The Western Sunni conception of Mary

Pardon my title; I do that sometimes. Pray for me. On this Day Of Obligation, Academia has sent to me "The Islamic Mary".

I'll raise here that I have no stake in this debate myself, as one who prays mercy for Nestorius every week I remember to. I don't consider Mary theotokos so I don't require her to be prokathartheisa. I believe it is Nishant Xavier who should come home. Still: Xavier raises an excellent point about my fellow Dyothelete, Saint Sophronius. Sophronius had no problem venerating Mary as full of grace "among" women - meaning, beyond. As Younus Mirza points out, many Muslims have agreed.

Ibn Hazm is no orthodox Muslim's first choice as an authority. Nonetheless the Muslims always respected him as an 'alim; enough that his books got copied. Among Ibn Hazm's observations was that Mary[am] had received similar Divine attention as had Joseph; he concluded that Mary deserves to be considered a nabi (although not rasul). Says Mirza, the local Sunnis (Malikite by then) quickly accepted Ibn Hazm's theory even as they expelled the man. One such Maliki was Qurtubi. Qurtubi's tafsir acquired wide respect far beyond his Western base, as Ibn Khaldun noted.

I do not find anything inherent in Maliki fiqh as would demand this. Malikism had sprouted from al-Madina and spread to Egypt, neither province particularly tolerant nor feminist. What Ibn Hazm offered to the Malikis instead, was a promotion of Mary over Fatima. Fatima was no competition for a woman elevated to Joseph's stature in the veriest Book Of Allah.

Even before enforcement of Malikism, by the AD 850s the Andalusis had bound Mary to Muhammad in marriage in Paradise. An insult to Catholics, still numerous in the Maghreb; but an honour for Mary.

Ibn Hazm was in the context, in North Africa, of the Shi'a - especially, from the fourth century [tenth AD], the Fatimids. Such proposed Umm Husayn Fatima as the most righteous of Islamic women. The problem with that is that many Maghrebis remembered the Umayyads fondly. This was certainly true in Spain which had adopted an Umayyad amir against the 'Abbasids. In that century they'd even promote 'Abd al-Rahman III (back) to Caliph.

What I don't see in the West was much debate over either to accept some woman as worthy of sainthood. Here I will debate Mirza. I think the West was primed for it.

Over in the Maghreb, many Muslims were Imazighen whose women were of some stature. Not for them the circumcisions of Egypt or the mutilations of the Somalia. Also over in the Maghreb was a longstanding tradition of saint-veneration and, more directly, Latin Christianity. That form of Christianity was visited by no less than Sophronius' protégé Maximus the (somewhat) Dyothelete, immediately before the Muslims invaded and Maximus became a Confessor. So here was veneration of Mary mother of Christ but not theotokos (yet). Already.

All these themes came together in northwest Africa and southern Spain, the "Andalucía" also called "the Maghreb". There was always going to be a feminism here, even if expressed Islamically. The veneration of Mary as Christotokos was natural to them.