For generations now, Christian apologists have wielded a curiously selective form of ethical critique against the person of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Their polemics are saturated with sexualized language, zealously targeting his marriage to ‘A’ishah (may Allah be pleased with her) through a distinctly modern, liberal-feminist lens. Their central charges revolve around the anachronistically applied concepts of “consent” and rigid, biologically-defined “adulthood.” In doing so, they conveniently sidestep their own theological tradition, opting instead for the secular language of progressive modernity as a cudgel against Islam.

This strategic outsourcing of moral frameworks invites a pointed question: how does the foundational Christian narrative of the Annunciation and Incarnation fare under the very same principles and scrutiny they so enthusiastically apply to others?

Basically, what I will be doing here is discussing some of the points raised by brother Daniel Haqiqatjou in his most recent video:

White Feminist Theology

The doctrine of the Incarnation posits that God elected to become His own Son, accomplishing this by causing His divine essence to permeate a human creature, who, by virtue of this act, was then retroactively designated as His mother. This figure, the Virgin Mary/Maryam (a highly revered personality in Islam – may Allah be pleased with her), thus becomes the created vessel for her own Creator. (Later on, God, who was incarnate as His own Son, chooses to offer Himself as a blood sacrifice to Himself.) As Augustine attempted to articulate it (Sermon 186):

He created His own Mother when He was with the Father; and when He was born of that Mother He remained in His Father.

However, beyond all the metaphysical drama, the mechanism of the Incarnation is described in the Gospel of Luke (1:34–35) with the chillingly vague term “overshadowed” (episkiazo):

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

 

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

Christian apologists routinely assert that the Greek verb episkiazo, used in Luke 1:35 to describe the action of the Spirit performed upon Mary, carries a benign and protective connotation. They (correctly) highlight its usage in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, wherein it describes the divine presence. For instance, in Exodus 40:35, the cloud of God’s glory “overshadows” the Tabernacle, and in Psalm 91:4, the faithful are promised refuge under the “shadow” of the Almighty. In the New Testament, the same term describes the divine cloud that “overshadows” the disciples at the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5, Mark 9:7), an event revealing “Christ’s glory.” From a traditional dogmatic perspective, then, this scriptural lineage is intended to frame the Annunciation as a new and ultimate theophany. Mary is depicted as the new, living Tabernacle, the ultimate dwelling place of God’s glory.

However, what if we, just as Christian apologists like to do with Islam, examine this incident under a feminist framework? To accept the “protective” meaning would be to ignore the profound power differential inherent in the metaphor. The same cloud that protects Israel also leads it, dictates its movements, and manifests in terrifying displays of power (Exodus 19:16–18). The Tabernacle is an inanimate object; Mary is a human person. To apply the language of a dominating, enveloping cloud or a shadow that conceals completely to the fertilization of a woman’s womb is to employ a metaphor of immense, unilateral power. Thus, from a critical feminist perspective, this language depicts a unilateral, overwhelming divine power imposing itself upon a human female body without her prior consent.

The radical feminist theologian Mary Daly, in her seminal work Beyond God the Father, makes reference to this very dynamic. She argued that within a “patriarchal” framework, the image of a male God “overshadowing” a passive virgin is the archetypal model for divine rape, sanctifying non-consensual violation as the very mechanism of salvation. The female body is reduced to a passive vessel, with her function not as that of a willing participant in a covenant but as an incubator for a divine plan which she did not compose. Amy Peeler summarized the feminist approach in Women and the Gender of God:

Some readers have suggested that the birth narratives portray an invasion of Mary’s body. Interpreters—some inside the Christian fold, and some decidedly out of it—have called upon the faithful to give a reason for the hope that lies within, literally the hope that lay within Mary. Infamously, the feminist theologian Mary Daly called her Christian namesake the “Total Rape Victim.” Conquered in both body and mind, “Like all rape victims in male myth she submits joyously to this unspeakable degradation.” […] the possibility of a supernatural rape remains a reading of Luke’s annunciation narrative. Michael Pope argues that interpreters could see a sexualized Mary, marked as such because of being referred to as a betrothed virgin, then depicted as a victim of sexual violence. In Luke’s account, Gabriel enters into her space, and she identifies herself as a slave of a male master. If these echoes are given full weight, Luke presents her as a victim of “the distinctive violence faced by women in antiquity.” Courtney Hall Lee calls attention to the difficulty of the annunciation scene, especially for those women who have experienced cultural violence against their bodies.

The irony here lies in the fact that Christian apologists, when challenging Islam, eagerly deploy a liberal-feminist standard that privileges “individual autonomy and bodily sovereignty.” Yet, they remain conspicuously silent when that same standard is turned upon the bedrock of their own faith, a narrative where divine agency completely subsumes human female agency, where a woman’s fiat is extracted in the shadow of an overwhelming, unsolicited celestial power.

