Mary was a Prophet

"O Maryam (Mary)! Verily, Allah has chosen you, purified you (from polytheism and disbelief), and chosen you above the women of the 'Alamin (mankind and jinns) (of her lifetime)."

Rather, Mary was a prophetess.

This is going to be such an unpopular blog post, but I really just want to open some eyes and get people to think.. I mean really THINK about their religion. One of the biggest problems with Islam is that so many people are under the impression that in order to be a good Muslim, one just has to blindly accept what they are told, and perform the duties they see as "obligatory/fard" like ticking items off of a checklist.

I don't subscribe to that view, and I've always been under the impression that people should open up their own eyes and THINK. Don't fall victim to the 10%; don't be a sheep. God gave you a brain, so you'd better start using it.

I can't go into extensive detail in this blog post obviously, but maybe I can open up some doorways for further inquiry. Firstly, consider why it is that you (Muslims) get so upset or up in arms when you hear/read this: "Mary was a prophet". 

Exactly why do you get so hung up on it? I'm guessing it's for one reason: Mary had a vagina.

Every other prophet we have been told to accept in Islam is a male. That's fine. I'm not arguing against the prophethood of any other individual, only for the inclusion of Mary in the lineup.

Secondly, you might say, "Maria, Mary was never mentioned in the Qur'an as a prophet!". True. But can you tell me any other individual that is mentioned more often, or has an entire chapter devoted to him/her? As far as I know, Mary is mentioned in the Qur'an more than Mohammed himself. This is not something to be taken lightly.

Historically, it seems that prophets are individuals who receive revelation from the divine (whether it be through angelic intermediaries or direct divine revelation). A prophet is also someone who either leaves a scripture behind as guidance, or tries to use their message to reaffirm faith for large swaths of humanity.

Mary epitomizes this description/understanding of prophethood in Islam. Not only did she receive direct spiritual guidance from the Angel Gabriel, she bore the next Prophet - Jesus - through miraculous immaculate conception at the hands of Allah. In the words of Michael Muhammad Knight's character Rabeya (The Taqwacores): Mary may not have left us a scripture, but I say that her book was her son.

I don't find the argument that her name is not explicitly mentioned as a prophet in the Qur'an a very convincing one. I do believe that the Qur'an was the direct word of God. Unfortunately, we in 2013 will never really know what the word of God was. All we can go by is the version of the Qur'an that has made it down to us today. Never forget that there was a gap between Quranic revelation and Quranic compilation. Even after that, who's to guarantee that the non-prophetic companions of Muhammad didn't make some final tweeks? The word of God as revealed to Muhammad is nothing more than perfect. But I maintain that we cannot be assured that such perfection has been maintained in its entirety until today.

I find the story of Mary, and her revered status in the holy Qur'an to be more convincing of her prophethood than the fact that she is not considered a prophet by mainstream Islam simply because she was not named as such. Don't lie, she isn't mentioned or labeled as a prophet because she had a hymen (perfectly intact, I might add), and I don't find that a convincing argument in the slightest.

Islam has been transformed from an egalitarian movement of the people, into a male-dominated, exclusionary society. I refuse to give in to that anymore. Women are equal to men in every way, shape, and form. God has told us that. On the day of judgment there will be no preference given to men over women, so why should we act out such idiocy in our mortal lives? If men and women are equal in every sense, as God has instructed in the Qur'an, how can women not be prophets? Trying to say as such is illogical.

I am a woman. I have a vagina. I am a Muslim. I love Allah. And I believe that the blessed virgin Mary was a prophet of my religion.

Peace and love always <3

From Prescott to Doha: Islam 5 years on

What follows is a deeply personal account of my conversion to Islam, in a way that I've never written or accounted it before. Since coming to Doha I've begun to reconsider my relationship with Islam, and while I couldn't be happier about my relationship with Allah, I have found that my relationship to "Islam" itself is much more muddled. It's difficult for me to put this all out there... Please be kind.

Some of you may be familiar with the story of how I came to Islam. At 16 I got engaged to the most extraordinary Pakistani man. A senior in mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado, he was worldly, well-traveled, pure, and good to his very core. The legality of the marriage would be a green-card sham for sure, but we were absolutely committed to getting a civil marriage so he could stay in the country. Later, we agreed, when we were ready we would hold the symbolic public spectacle, crossing all the messy intercultural bridges later. His family knew about me but were not pleased in the slightest. It helped that he lied and told them I was a devout Christian (I was raised atheist). In Islamic tradition, it's acceptable for a Muslim man to marry a woman who belongs to the "ahl al-kitaab" ("people of the book"), a tribute to the shared Islamo-Judeo-Christian muddle. His family really pushed us into opting for the marriage earlier than we should have; upon discovering that their son was smitten with some blonde American infidel they threatened to bring him straight to Canada (where his parents were set to move from Brunei) as soon as he graduated in a few months.

Before all of this had happened, I had accepted an offer to start my BA in Arizona, about an 18 hour drive from Boulder through Grand Canyon and Four Corners country. It's one of the most beautiful routes in the desert southwest, to be sure. The first few months went ok, but when I found myself slipping back into a well-known and comfortable near-alcoholic pattern I had a typical first-semester breakdown and called my new fiance in a fit. He agreed to drive down at the end of the week and help me look for a healthier living situation. The next morning I awoke to a single text message from Muneeb: I love you - sent at 1:24am. I cleared out my inbox (back in the Stone Age when cell phone inboxes could fill up) and went out to attempt a jog down the way.

