Mary Palestinian Controversy: Corsica Retreat Backlash

Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is set to co-host a women's spiritual retreat in Corsica from today July 9 through July 14 titled "Mary In The Quran," an event that has drawn sharp criticism online over its framing of Jesus's mother.

The retreat is run by The Women's Sanctuary, a group founded by Parisian designer Rym Nur, and will take place at a converted Capuchin monastery in the northern part of the island. According to the organization's website, the sold-out gathering centers on what it calls the legacy of Mary, described there as the most honored woman in the Quran, with daily prayers, lectures, and farm to table meals included. Tickets for a private accommodation with a living room, private bathroom, and garden views run between roughly $3,100 and $5,260 per guest.

The retreat has become a lightning rod on social media after commentators characterized its framing of Mary as casting her as a Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation, a description widely shared and condemned online, including by Israeli commentator Hen Mazzig, who argued the framing distorts the historical record that Jesus and his mother were Jewish, living in Judea under Roman rule at the time. Critics online echoed that point, arguing that recasting a Jewish woman living in her people's ancestral homeland as a symbol of Palestinian occupation amounts to a rewriting of both scripture and history.

This is not the first retreat of its kind for Duwaji this month. She previously co-hosted a sold-out gathering called "Plants Of The Quran" on the Spanish island of Mallorca, which ran from July 1 through July 6 and cost roughly $3,400 per guest, according to the New York Post. That trip drew its own criticism after it emerged Duwaji had skipped New York City's celebrations marking America's two hundred fiftieth anniversary to attend, a contrast made sharper by her husband's own request that New Yorkers turn their air conditioners up to 78 degrees during a heat wave while parts of City Hall were reportedly kept far cooler.

Duwaji, a Syrian-American artist raised in Texas and educated in Dubai, has faced repeated scrutiny over past social media posts, since deleted, in which she praised Palestinian militant groups and criticized American service members, among other controversial statements. She has since apologized for what she called past harmful content. