Maryam (A.S.) Facing the Challenge

 

As for the challenge in the case of Maryam (A.S.) it, too, is harsh and bitter. It is a challenge in a matter that touches her own person and being, a most sensitive challenge for a female who regards herself as the pioneer of purity and virtue, deploring her people’s sins and deviation. It is a challenge regarding chastity and purity. It came in a way wherein she lost with it all the means of her self-defense. How can a woman bring her people her newborn then claim that she never committed a sin nor had she a relationship with any man? She claims that she was big with child without having been touched by a man, insisting that she preserved the meaning of virtue and purity in the precise sense of the word. She accepts no other interpretation in that regard, not even one wherein a forceful action (such as rape) is applied and because of which a woman is excused.

Even when a married woman gives birth, she is shy during the first days to a high degree especially before those who knew her and whom she knew. So, how is it if she goes to her people carrying a newborn to whom she had given birth without having been married, insisting that she was not touched by any man at all?! Could she not expect them to think or imagine that something else must have taken place?!

Yet Maryam’s belief was not shaken, nor did she retreat, nor did she hide that infant, nor did she send him away or dissociate herself from him. Rather, she accepted and was pleased, and she persevered and tolerated everything seeking to please Allah, Praise is His. She was rightfully the head of the women of her time, and she was quite worthy of it, because she believed in the Words of Allah, and she supplicated to Him.