An Evaluation of the Interpretations of the Qur'anic Utterance 'No Male child could ever have been like this Female'

Understanding the Qur’ān’s intended meanings depends on accurately pinpointing the denotations of the words that make up the verses as the words in the Qur’ān come with different denotations. There is a hierarchy developed based on the covertness of the intended meanings. Within this hierarchy, there are some words with multiple meanings. These are called mushkil (problematic). The most distinctive feature of such words is that they are open to disputes and different interpretations. One of these is the 36th verse of Al-‘Imran. Tafsīrs discussed whom the utterance “No male child could ever have been like this female” in this verse belongs to, whether any of these genders is superior to the other and which gender is superior if superiority is the case. This study brought together different perspectives on how the aforementioned verse has been interpreted so far, particularly based on main classical tafsīrs, and it examined the reasons for these interpretations. The original commentaries on the utterance generally focus on two views. Firstly, there are ontological advantages of being a male with respect to serving for religious temples. Menstruation and puerperium are obstacles that prevent women from being in a temple, whereas the man is free of them and has the necessary physical strength to serve for it. Since such service would entail contact with men who regularly come to the temple, being a female is not appropriate for it. While there is no problem for males to be together with other males in congregation, it is not the case for females. Secondly, Hannah favored the girl bestowed upon her above a boy. According to this, Mary’s mother said, “A boy was what I wanted, but this girl is a gift that God has given me. The boy I had wanted could never have been like this female God gave me.” According to such an interpretation, Mary’s mother is a wise woman who knows that what God has given her is better than what she had wanted for herself. Globally considered, it is stated that each of these interpretations has a scientific basis in general, and that it is not possible to make a definite judgment because the phrases and clauses are likely to have multiple meanings. However, the present study offers the following interpretation about the utterance in question: It gives a “lesson of surrender”. It is more appropriate for the purpose of “tawhid and tawakkul” of the Qur’ān for Mary's mother to submit to the will of Allah when she gives birth to a girl although she wishes for a boy in her heart, and that she believes there is goodness in the female child bestowed upon her. This is because the Qur’ān—from the beginning to the end—repeatedly gives the lesson of “acceptance and tawakkul”. It is also possible that the Qur’ān offered us the thought or yearning of a woman who gives birth to a daughter while wishing for a son that the son is more gifted for some reason. However, this is not the perspective favored in this study