RELATED: The Strongest Arguments Against Christianity

Black Feminist Theology

The demographic center of gravity for Christianity is shifting decisively toward the Global South, particularly Africa. This transformation makes it imperative to examine core Christian doctrines through the lens of postcolonial and Black liberation thought. When viewed through this prism, the feminist critique of the “divine rape” in the Annunciation takes on a devastating new dimension, intersecting powerfully with the historical trauma of the Black female body under slavery and colonialism.

Indeed, scholars operating at the nexus of liberal feminism and Black critical theory have drawn a provocative parallel: they argue that the theological motif of a dominant, sovereign (and implicitly white) male God unilaterally imposing his will upon a passive, non-consenting female vessel, provided a sacred blueprint for racialized sexual violence. This dynamic became the spiritual legitimization of the material exploitation of Black women’s bodies by white slave masters and colonizers. We read in Sarah Marie Keough’s thesis, Mary a Woman: Sex and Situation in the Incarnation (pp. 6-7):

Writing from a womanist perspective, Delores S. Williams expresses similar concerns with Mary in terms of colonial encounter. Within the Western framework, the Virgin Mary historically was maintained as the ideal picture of proper womanhood. Depicted as a white European aristocrat, Mary embodied justification for the oppression of African people—protection of the white woman and salvation for the “savage” was cited as defense for the conquest and enslavement of dark bodies. Williams notes that when black leaders of racial uplift in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries upheld this idyllic Victorian “Virgin Mary taste,” they inadvertently perpetuated the very system of white supremacy that had systematically oppressed and violated their people. For the poor black woman in particular, this notion of the ideal woman denied a realistic iteration of her experience, and upheld an impossible and oppressive image of womanhood that she could never achieve.

 

Mary’s virginity becomes particularly problematic when considering the ways in which black women were abused by white slavemasters. Williams expresses concern that because Mary does not explicitly provide consent in the virgin birth, her assumption of the role of surrogate mother recalls slave experiences of abuse and rape. Furthermore, the fact that Joseph was not included in the conversation between the angel and Mary regarding Jesus’ conception “amounts to a breakdown in the portrayal of family.” The black family was a source of survival, a sign that black life endures and God is present despite captivity and persecution. Joseph’s absence, therefore, is unsettling for Williams, and reinforces a narrative of bondage and exploitation under white supremacy.

Keep in mind, we have not even begun to address the issue of consent, for by the strongest historical and textual indications, Mary was a (very?) young girl, at least not yet old enough to be considered an “adult” by contemporary standards. Also, the comparison to enslaved Black women in the United States shows that even when they were “fully adults,” their social position rendered their consent effectively irrelevant. Something similar appears in the Lukan narrative, as many feminist scholars have argued, including Christian feminists, with Mary being almost entirely passive, a figure spoken to rather than consulted, acted upon rather than “empowered,” as feminists – like the enemies of Islam (a category in which the feminists too are included) – would put it.

RELATED: Is Christianity a White Religion Today?

…Incest?

As brother Haqiqatjou had aptly noted, the classical formulation of the Son as “eternally begotten of the Father” (Nicene Creed), when combined with the temporal Incarnation through Mary, creates a theological framework that can be interpreted as projecting creaturely familial relations that are, at best, morally ambiguous.

For we are told that the Son, the eternally generated Logos of the Father (distinct in hypostasis yet sharing the one, undivided divine essence or ousia), is quite literally conceived and born of Mary, the Theotokos or “God-bearer.” If the Son is indeed the Father’s own eternal self-utterance, then His passage through a human womb entails far more than a sentimental Christmas tableau. It becomes, metaphysically, a moment in which the divine substance itself “passes through” a created, maternal vessel. (As attested in various Nag Hammadi and patristic polemical sources, certain Gnostic groups in the early Christian centuries expressed deep unease with the idea of the divine Christ entering the world through a physical, human womb, best exemplified by the Valentinians, who, as Irenaeus records, argued that Christ “passed through Mary as water through a tube,” a docetic interpretation that denied he took physical substance from her, thus “preserving” his divinity from “material contamination.”)

Thus arises some sort of ironic and twisted theological Möbius strip.

The Father eternally begets the Son, the Son is the Father’s own Word, and this same Son, without ceasing to be consubstantial with the Father, receives a temporal birth from Mary.

In a way, we’re forced into a closed loop of divine origin, in which the Father begets the Son, the Son is the Father’s own self-expression, and yet this divine self-expression is mediated through the Mother. Thus, in this schematic, the Son (as he’s consubstantial with the Father) appears to “beget” with the Mother what He already is from eternity (that is, Himself), producing an eternal-temporal recursion that the tradition insists is orthodox, even while it threatens to slip into metaphysical tautology and what we’d call, in less poetic terminology, incest.

