Mary, Sister of Aaron: Difference between revisions

{{QualityScore|Lead=3|Structure=4|Content=4|Language=3|References=4}}'''Mary (Miriam) the sister of Aaron''' (and of Moses),  is a passing phrase used in the [[Quran]] to refer to Mary the mother of [[Jesus]].<ref>{{Quran-range|19|27|34}}</ref> From at least the 8th century  and perhaps as far back as [[Muhammad ibn Abdullah|Muhammad]]'s time [[Critics of Islam|critics]] have attacked this verse  as a simple but revealing error.<ref name=":02">Mughira b. Shu'ba reported: When I came to Najran, they (the Christians of Najran) asked me: You read  "O sister of Harun" (i. e. Hadrat Maryam) in the Qur'an, whereas Moses was born much before Jesus. When I came back to Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) I asked him about that, whereupon he said: The (people of the old age) used to give names (to their persons) after the names of Apostles and pious persons who had gone before them. {{Muslim|28|13}}</ref> In [[Arabic]] both Mary, the mother of Jesus and Mary, the sister of Aaran and Moses are called by the same name مريم (''Maryam''). Skeptical Jewish and Christian scholars at the time believed that Muhammad had mistook Jesus' mother for Moses' sister.<ref name=":02" /> While they share a common name, according to the Bible they lived more than a thousand years apart. When confronted, in the [[hadith]] Muhammad explains that their perception is a misunderstanding, however, according to these same texts many remained unconvinced.<ref name=":02" /> Ultimately, it seems, the hadith and sirah traditions came to assert that Aaron and Moses had a sister whose name was Kulthum rather than Miriam, which seems to point to their fundamental inability to understand the context of these verses.<ref>{{Quran-range|19|27|28}}.</ref><ref>{{Muslim|25|5326}}.</ref><ref>[http://www.al-islam.org/hayat-al-qulub-vol2-allamah-muhammad-baqir-al-majlisi/ Majlisi, ''Hayat al-Qulub'' 2:26].</ref> Modern scholars have rather found in this surah a complex web of inter-textual references, pointing to a highly literate and Christian audience of the original text <ref> Guillaume Dye, “The Qur’ān and its Hypertextuality in Light of Redaction Criticism,” The Fourth Nangeroni Meeting Early Islam: The Sectarian Milieu of Late Antiquity? (Early Islamic Studies Seminar, Milan) (15-19 June 2015): 8</ref><ref>Suleiman A. Mourad, “Mary in the Qur’an: a reexamination of her presentation,” The Qur'an in its Historical Context, Edited by Gabriel Said Reynolds (2008): 165.</ref>.