The Blessed Virgin and the Mother of the Book - Reza Shah-Kazemi PART 3: Um Abiha

Toledo Interfaith Dialogues
Dr. Reza Shah-Kazemi

The Blessed Virgin and the Mother of the Book: The Marian Archetype in Islam and Christianity.

Theotokos: Mother of God
Umm Abiha: Mother of her father
Umm al-Kitab: Mother of Revelation

All three are symbolic expressions, at different ontological levels, of one supra-cosmic archetype: the maternal ‘Womb’ which contains the seeds of both Creation and Revelation.

One of the clearest expressions of this maternal archetype is what is called in the Hindu scriptures, Hiranyagarbha, ‘golden [hiranya] womb [garbha]’. According to one of the Puranas (Manu Smriti), Brahma [the ‘Creator’, masculine form, one of the Trimurti, not neuter] is said to be born from a golden egg.

The Prophet said to Fatima: ‘You are the mother of her father’ (umm abiha). Remember Mary is ‘the cause of what preceded her’ (St Gregory Palamas)

Kashani on Mother of the Book: According to Kashani’s commentary on al-Zukhruf, 43:4, the ‘Book’ is Muhammad himself, his archetypal reality. In which case Fatima’s designation, Umm abiha, mother of her father, implies that she is the (or a) personification of the archetype in question here: Mother of the Book.

Metaphysical priority and physical posterity: Here, we can draw out the implication as follows:
Fatima is a personification of the human heart in perfect receptivity; as such, she is the quintessential ‘mother’ of the formal, articulated Qur’an—personified by her father. Qua his daughter, however—one of Muhammad’s ‘descendants’—she only receives the ‘spiritual reality’ of the Qur’an, the ma‘na as opposed to the lafz (the actual words), hence she is not a prophet or a messenger, defined as one who receives the actual words of Revelation. Her status as embodiment of ‘Mother of her father’, ‘Mother of the Book’, ‘the Guarded Tablet’ is thus of a metaphysical order; her status as the daughter of her father, hence, as theologically subordinate to the Prophet, remains intact.

This takes us back to the idea of Mary as manifesting the mystery of the human heart, the primordial human nature, the fitra.

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