The Qur’anic stance, crystallised in Surat al-Ikhlas, collapses the entire Christian generative model in a single stroke. The declaration, “Qul huwa ‘Llahu Ahad” (112:1), does not merely affirm oneness. Ahad denotes an indivisible, non-composite unity that cannot accommodate anything resembling “eternal begetting,” “processions,” or divine genealogies. On this foundation, “Lam yalid wa lam yulad” (112:3) does more than deny literal procreation, as the verb yalid (to beget, to generate offspring) dismantles any model in which God produces a “Son,” whether eternally (aeternus generatio) or temporally (through Mary). Conversely, yulad (to be born, to emerge through a generative process) rejects any notion that God could be derived, issued, or manifested through another, whether in eternity or in history.

The Islamic Counter-Narrative

We thus see that the Christian narrative seems to portray what, according to the same liberal and feminist perspective they like to employ against others, would indeed be a form of “divine rape” or even “divine incestuous rape.”

However, a critical illumination emerges when the Lukan narrative is contrasted with the Qur’anic account of the Annunciation (Surah Maryam, 19:16–21). The Qur’anic presentation fundamentally reframes the event by operating within a strict framework of divine transcendence (tanzih), which categorically rejects any notion of incarnation (hulul). Because God does not become man, there is no paradoxical recursion of the Creator needing to create His own mother to become Himself as a potential human sacrifice to Himself.

Consequently, the power dynamic is distinctly different. The divine message is not conveyed through an overwhelming, “overshadowing” presence that implies a metaphysical merger. Instead, it is conveyed through the Angel Gabriel/Jibra’il, who is sent to Mary and who appears to her “as a perfect human” (19:17). The event is framed not as an insertion of divine essence into a human womb but, rather, as a creative act of divine fiat.

This ontological distinction elevates Mary’s status and agency. She is explicitly honoured as one whom God has “chosen and purified” and has “chosen above the women of all worlds” (Surah Al ‘Imran, 3:42). Her role is not that of a passive vessel for a divine person but of an honoured woman entrusted with a miraculous sign. Her response, “My Lord, how can I have a son when no man has touched me?” (19:20), is a request for understanding. This request is met not with an overwhelming force that suspends her intellect but, instead, with a logical explanation that appeals to it. The angel clarifies that this is a divine decree already ordained, a creative act comparable to the creation of Adam from dust, requiring no human father (19:21). The mechanism is thus framed as a direct, transcendent act of divine will – “Be!” – which brings a new creation into existence (19:35).

In this Islamic paradigm, the conception is not understood as an incarnation but as a miraculous creation bestowed upon a spiritually eminent woman. This fundamental metaphysical distinction is reinforced by a distinct socio-theological trajectory. Historically, mainstream Islamic thought has demonstrated a more robust resistance to the assimilation of liberal and feminist frameworks in comparison to many Western Christian denominations, which have regularly sought to reconcile their theology with these modern ideologies.

Consequently, the specific “feminist reading” of the Annunciation as a divine violation – a critique that emerged from within the Christian West’s own process of secularization and feminist critique – is a discourse largely foreign to the Muslim intellectual and spiritual consciousness. Even for Muslims in secularized contexts, the Qur’anic narrative’s inherent emphasis on Mary’s honoured status, her conscious engagement with the divine command, and the absence of any incarnational theology pre-empts the very premises upon which the “divine rape” critique is built. The internal Christian struggle with patriarchal symbolism is just that, an internal struggle rooted in the specific logical tensions of Christian doctrine, which Islamic revelation structurally bypasses.

In conclusion, I wish to reassert a foundational principle of Islamic belief: our profound reverence for Jesus (peace be upon him) and his mother (may Allah be pleased with her). This respect is embedded in the very nomenclature of the Qur’an, which consistently refers to the Messiah not as “Jesus, Son of God” but as ‘Isa ibn Maryam, i.e., “Jesus, son of Mary.” This title serves a dual theological purpose: it firmly anchors his genealogy in a human, maternal line, affirming his sacred yet fully human nature; and it also elevates his mother to a position of unparalleled honour, making her identity essential to his.

Furthermore, the spiritual strength of Maryam (may Allah be pleased with her) in the Islamic narrative is not located in a modern paradigm of “empowerment or assertive agency.” On the contrary, her ultimate strength resided precisely in her pure, unwavering receptivity and submission (islam) to the divine command. Her greatness was not in seizing power but in perfectly embodying the role of the devoted servant, becoming the unblemished vessel through which God’s miraculous will was manifested. In this way, she stands as a direct theological refutation to worldly philosophies that equate female virtue with forms of empowerment that challenge divine sovereignty. Her exalted status is the direct result of her complete submission and devotion, presenting a model of holiness that transcends and challenges modern, liberal feminist conceptions of power.

RELATED: Feminism and the Death of Christianity: A Warning for Muslims