Mary is venerated in Islam as well as in Christianity, and the honour the Quran pays her is easy to underestimate: she is the only woman named in it, called simply Maryam some thirty times, and a whole sura, the nineteenth, carries her name.
The Quranic account affirms the virginal conception: an angel announces that she will bear a son though no man has touched her, and she conceives by God's word, so that Islam holds the virgin birth of Isa (Jesus) as firmly as Christianity does, while denying that it makes him divine. The details differ from the Gospels. In Sura 19 she withdraws to a distant place and gives birth in pain beneath a palm tree, which drops ripe dates to her, and returns to her people carrying the infant, who speaks from the cradle to defend her against the charge of unchastity. Sura 3 has her raised in the sanctuary under the care of Zechariah and says that God chose her and purified her and chose her above the women of the worlds.
Her chastity and obedience make her, in the Quran, a model believer, and she is held in high honour across Sunni and Shia Islam; some Muslims visit Marian shrines. Whether she should be counted a prophet was debated by classical scholars, a mark of the seriousness with which the tradition takes her.
That the mother of Jesus is a revered figure in the scripture of a tradition often assumed to have nothing to say about her is one of the quieter facts of comparative religion.