed in “Golden Age” Cordoba in 859.
One expects that all of these “inconvenient” facts will be quietly passed over during the Pontifical International Marian Academy’s webinars. And if they are raised, no doubt Christians will somehow take the blame, as almost always happens in academic settings. As one example, after quoting Eulogius’s aforementioned lament against Muhammad’s claim of being married to Mary, John V. Tolan, a professor and member of Academia Europaea, denounced it as an “outrageous claim” of Eulogius’s own “invention.” He then railed against the martyr — not against his murderers or their prophet:
Eulogius fabricates lies designed to shock his Christian reader. This way, even those elements of Islam that resemble Christianity (such as reverence of Jesus and his virgin mother) are deformed and blackened, so as to prevent the Christian from admiring anything about the Muslim other. The goal is to inspire hatred for the “oppressors[.]” … Eulogius sets out to show that the Muslim is not a friend but a potential rapist of Christ’s virgins. (Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, p.93)
As already seen, however, it is Muhammad himself — not any “Christian polemicist” — who “fabricates lies designed to shock,” namely that Mary will be his eternal concubine.
This, incidentally, is the main problem the purveyors of Abrahamism 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, take away, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also rely on. Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments — primarily 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 biblical accounts on these figures are then seen as “distorted” because they are different from Islam’s later revisions.
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 become your friend — he adds: “And everything you thought you knew about grandpa is wrong! Only I have his true life story.”
Would that create a “bridge” between you and this stranger who is trying to appropriate and recast the image of your grandfather?
Are the Catholic leaders trying to maintain their “universal” one true faith status by absorbing Islam, or are they simply appeasing their militant co-religionists?
Appease Sharon. They know what’s up my thinking. Either a willful blindness, utopian fantasy of acquiring peace, or fear perhaps driving this madness, not sure of course, no mind reader here, but corruption of corruption of some kind no doubt.
Mary … like every other heroine or – for that matter – like any other victim of the demonic …
… must be maligned and desecrated and defamed …
… rather than giving her the honor due to her …
… or at least the respect one show’s for someone else’s mother …
No surprise. Leftists and Muslims hate all of the historical figures who ever did anything decent or normal in the course of the long war between good and evil. And vice versa. About the only historical figure we ‘agree’ upon is that guy named Adolf … and that’s only because they blame us for his atheistic and anti-Christian behavior.
*** God bless everyone here … and watch over and protect them!
danknight, the truly ironic thing about “Adolf” is that he, too, was a socialist; the difference is that he was a fascist, and not at all a right-winger, while marxists and other leftists are communists. the only reason that “Adolf” and his ilk are reviled by today’s leftists is that he lost; furthermore, he makes a dandy tarbrush with which to tar non-leftists, in particular conservatives.
BTW, i suspect that although there will be roundups and 9 mm. “re-education” once the USSA is firmly established, US leftists/socialists will take the fascist route, much like the so-called commies in the PRC now allow capitalism. by so doing, the people pretty much take care of themselves, and so long as they parrot the Party line and do *exactly* what they are told when they are told, all goes well (unless an unfortunate entrepreneur has his company taken by a Party member because the Party member wants it). e.g., the PRC owns the world market for rare earth metals; at one time, it did not, but wanted to own it. rare earth metals are not actually rare, and their ores are found around the world, including in the western US and canada. at one time, there were substantial open-pit mines for the ores of these metals in the US and canada, but the Party in the PRC did a major revamp of the chinese industry, merging some companies, closing others, and setting an official price for both the ore and other products up to finished ingots. the official prices of the finished ingots were far below what any non-chinese producer could afford to sell the raw ore, so all other mines began to close, beginning with those in the US and canada, whose costs were highest. rare earth metals are used in powerful magnets, which are used to DC electric motors, and incidentally in head positioners in hard disk drives (HDDs). it is for the reason of short supply lines that almost all HDDs and most electric motors are manufactured in southeast asia, which is closest to china.
the Party did not need to issue detailed instructions for the companies in the industry to execute its commands; instead, it issued top-level commands and set the price (subsidizing all chinese companies in the industry), and the people in the industry did the rest. by using a fascist approach, far fewer people need to be re-educated or shot, and the Party relieves itself of the responsibility of carrying out the details of their orders. ignoring the dictatorial aspects of fascism and communism, it seems to be pretty obvious that fascism makes much better use of its resources than communism, which insists on running everything in detail, and in so doing, often puts incompetents who are good Party members in charge of entire industries. nevertheless, dictatorships often promote stupid ideas that hinder scientific progress; lysenkoism in the USSR is a good example of that problem, and *any* dictatorship can be subject to such misdirections of resources.
and may God bless U, too, danknight!
Appease Sharon. They know what’s up my thinking. Either a willful blindness, utopian fantasy of acquiring peace, or fear perhaps driving this madness, not sure of course, no mind reader here, but corruption of corruption of some kind no doubt.
Is it possible to find Muhammads words in Ibn Kathir’s corpus somewhere online?
Yes! Click on Raymond’s fifth paragraph above which says in blue ‘televised Arabic language program’ and you can watch the Arabic version on You Tube where Maryam and Mohammed’s names are mentioned several times by Abdul Galil. Of course, you have to have a good knowledge of Arabic or know someone who does, because they don’t give you the translation (and I wouldn’t trust it even if they did). One of my greatest regrets is that I didn’t take my Arabic lessons seriously in school in Egypt, same as the other girls in my class – maybe because the powers that be always treated us as foreign residents with no right to Egyptian citizenship even if born there which both my parents and I were. I shocked an English lady once when I said that to her and she replied, “And they call US racists!”.
