I have been thinking about Mary Magdalene this morning. Not the churchy cardboard version. Not the repentant prostitute version that got stapled onto her by men who seemed deeply uncomfortable with spiritually powerful women. Not the Da Vinci Code version either, where every sacred feminine conversation has to be turned into a sex scandal with better lighting. I mean Mary Magdalene as she appears in the Gospel of Mary: the woman who remembers her innate goodness, the woman who sees, the woman who speaks after the men have lost their nerve and caved to the chatter of their nafs, the lower self.
The Woman Who Remembers
And the more I sit with that gospel, the more Islamic it feels to me. Not Islamic in the sense that someone should grab it, slap a crescent moon on the cover, and start yelling at Christians in Facebook comments. That is not the point. The point is deeper than that. It feels Islamic in its understanding of the human being.
It does not feel like a text obsessed with inherited guilt. It does not begin with the assumption that the soul is trash and needs to be rescued from its own existence. It does not sound like a religion built around permanent spiritual self-hatred. It feels like a text about remembrance, about something that has been obscured, covered over, and forgotten. Something in the human being still belongs to the Good, but we have forgotten how to live from it.
The Good Beneath the Noise
That is why the language of “the Good” hits me so hard. In the Gospel of Mary, the Good is not merely moral behavior. It is not being nice. It is not having good manners at the church potluck while secretly wanting control over everyone’s soul. The Good is root language. It is origin language. It points to something planted beneath the noise, and when I hear that, I cannot help but hear fitra.
In Islam, fitra is the original nature, the primordial orientation toward Allah. The human being is not born as a theological dumpster fire. The human being is born with an inward orientation toward truth, mercy, beauty, surrender, and remembrance. The tragedy is not that we are evil at the root. The tragedy is that we become veiled from the root.
The nafs does not erase the fitra. It covers it. It distorts the mirror. It takes the soul’s hunger for Allah and redirects it toward status, appetite, fantasy, resentment, domination, and fear. This is why the spiritual path is not about manufacturing goodness from scratch. It is about removing what keeps us from seeing what Allah has already placed within us.
When the Lower Self Becomes Religious
This is where Mary Magdalene becomes so interesting. In her gospel, the conflict is not simply between men and women, though that is obviously there. Peter and Andrew do not come off looking great. There is a very old religious reflex at work: when revelation comes through a woman, the insecure men ask for paperwork. But beneath the gender conflict is a deeper spiritual conflict. Mary remembers what the others cannot hold. She carries a vision they do not trust. She has inward knowledge, and that makes her dangerous to the outer authority structure.
The Accuser and the Nafs
That is how these things tend to work. The person who remembers the root becomes a threat to the people managing the fog. The accusers in the story are not merely individuals. They are spiritual forces wearing human faces. They are the voices that rise up whenever the soul begins to awaken and say, “Who do you think you are? Why would Allah speak to you? Why would the Beloved reveal something to you? Why would you, wounded as you are, still belong to the Good?”
That voice is old. It is older than Peter, older than church politics, older than every religious institution that ever learned how to confuse control with holiness. In Islamic language, we could call part of that voice Shaytan. But I would not stop there. Shaytan is real, but Shaytan usually does not need to invent anything new. He finds the wound. He finds the fear. He finds the place where the nafs already wants to be flattered, defended, or humiliated. Then he whispers, and the nafs gives him a microphone.
That is why Mary’s accusers are not just “bad men.” That is too easy. They are what happens when the lower self becomes religious. That is the real horror. The nafs can wear a robe, quote scripture, defend tradition, and say, “We are only protecting the faith,” while quietly protecting its own authority. The nafs can accuse the soul of arrogance for daring to remember its own dignity.
And that is what makes Mary Magdalene such a powerful figure. She is not presented as powerful because she dominates. She is not powerful because she wins an argument. She is not powerful because she finally gets Peter to attend a restorative justice circle and unpack his apostolic fragility. She is powerful because she remains rooted in what she has seen. She knows something, and that knowing does not come from ego.
Fitra Is Not Ego
This matters because a lot of people confuse spiritual confidence with arrogance. They think humility means agreeing with every accusation thrown at you. They think holiness means shrinking until the loudest man in the room feels safe again. But Mary does not shrink. She does not become less because others cannot recognize what was given to her. That is fitra energy. Not ego inflation. Not self-help sparkle dust. Fitra. The soul remembering its original orientation and refusing to let shame define reality.
This is where the Gospel of Mary and Islam start speaking to each other in a way that feels almost electric. Islam does not need the doctrine of the Fall the way much of Christianity came to depend on it. Human beings are forgetful, weak, easily deceived, and capable of terrible cruelty. Islam is not naive about the human condition. But the human being is not metaphysically rotten. We forget. We are veiled. We are tested. We are pulled by the nafs and whispered to by Shaytan. But beneath all of that, there is fitra. There is still an original yes. There is still a place in us that recognizes Allah, even when the rest of us is busy building a personality out of fear.
