SUBVERSIVE MARYAM OR A QUR’ANIC VIEW ON WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT Johanna Marie Buisson Introduction W hen considering the history of the religions of the Book, Maryam is at the center; in that respect, her position is pivotal and around her revolves most controversies between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. As a Jewish woman of the 1st century BC, she was born to bring forth radical change within the Jewish community of Jerusalem, and at the same time, she enabled cultural and religious transition into Christianity. She was brought up in the Temple of Jerusalem among Jewish priests, she was therefore dedicated to God’s service, knowledgeable, and particu- larly well educated within Judaism, and still, she broke the Jewish rule of gender segregation and she later became the mother of the Prophet of Christianity, recurrently called Ibnu Maryama in the Qur’an, to emphasize their kinship. In early Muslim history, Maryam was also set forth as a powerful figure of unity between Christian and Muslim faiths, as the epi- sode of the migration to the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia shows, when Muslims were persecuted in Mecca and sought the Negus’ protection. Verses on Maryam were recited, and Muslim migrants were eventually granted asylum. Maryam therefore epitomizes both the bridge and the u- turn. Maryam’s body was the living locus of the manifestation of the power of the Word of God, but Maryam is obviously much more than a body and a womb; religious tradition turned her into the epitome of both virginity and motherhood, two extremely patriarchal key-representations of woman; the 450 . CROSSCURRENTS © 2017 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life