Maryam · Makki · ayah 20 of 98

Maryam 19:20

قَالَتْ أَنَّىٰ يَكُونُ لِى غُلَـٰمٌ وَلَمْ يَمْسَسْنِى بَشَرٌ وَلَمْ أَكُ بَغِيًّا

“She said, "How can I have a boy while no man has touched me and I have not been unchaste?"”

Saheeh International

Essence

Maryam asks Zakariya's very question, but her obstacles are not age and barrenness: no man has touched her, and she has never been unchaste.

A reflection

Not doubt: a precise defence

Readers sometimes hear Maryam's question as a wobble, or as innocence bordering on naivety. How can I have a boy? As though she did not understand, or did not believe.

One classical commentator rejects both. Her wonder, he says, was at the ordinary course of things. People of understanding take the normal pattern seriously, even while knowing Allah can break it. Nothing in her words suggests she doubted His power. How could she, he asks, when she knew He had created the father of humanity without father or mother? And a woman devoted to worship as she was could not have been ignorant of it.

Look too at how carefully her answer is built. She names two routes by which a child could come to her, and closes both.

No human has touched me. The commentaries explain that touch is the Qur'an's dignified word for marriage, used elsewhere for the same thing. So: I have no husband.

And I have not been unchaste. That route she names plainly, because, as one commentary notes, it is not spoken of with a gentle euphemism.

Another commentator asks why she mentions unchastity at all, since the first phrase already covers it. His answer is sharp. A woman with no known husband who produces a child faces one assumption above all others. She singles out the worst accusation in order to deny it.

So this is not a confused girl. It is a young woman just told she will have a child. She instantly sees every way the world will read it. Both doors are shut. She knows it. She says so.

The only door left is the one the next ayah opens.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.