Thus says the Lord: Cursed is the man who trusts in man, … Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and whose trust is in the Lord!
The Bible – Jeremiah 17:5-7
When a Christian missionary opened a Qur’an at random for the very first time, she came across a passage… that was very revealing:
Then she [Mary] came to her people carrying him [the baby] . They said: ‘O Mary, you have done a monstrous thing! Sister of Aaron, your father was no wicked man and your mother was no prostitute’ . Surah Maryam 19:27-28
فأتت به قومها تحمله ۖ قالوا يا مريم لقد جئت شيئا فريا يا أخت هارون ما كان أبوك امرأ سوء وما كانت أمك بغيا
What a surprise: here, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is also the sister of Aaron! Yet Mary (mother of Jesus) and Mary (sister of Aaron – Hârûn in Arabic) lived in two eras separated by more than a thousand years.
Here, the Qur’an seems to confuse the mother of Jesus with the sister of Aaron! Could it be that Muhammad is recounting anachronistic facts concerning these two Marys, without distinguishing one from the other?
One day, the Christians of Najran reported this inconsistency to a disciple of Muhammad named Al-Mughîra, who went to the ‘Messenger of Allah’ and questioned him on this matter. To justify himself, Muhammad replied that the ancients – in Mary’s time – were in the habit of naming their children after the Apostles and the pious people who had come before them.
Al-Mughîra ibn Shu’ba recounts: “The Prophet sent me to Yemen. There I was told: ‘You recite this passage: “O Sister of Harun”; yet, between the time of Moses and that of Jesus, there was the period that everyone knows! ’’. I did not know how to reply to them… When I returned (to Medina), I asked the Prophet about this… He said to me: ’’You should have informed them thatthey were taking the names of the prophets and the pious who had lived before them.’ ’ ” Hadith: Sahih Muslim 025, 5326
A Muslim tried to reassure me with the hadith1 above.
This (so-called) authentic hadith clearly explains that ’’sister of Hârûn‘’ does not mean a sister by the same father and mother, but is simply the custom the Jews had of naming themselves after prophets and pious men!
The problem!
There is no trace of such a practice of naming people ‘ sister of… ’ in the Tanakh, the Torah, the Talmud or any form of Judaism, nor in Christianity, and nor even in Arab culture.
The Muslim apologist Dedat dismisses the problem by arguing that Jesus is called “son of David”. Yes, the genealogical designation ‘Son of…’ skipping generations does exist; we are all ‘sons of Adam’ but never ‘sisters of Eve’!
This anachronism, stemming from ignorance of the history of the two distinct Marys, occurs several times and is confirmed and proven in various forms in the Qur’an and in the hadiths:
(Remember) when the wife of Imran said: ‘Lord, I have dedicated to You, in complete exclusivity, that which is in my womb. Accept it, then, from me. You are indeed the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing. Then, when she had given birth, she said: ‘Lord, I have given birth to a girl’; yet Allah knew best what she had given birth to! A boy is not like a girl. ‘I have named her Mary, and I place her and her offspring under Your protection against the accursed Devil.’ Qur’an 3:35-36
When the wife of Imran said, ‘My Lord, I have vowed to You what is in my womb as a free offering; so accept this from me& nbsp;ۖ Verily, You are the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing. And when she gave birth to her, she said: ‘My Lord, I have given birth to a girl, and Allah knows best what I have given birth to; a boy is not like a girl ۖ And I have named her Maryam, and I seek refuge for her with You and protect her from the accursed Satan
Further on, Mary’s mother is referred to as the wife of Imran.
Likewise, Mary, the daughter of Imran, who had preserved her virginity; We then breathed into her of Our Spirit. She affirmed the truth of her Lord’s words and His Books: she was among the devout. Quran 66:12
ومريم ابنت عمران التي أحصنت فرجها فنفخنا فيه من روحنا وصدقت بكلمات ربها وكتبه وكانت من القانتين
So here, it is the people of Moses’ time who claim to have seen Mary pregnant, having been breathed into by the Spirit. No false and hypocritical argument based on the tradition of naming after ancestors can be put forward any longer. Shame on Dedat! The Qur’an shows that Dedat is either an ignorant man or a lying hypocrite.
Imran (=Amram in the Bible) is indeed the father of Mary, Aaron and Moses (Numbers 26:59).
The Sahih al-Bukhari Hadith 3769 also confirms that, according to Muhammad, Mary (the mother of Jesus) is the daughter of Imran! He would therefore be the grandfather of Jesus!
Muhammad should have known how to sort through the jumble of Jewish, Christian, pagan, Persian and Sabian names and stories of his time. He should have been able to distinguish who was who, and the true from the false.