Islam is an abomination, not a true religion. Muhammad himself was a pedophile, warlord, and murderer, not to mention a plethora of other personal eccentricities. He was thought to have had frequent epileptic seizures, and would come out of them professing that he had been communicating with Allah. Islamic apologists suggesting some connection with Mary are out of their flipping minds! The entire verbal and written history of Islam attempts to claim legitimacy by professing certain common antecedents with Judaism and Christianity, but that dog don’t hunt! It considers Christians and Jews to be “infidels”, subject to death by the sword or life-long Dhimmitude if they don’t agree to convert to Islam.
Illegitimate Pope Francis’ fascination with ecumenism is just another example of modern clerics’ doing their best rendition of tree-hugging. In reality, “the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim”!
“…the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim[.]”
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Shooter, as a born-again christian, i don’t see muslims as potential dead bodies, but instead as lost souls, because God can reach anybody whom He wishes to reach. This does *not* mean, however, that islam is a legitimate religion; U had it *absolutely* correct when U said that it was an abomination (except that i might have said “f***ing abomination”).
almost everything that muhammed did was also done by contemporary non-muslims, and many of the practices – including child rape – were widespread. in ancient roman law, when a family was to be killed, it was illegal to kill a girl over 12 years old if she was a virgin; the solution: rape the little girl, then kill her. most of these practices, however, had nothing to do with any of the religions, and when they did, they were not inviolable doctrines; thus, there was room in almost all cultures for moral improvement (admittedly, however, not much impetus). in islam, however, allah tells the muslims that muhammed is an “excellent example” (e.g., quran 33:21, along with some 90 or so other ayat); thus, he is known as al-insan al-kamil (the Perfect Man) and uswa hasana (Model of Conduct). muhammed is therefore central to the cult, and it is blasphemy (the penalty for which is always death) to even intimate that he was wrong. the end result is that all the really gross parts of islam can *N*E*V*E*R* change, because muhammed did them all. BTW, this is why the sunnah (“traditions”) of muhammed exists: so that muslims will know what to do to be a pious muslim, since according to the ulema, it is not possible to reach allah by reason alone (allah calls some to him, and causes others to be “losers” and end up in hell).
other than that one nit, i am in full agreement with your post.
+1
I hope Danos Shukuroglou reads this: Thank you for your long reply to me in ‘Desecrated and Defecated on: Churches in Europe under Islam’, (3/10/2021), which was kindly relayed to me from Raymond Ibrahim’s website. On behalf of Don Gaetano and me, and I am sure others, I have to ask you to stay with us, please. Keep reading Raymond and keep giving your views. That said, I learned a very important detail from your comments, which is that Mustafa Bülent Ecevit was a student of Kissinger. It seems to me that this is a case where the professor learned from the student, or they were both of one mind. If you look up on the internet the article, “CIA document confirms Kissinger’s selling out of Cyprus”, at the very end of this article on the right there are small arrows pointing to another article, “What did Henry say about the Greeks in 1974”. The quotation from Kissinger is there in full, and even I, who thought that nothing would shock me anymore (I am in my nineties), was literally shocked – Hitler all over again and worse.
And now I am going to say what I said before and will say again and again. I think everyone is entitled to his own beliefs, including atheists, agnostics, Buddhists or whatever – we fought wars for this freedom. And whether one is a religious Christian or not is up to him or her. However, the Virgin was Jewish and Christian but never never Muslim, this is historical fact whatever Fr. Gian Matteo Roggio would like us to believe, nor is she the Mary (or Maryam) of the Koran. Nor is Jesus Christ the same as their Isa, the one who was never crucified, and nor again is the Christian God (the God of Love) the same as Allah (Pure Will). This is a distortion of history to begin with (nothing new nowadays) and a denigration of the Christian religion in their own Muslim holy book. And to even think that the Virgin is to be one of Mohammed’s wives I find extremely offensive, and I don’t understand how members of the cloth like Fr. Gian Matteo Roggio or indeed the Pope – can fraternise with these people, when any stupid thing like the Muhammed cartoons or Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ sends them to paroxysm of rage and cause so many deaths. As I mentioned somewhere before, this, in my view, is the same as plays and films like Jesus Christ Superstar, The Last Temptation of Christ or the Da Vinci Code, but we don’t kill people for that in our countries.
In any case, who was it who decided that truth is relative, and when was it decided, and by whom, that all value systems are equal? Our system may not be perfect but we are willing to change with time and accumulated knowledge. Maybe we don’t have the whole truth but we can accept this and if and when we believe something is wrong, we try to change it, as we did with slavery. We (the Western world) abolished slavery – which, by the way, was condemned even by the Stoics as far back as ancient Athens – and we developed a technology which made slavery redundant. But slavery is still practised in Africa and elsewhere in countries which still believe in such outmoded and degrading systems because allowed in the Koran. And don’t start me on the inequality of women. Since when is it allowed for a husband to beat his wife (even if lightly?) if not obedient to him, as it says in the Koran. There is so much more in the Koran but I can’t go into detail. And this is not to mention ‘honour killings’ and FGM, which still exist in the “old countries” and are illegal in our own but still practised underground. And finally, when was it no longer a principle that immigrants accept our Western laws and values as the price of settling in our countries and obtaining their benefits? Everyone in our lands has to respect our laws and our principles, just as every other minority in the country. Why the special treatment? They cannot censor us and cause deaths because of their insistence that the Koran is the uncreated eternal word of God, good for all time, when it was written in the 7th c., or so they say, and good for the 21st. Everything is open to scrutiny. This is the basis of our freedom and critical inquiry for which we fought wars and many died and those who don’t want to “submit” are free to go elsewhere.
thank U for the information about cyprus, Mary; although i knew of the turkish atrocities, i didn’t have any further information than that. i have now bookmarked actionforcyprus.org and will be watching it for further developments (although i suspect that islamic manipulation of the PC legacy media will prevent any good developments).
+1