3. Aal-i-Imraan

He said, ‘My Lord! Appoint for me a sign’, that is, an indication of my wife’s pregnancy. He said, ‘Your sign, for this, is that you shall not speak to men, that is, you shall refrain from speaking to them, but not from remembrance of God, save by tokens, gestures, for three days, and nights. And remember your Lord often, and glorify, perform prayer, at evening and dawn’, at the end of the day and at its beginning.

And, mention, when the angels, namely, Gabriel, said, ‘O Mary, God has preferred you, He has elected you, and made you pure, of the touch of men; He has preferred you above all women of the worlds, that is, the inhabitants of your time.

O Mary, be obedient to your Lord, be compliant before Him, prostrating and bowing with those who bow’, that is, pray with those who pray.

That, which has been mentioned of the matter of Zachariah and Mary, is of the tidings of the Unseen, of the news of what was unknown to you. We reveal it to you, O Muhammad (s), for you were not with them, when they were casting quills, in the water, drawing their lots so that it be manifested to them, which of them should have charge of, [which of them should] bring up, Mary; nor were you with them, when they were disputing, about the custodianship of Mary, such that you might have known it and related it; but truly you know it only through revelation.

Mention, when the angels, namely, Gabriel, said, ‘O Mary, God gives you good tidings of a Word from Him, that is, a boy, whose name is the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, He addresses her attributing him to her in order to point out that she will give birth to him without a father, for, the custom is to attribute the child to its father, honoured shall he be in this world, through prophethood, and the Hereafter, through [his] intercession and the high stations [al-darajāt al-‘ulā, cf. Q. 20:75], and of those brought close, to God.

He shall speak to mankind in the cradle, that is to say, as a child before the age of speech, and in his manhood, and he is of the righteous’.

She said, ‘Lord, how shall I have a child when no mortal has touched me?’, neither through conjugality or otherwise; He said, the command, ‘It is such, that God will create from you a child without a father. God creates what He will. When He decrees a thing, willing its creation, He says to it only: “Be”, and it is, that is, [and] ‘he is’.

And We will teach him (read nu‘allimuhu, or, yu‘allimuhu, ‘He will teach him’) the Book, that is, script, wisdom, and the Torah, and the Gospel.

And He will make him, to be a messenger to the Children of Israel, during his tender years, or after puberty. Gabriel breathed into the opening of her garment and she became pregnant. What happened to her after this is mentioned later in sūrat Maryam [Q. 19:21ff]. Thus, when God sent him to the Children of Israel, he said to them, ‘I am God’s Messenger to you’, and, ‘I have come to you with a sign, an indication of my truthfulness, from your Lord, and it is that, I will create (a variant reading for [the particle introducing the relative clause] annī, ‘that I’, has innī, ‘truly I’, indicating a new [independent] sentence) [that] I will fashion, for you out of clay like the shape of a bird (ka-hay’at, ‘something like the shape of’: the kāf is the subject of a passive participle) then I will breathe into it (fīhi, the [suffixed] pronoun [-hi] refers to the [preceding] kāf), and it will be a bird (tayran, is also read tā’iran) by the leave, the will, of God. So he created for them a bat, being the most perfectly-created of birds, and they would watch it flying, but when it went out of sight, it would fall dead — so that the work of a creature [sc. Jesus] may be distinguished from the work of the Creator, namely, God, exalted be He, and that he might know that perfection belongs to God [alone]. I will also heal the blind (akmah is one that is blind from birth) and the leper; these two are singled out for mention because with both afflictions the person is completely helpless. He [Jesus] was sent in an age of [characterised by] medicinal science, and he cured, through supplication, fifty thousand in one day on the condition that each person would become a believer; and I bring to life the dead, by the leave of God — He repeats this to preclude any false attributions of divinity to him — he brought back to life his friend ‘Āzar, the son of an old woman, and the daughter of the tithe-collector, all of whom lived on and produced offspring, and [he also brought back to life] Shem, son of Noah, but he died [again] immediately. I will inform you too of what things you eat, and what you treasure up, store, in your houses, and what I have never seen, and he would inform people what they had eaten and what they would eat. Surely in that, mentioned, is a sign for you, if you are believers.