35 Preface إِذ قالَتِ امرَأَتُ عِمرانَ رَبِّ إِنّي نَذَرتُ لَكَ ما في بَطني مُحَرَّرًا فَتَقَبَّل مِنّي ۖ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ السَّميعُ العَليمُYusuf AliBehold! a woman of ‘Imrān1 said: “O my Lord! I do dedicate unto Thee what is in my womb for Thy special service2: So accept this of me: For Thou hearest and knowest all things.”Now we begin the story of Jesus. As a prelude we have the birth of Mary and the parallel story of John the Baptist, Yahya the son of Zakariya. Yahya’s mother Elizabeth was a cousin of Mary the mother of Jesus (Luke 1:36), and therefore John and Jesus were cousins by blood, and there was a spiritual cousinhood in their birth and career. Elizabeth was of the daughters of Aaron (Luke 1:5), of a priestly family which went back to Aaron the brother of Moses and son of ‘Imrān. Her husband Zakariya was actually a priest, and her cousin Mary was presumably also of a priestly family. By tradition Mary’s mother was called Hannah (in Latin, Anna, and in English, Anne), and her father was called ‘Imrān. Hannah is therefore both a descendant of the priestly house of ‘Imrān and the wife of ‘Imrān,-"a woman of ‘Imrān” in a double sense.Muharram=###freed from all worldly affairs and specially dedicated to God’s service. She expected a son, who was to be a special devotee, a miraculous son of the old age of his parents, but God gave her instead a daughter. But that daughter was Mary the mother of Jesus, the chosen one among the women; 3:42.