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 he
Koran says the following about Hz.Mary,
who is the mother of a Rasul;
-’Oh! Mary… No
doubt that Allah has chosen you, purified you and has preferred
you above the women of the universes’’ (Al-Imran/The Family
of Imran – Verse 42)
-‘’Right graciously her Lord has accepted
her. He made her grow in purity and beauty. To the care of
Zakaria was she assigned. Every time that he entered (Her)
chamber to see her, he found her supplied with sustenance.
He said ‘O Mary! Whence (comes) this to you?’
She answered
‘From Allah; for Allah provides sustenance to whom he pleases
without measure.’’ (Al-Imran 37)
With
reference to these explanations we can say that Hz.Mary is not
an ordinary human being, but one of
the distinguished individuals in servitude to Allah and
she is one of the ‘’female saints’’ who are very few in
number.
As in Christianity, Hz.Mary is accepted as a symbol of
honesty in Muslim as well.
For her the Rasul of
Allah (s.a.v) says ‘’Hz.Mary,
the daughter of Imran is the best among the women of her
period’’.
He also states that the
women who have reached the most divine position are Asiye, the
believing wife of the Pharaoh and Mary, the daughter of
Imran.
One day Gabriel had come to Mary in the form of a human
being and by looking at her shy behaviour he said ‘’I
am the messenger of
Allah and I have come to give you a good, clean child as a
present’’…
She was surprised very much because of having faced such an extraordinary situation, so Hz.Mary said ‘’How can
this happen as no human being has touched me before and as I am
not a corrupted
person.’’
In
his book Fusus’ul Hikem,
Ibn-I Arabi says that
Hz.Mary has seen Gabriel (a.s) in the form of a human
being and that she was very much impressed.
The questions regarding how Hz.Mary had become pregnant for
Hz.Jesus have always been on the agenda and the people’s minds
are always busy with this issue…
The thoughts of those that say ‘’If the creator creates in a certain way, then the creation process can be
done in another way too’’ are accepted as the most logical
answer that comes to the minds.
Imam-I Gazali, in
his small, but very meaningful work translated by Prof. Süleyman
Ateþ is using an expression ‘’The
divine spirit of prophecy (The Holy Spirit) is being found in
some saints.’’
This
means that some saints meet
Gabriel (a.s),
but this meeting cannot be considered as a wahey. In these
meetings, the representative of the Universal Mind meets the
saint in the form of a human being.
Apart
from the special cases, one becomes a
saint after
going through lots of difficulties;
it is the state of mind
attained after the purifications that take place in the self/ego
and the spirit. The
subject gets purified from all the limitations that
are imposed upon him because of his physical
being.
The lives based on different levels of certitude start from Ilm-el
Yakin (Scientific
certitude) and going
through Ayn-el yakiyn (seeing
and
believing) and Hak-el Yakin. The lives of the saints are based on these.
The Koran gives the message ‘’There
is no fear for the saints of
Allah who are in servitude, and they will not be
sorry.’’ (Jonach/62)
Also, a divine hadith says ‘’They
are under my dome and you can never recognize them.’’
There is no doubt that Hz.Mary has attained the position of
a saint. During her pregnancy for the Rasul who had no father,
she never answered the slanders, in this way she had been
ordered to have ‘’a
fasting of silence’’ as it is stated in the Koran.(Mary/
26-33)
Hz.
Abd-al Qadir Jilani, in his book Risale-Ý Gavsiye defines the
fasting of silence
and says that those who are practicing this kind of fasting are
‘’deaf, speechless and blind’’.
Most probably he is using these expressions as metaphors.
They do not indicate that any of
the parts of the physical body are lacking thereof in the
sense that we know….
Who
can practice the fasting of
silence which expresses the state where the tongue is speechless as
it is called in sufism… I leave the decision to you…
Hz.Abd-al
Karim Jiili who is the grandson
of our Rasul
(s.a.v) speaks about Hz.Mary
as a saint who has the science of unity.
However, we should accept that
the rank of Hz.Mary
in sainthood cannot be compared to that of Hz.Jesus; he has a
superiority without any doubt.
The
information regarding where and how Hz.Mary has spent her last
years is as follows:-
Close
to the time of his death, while he was together with his mother
and St Jean, Hz.Jesus turned to his mother
and said ‘’Mother, here is your son’’, then he turned to St.Jean
and said ‘’Here is
your mother’’. In
this manner he had entrusted
them to one another.
According to the bible, after this point St.Jean has taken the
mother of Hz.Jesus to his protection.
At the beginning of the 1st Century the torchers
against the Christians had increased very much. The torchers had
started in the year 36 A.C. when Stephanos, one of the apostles
of Hz.Jesus had
been stoned to death and this was followed
by many other events.
In the year 41 A.C., I.Agrippa (Herodes) had announced himself
as the king and in order to have a better reputation among his
followers he had killed Jacob, the brother of St.Jean and
prisoned St.Peter.
All these confused
and irritated the Christians and they started to go to Juda and
Samiria.
After the death of Jesus, most probably the two had stayed in
Jerusalem for some time. However,
St. Jean after his brother St.Jacob’s
head was cut off had
understood that it would be impossible to stay in Jerusalem
amongst that massacre. So, he took
Saint Mary with him and came to Ephesus after passing
through Syria and Anatolia.
It
is stated in the records of
the council for the year 431 that St.Jean and Mother Mary
have stayed for a short time in the old building beneath the
Church of the Council when they had first come to Ephesus.
As it is known, St.Jean had written his bible for the people of
Ephesus and it consists of
the questions asked by the Christians in Ephesus and his
answers given to them.
In his writings, he doesn’t speak openly about Mother Mary’s
coming to Ephesus, but he implies this subject. However, in
spite of all the investigations it had not been possible to
bring to light the details regarding Mother Mary’s life. To say it more correctly, commenting about her life has been
avoided. Mary,
had left the job of
introducing Jesus’s teachings and spreading them to the
apostles and she had given utmost importance to the secrecy of
her life.
As for the people of Ephesus,
the subject of Mother Mary is a very important fact.
In the bible Mary’s stay in Ephesus is not directly
mentioned. However, St.Epifan who is one of the writers
belonging to the church of the IVth Century, writes in his book
‘’Panarion’’ that some people who have taken St.Jean and
Saint Mary as an example have been living with women who were in
seclusion for the purpose of religious ideals and for protecting
them.
Even the female saint Jerome, who has investigated the Jerusalem
of the fourth century does not speak about a monument for Mary.
If there had been the grave of
Mother Mary in the same place, she would most probably be
speaking about this
as a historian, because according to the religious rules during
the first years of Christianity
the churches could be built only in the places where the
saints have lived or in a special place where the people
have died as a martyr for the religion. Only undet this condition the church
was named after a person…While Saint Jerome was alive, the
only church that had been dedicated to
Mary was in Ephesus.
If,
one day you pass through Ephesus, do not forget to go to the
citadel, the place where Mother Mary has become a symbol.
While you are climbing up the hill, the voice of the wind will
take you away from the material universe and put you into the
universe of meanings. The wind will be telling you that this
world is temporary and you should not spend all your effort for
the things that you are going to leave here and accept yourself
only as a visitor on this world. I have visited these places a
lot and I have felt that the mother of Hz.Jesus whom I adore
most after Hz.Mohammad, has given a direction to my life.
I
know that such people are monuments of the humanity and they are
always living in the hearts of the people.
Ýstanbul-
December
12th 2000
http://afyuksel.com
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