That is what “the Good” sounds like to me in Mary’s gospel. It is not a trophy for the spiritually successful. It is the buried orientation of the soul. It is the part of us that still knows where home is, even when the mind is confused, the heart is wounded, and the body is carrying years of accusation.
And this makes the attacks on Mary feel familiar. The moment someone begins to speak from that deeper place, the accusations come. She is told, in effect, that she is making things up, that she is being prideful, that she is dangerous, that she is not authorized, that she is not the right kind of person to carry what she has been given. That is how religious power often protects itself. It does not always deny the sacred outright. Sometimes it simply insists that the sacred must only arrive through approved channels.
That is why Mary Magdalene bothers people. Not because she is obscure, but because she is clear. She exposes the insecurity of religious authority that has lost contact with the heart. A soul that remembers its root does not need permission from the people managing the fog. That kind of clarity is threatening, especially to men who have confused control with discernment.
Women Who Carried the Sacred
And this is also why I keep thinking about the women around the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, did not move through the world like a man terrified of women’s spiritual intelligence. Women came to him. Women questioned him. Women learned from him. Women corrected, transmitted, remembered, and taught. Khadijah believed in him when the world had not caught up yet. Aisha became one of the great transmitters and teachers of the tradition. Umm Salama’s wisdom mattered. The women of the Ansar were praised because their modesty did not stop them from seeking understanding.
This is not some modern progressive fan fiction pasted onto the early community. Women were there from the beginning. They were asking, learning, challenging, remembering, and teaching. So when I read the Gospel of Mary, I do not see a woman trying to overthrow the sacred. I see a woman refusing to let insecure men shrink the sacred down to their own comfort level.
That is a very Islamic problem, because Islam, at its heart, is not about protecting male anxiety. It is about surrender to Allah. And surrender is terrifying to the ego, especially the religious ego. The religious ego wants rank, control, and certainty. It wants to manage who gets to speak, who gets to know, who gets to come near, and who must remain outside the curtain.
But the Spirit keeps embarrassing the managers. The Good keeps appearing where the gatekeepers said it should not appear. Wisdom keeps coming through the people who were supposed to stay quiet. Mary Magdalene becomes a witness to that. She is not important because she fits neatly into someone’s system. She is important because she remembers the root.
And that is the spiritual path. It is not becoming impressive. It is not becoming pure enough for the accusers. It is not winning the approval of people whose whole identity depends on misunderstanding you. The path is remembrance. The path is polishing the mirror. The path is learning to recognize the difference between the voice of Allah calling you back to your root and the voice of the nafs trying to drag you into the courtroom of shame.
The Soul Does Not Awaken by Winning the Trial
Because the accuser always wants a trial. The accuser wants you explaining yourself forever. The accuser wants your life reduced to evidence. But the soul does not awaken by winning the argument with the accuser. The soul awakens by returning to the Good.
That is Mary’s gift. She shows us a soul that has heard something deeper than accusation. She stands in a room full of frightened men and carries a memory they cannot control. And maybe that is why her gospel survived only in fragments. Maybe the text itself is a symbol: wounded, interrupted, partly missing, and still speaking. Like the soul. Like fitra. Like every woman whose wisdom was questioned by men who mistook their discomfort for discernment. Like every seeker who has been told they are too broken to belong to the Good.
The Root Remains
Mary Magdalene does not give us a religion of self-esteem. She gives us something harder. She gives us the courage to remember that what is deepest in us was never owned by the accuser. The nafs can obscure it. Shaytan can whisper against it. Religion can misunderstand it. Fear can bury it. But the root remains, and the soul that remembers becomes dangerous, not because she is rebellious, but because she is free.
Recommended Reading
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A good companion book for this piece is Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam by A. Helwa. (I also recommend following her on Substack)
This is not a book about Islam as a political problem, a culture-war threat, or a legal argument. It is a heart-centered introduction to Islam through love, mercy, the Qur’an, prayer, surrender, and the spiritual transformation of the self. The author describes it as a guide to experiencing “the beauty hidden in the heart of the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition” from a place of love and joy.
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This is what stays with me: Mary is not defending an identity. She is remembering the root.
That feels deeply Islamic to me. The soul is not trying to become worthy of the Good. It is trying to return to what Allah placed within it before fear, shame, and the nafs started speaking so loudly.
The accuser always wants a trial.
But remembrance does not need to win the courtroom.
It just returns home.
Thank you for this reminder of the backdrop we live in. If we can stop trying to defend and explain ourselves to the accuser, we would have so much more energy. “But the soul does not awaken by winning the argument with the accuser. The soul awakens by returning to the Good.”