Let us summarise the chronology of the incident:
- The Qur’an presents a confusion between the two Marys in several places2
- Some Christians noticed this error and approached devout Muslims (who recite the Quran) to ask for an explanation. The Muslims were unaware of such a naming tradition and did not know how to respond, which is why they went to Muhammad for clarification.
- Muhammad had never explained a made-up naming tradition to anyone. It was only when this error was revealed that he attempted to justify himself. Where is there any evidence of a custom referring to:
a) A pious woman: the sister of a prophet ?
b) the mother of a pious woman : the wife of a prophet?3
No ancient culture records this sort of practice . ..neither in the time of Moses, nor in the time of Christ, nor in the time of Muhammad. - The news spread, and was not immediately accepted everywhere :
- According to Ibn Kathir, when Aisha (the Prophet’s wife) learnt from Ka’b that Mary in the Sura ‘O sister of Harun (Aaron)’ does not actually refer to Aaron, the brother of Moses, she called him a liar(!).. . ’’ Ka’b : ’’O Mother of the Believers, if the Prophet said so … moreover, I find a time difference of 600 years’’, she remained silent”.
She would not have done so if the Qur’an did not clearly state that these two Marys are one and the same person. Aisha’s reaction is significant because it reveals Muhammad’s first error. Aisha is, like many Muslims, sincere, but misled. Having believed the Quran, she accepts the error as truth, and rejects the truth that has been revealed as a lie.
We have indeed sent down to you clear verses, setting forth a parable of those who lived before you, and an admonition for the righteous! (Quran 24:34)
ولقد أنزلنا إليكم آيات مبينات ومثلا من الذين خلوا من قبلكم وموعظة للمتقين
The series of ‘why, why…’
If the Qur’an is as clear as it claims to be …,
why then were the first Muslims misled by it?
Why was Aisha herself so hard to convince? It would have been enough for Muhammad to read the ‘Law and the Prophets’, and he would have known that between Moses and Christ, there was a gap of over 1,000 years4.
Muhammad never made a single prophecy about the future that came true. Being probably5 illiterate, he still manages to make naive mistakes by ‘ revealing6 what everyone can know… the past ’.
The Quran … left in the lurch! along with the two Marys. Everyone will draw their own conclusions, but here are mine
- Muhammad, knowing only fragments of Judeo-Christian stories, confused the two Marys on two occasions because of their identical names. This confusion, though entirely human, cannot be accepted from a true prophet.
- Muhammad does not acknowledge his errors and justifies himself with yet another lie: Intolerable for a prophet!
- Muhammad is therefore not a prophet. The Quran, just like Muhammad, is a liar and a hypocrite.
Notes
- 1The hadith are details of Muhammad’s life reported by those close to him.
- 2 Linguistic note: It was easy to get confused. Indeed, the two Marys certainly bore the same name in Arabic, though of Hebrew origin (מרים, miryâm). That said, in certain biblical translations [Indonesian, English, German, Tagalog, Vulgate …] the spelling of the two Marys differs due to the translations of the Greek New Testament (Μαρία, Μαριάμ Maria Mariam). In other translations of the Bible [French, Arabic, Italian], the name of Mary – the mother of Jesus – is the same as that of Mary, the sister of Aaron. It is understandable that a single spelling exists in certain languages, but in the Qur’an and all its translations, there is … only one spelling and also one and the same Mary!
- 3 The combination of these two instances (Mary’s brother, Mary’s father and mother) shows that Mary (mother of Jesus) and Mary (sister of Aaron) are quite simply being confused.
- 4 Faced with this problem of the two Marys, some uneducated Muslims argue: “Yes, but in those days people lived for 800 years or more.” As the Qur’an is not a chronologically ordered book, they do not readily realise that Moses and his sister Mary, just like Joseph and Mary, lived long after the Flood and Noah, and that their lifespans were like ours.
- 5 This is not certain: there are accounts suggesting that whilst he was unlettered, he may have been able to write, as he is said to have corrected scribes who did not write down exactly what he had said.
- 6 In this Surah of Mary, he also recounts ‘unprecedented’ events concerning Christ: Jesus is said to have spoken whilst still a baby! But (the baby) said: ‘I am truly the servant of Allah. He has given me the Book and appointed me a Prophet. (19:29) These events are not recounted either in the writings of the New Covenant (the New Testament, written 500 years before Muhammad’s writings) or in the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. Furthermore, the Jews never called God ‘ Allah ” (one of the gods of Mecca) but “Yahweh or Jehovah”, Adonai, Elohim, etc.