The Holy Quran speaks of palm trees in ten verses, and in every instance uses the masculine form nakhla—except one. In Surah Maryam (19:24; 19:26), when describing the birth of Jesus, the text employs the feminine nakhlati, marking the only occurrence of this form in the entire Quran. This linguistic precision gains deeper meaning when considered alongside both classical Islamic scholarship and modern botanical understanding of palm tree reproduction.
When the pains of childbirth drove Mary to the trunk of a palm tree, she was commanded to shake it so that fresh ripe dates would fall upon her (19:26). Ibn Arabi, the renowned Andalusian mystic and scholar, observed something remarkable about this scene: the dates that tumbled down came without the presence of a male palm tree or pollination. He understood this as a female tree producing fruit through an extraordinary process, making both Jesus and the palm tree witnesses to Mary’s chastity. The miracle of a virgin birth found its botanical parallel in virgin fruit.
Palm trees themselves exhibit fascinating reproductive patterns. They have separate male and female flowers, sometimes on the same plant but often, as with the date palm, on entirely different trees. These wind-pollinated plants typically require human intervention for optimal fruit production. Cultivators throughout history have practiced grafting, bringing stalks of male flowers to female trees and dusting pollen onto the female blooms with cotton or similar materials. A hadith in Sahih Muslim recounts how the Prophet(sa) once observed people grafting date palms and questioned its necessity. When the practice was abandoned and yields declined, he clarified that this was merely his personal opinion about an agricultural matter, not divine instruction, and encouraged people to resume the beneficial practice.
The process normally unfolds through fertilization. Pollen lands on female flowers, fertilizes the ovary, and seed development begins within the ovary walls. The wall produces fruit surrounding the seed, eventually carrying it away from the mother plant. Mature seeds vary in shape and size, many being hard and oval or round. Palm trees can take anywhere from three to forty years to flower for the first time, making their cultivation a practice of patience and intergenerational knowledge.
Yet nature occasionally deviates from this standard pathway through parthenocarpy, the development of fruit without fertilization of ovules. This process produces seedless fruit and occurs either naturally as a mutation or through stimulation by plant hormones like gibberellin, auxin, and cytokinin. Some plants require pollination or other stimulation for parthenocarpy, while others produce fruit vegetatively without any such trigger. Seedless cucumbers exemplify vegetative parthenocarpy, while seedless watermelons result from immature, aborted seeds. These are sometimes called virgin fruits.
The phenomenon extends beyond plants into the animal kingdom as parthenogenesis, where an unfertilized ovum develops into a new individual. Queen bees provide a natural example, with unfertilized eggs developing into male drones carrying only a haploid set of chromosomes. When parthenocarpy affects every flower of a plant through mutation, sexual reproduction becomes impossible, though the plant might propagate through apomixis or vegetative means. Many citrus varieties undergo nucellar embryony, reproducing without sexual fertilization and yielding seedless fruits.
The Quranic account thus interweaves multiple layers of meaning. The feminine nakhlati appears at the moment of virginal birth, describing a tree that produces fruit in defiance of normal reproductive requirements. Whether understood as divine miracle or botanical phenomenon, the image resonates across interpretive traditions.
Mary shakes the trunk, fresh dates cascade down, and both mother and tree testify to a creation that transcends ordinary processes. The linguistic shift from masculine to feminine, from nakhla to nakhlati, marks this singular moment when the normal patterns of generation gave way to something unprecedented, leaving a trace not just in sacred history but in the very grammar of revelation.