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Excerpt : from
the Introduction |
Page:
1,2,3,4,5
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Her name is Maryam.
A name so common in her time and place that if you call out "Maryam," one out of every three women is likely to answer. The Latin version of her name, Maria, will come into common usage only four centuries after her death, once the universal Catholic church has been established with its base in Rome. Later still, in what will become the English-speaking world -- for this is some two thousand years ago, and English does not yet exist as a language -- she will be known as Mary.
The language she speaks is Aramaic -- the lingua franca of the whole of the eastern Mediterranean for well over a
millennium, in a wide arc from what is now Iran all the way to North Africa. It is both the language of trade and the peasant language: the language of those who live by whatever meager crops they can coax from desert and dust, rocks and thorns. A language almost entirely spoken, not written, for people who have never learned to read or write. Its multiple dialects bind Judeans and Galileans, Syrians and Persians, Egyptians and Arabs, Nabateans and Idumeans -- all the peoples, tribes, and nations living under the far-flung rule of the eastern Roman Empire.
The Aramaic name is important -- the Middle Eastern name -- for Maryam's is a Middle Eastern story. Where Mary floats to us on a cloud of incense, a delicate European draped in silk, Maryam carries the scent of heat and dust clinging to her skin and her thin linen shift. One is the legend, the other, the real woman. And if we are to reach beyond the legend, we must surely start with the most basic gesture of respect. Let us do Mary the honor, then, of calling her by her real name, Maryam -- the name she recognized and responded to, the name she thought of as hers.
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(c) Lesley Hazleton, 2004
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