By noon I hadn't heard from Muneeb and started to get a little miffed; why hadn't he answered any of my calls? I broke down and called my mom to ask if she'd seen him. A few weeks earlier, his parents had kicked him out of his sister and brother-in-law's house in Denver after he refused to stop seeing me. My parents had happily given him meals and support, allowing him to move into my childhood bedroom. My mom finally dropped a big enough hint that he had taken off early, and was already on his way to Prescott; he should arrive right after my last class. It was a Wednesday.

I went to my first class. It was called something like "interpersonal communication and creative writing" or something New Agey like that. We had an in-class writing assignment and were then broken into pairs to go over our work. Not five minutes after finishing, two college administrators I knew walked over and had a few words with the professor. I sat on a boulder facing my partner. I don't remember who that person was - faceless - but I remember the sun shining gloriously on the pinyon and juniper on the hills just behind them. The instructor came over and asked me to go with the administrators. It was a tense and awkward walk about a block to the main offices. They told me to sit and to call my mom, she needed to give me some news. I remember thinking it would be something about my dad: he was in the hospital. He hadn't come home from a long run...

When I called my mom, I could hear that she was sitting on an airplane, the typical "dos and don'ts" were coming through the PA. She was in tears.

"Maria..." She sobbed

"Yeah, mom what's -"

"There's been an accident," she interrupted me with an uncontrollable wail "Muneeb is dead."

I shut my tiny Samsung flip-phone in a millisecond and threw it at the floor. I weaved my fingers into my hair and started to pull, eyes wide.

~

The rest of the day is a blur until I collapsed, a weeping mess, into my mom's arms at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. After that it's hard to sift through memories of individual days - it all just melted together. I know that I slept in my parents bed that first night back, drugged up on sleeping meds like a small child. I didn't go into my - his - room until my second day back I think. I found a soft, green prayer rug (that I first thought was just a fancy carpet for hanging on the wall) and an English translation of the Quran. I only wore his clothes.

Muneeb Anwar Kamal died on October 6th, 2008 between 1:24 and 6:34am, some time before a trucker reported seeing a white Toyota Avalon upside down at the bottom of a ravine on I70, just after the on-ramp at the 214 Cisco exit a few miles over the Utah border. He was driving to come see me, and was half-way through the journey. All the mountainous sections of difficult driving were behind him. In fact, he was found at the bottom of the only ravine for at least 50 miles in either direction. It's a flat, unimportant piece of road - the last few miles before I70 officially ends just north of Moab.

I read the Quran I found. I went to Muneeb's funeral at the Abu Bakr Mosque of the Colorado Islamic Society in Denver. His family met and accepted me with outstretched arms and tears in their eyes. We cried together.

It was inevitable that I would turn to Islam after that.

Islam believes in angels. And I expect that Muneeb may have been an angel, made of light, and sent to this earth for a higher purpose. It's generally accepted by Muslims that angels have no free will, and can only do as they are commanded by Allah. Allah ordered Muneeb to die that night, on that highway, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy - millions of memories with hundreds if not thousands of people. I am convinced that he is the reason I became a Muslim. He completely altered the course of my life. Everything that I have done over the last 5 years, everything, is due fully to him (and to Him).

As I draw nearer to another paradigm shift in my worldview five years later, I find myself thinking back more and more to Muneeb, and realize that I haven't been comfortable being alone with myself and my haunting past since he died.

I was born with a pain inside... A pain that lead me to experiment with drugs and alcohol FAR too early in my childhood. By the time I was 14 I could hold my liquor better than most college frat-boys. I started on crack-cocaine not much later. After 9 months of rehab and therapy I was cured of my drug addiction, but found that the pain had not left me.

For the past five years I've lived with this same pain, tripled by the weight of Muneeb's death. Five years later I can really look back at all of this from a substantial enough distance to make some sense of it...

Even though it was Muneeb and the hardcore Pakistani Salafi Islam that originally hooked me, I've gotten so far away from that it's hard for me to sit through a traditional, puritanical Sunni khutbah anymore.

I recently moved to a new part of Doha, a place with a bit more permanence and a "residential" atmosphere.  There's a big mosque a few blocks away that belts out the adhan five times a day, and then continues the prayers through the PA. Despite the fact that I normally abhor traditional practices of Islam, lately every time I hear the adhan and the subsequent lyrical Quranic recitation I am drawn without effort into prayer. My knees buckle, my waist folds.... Sometimes I haven't even washed wudhu, mostly I'm not fully covered.

My relationship with Islam right now is complicated. I'm not sold on the mass-consumption, Burger King, "one-size-fits-all" version (which is the ONLY version sold en masse in Doha), but I'm definitely not ready to give up on it altogether. It's hard carrying this burden around with me... I wear a hijab on my head, and cover myself in public because I feel it's the right thing to do. But I don't always pray, and I still wear makeup. I smoke. But when the fajr adhan is called, I can't stop myself from crawling to the window and following the lead of the muezzin.

I'll never be a "good Muslim" - but I'd rather keep walking around with Allah in my heart.

Allahu akbar.

Peace and love always <3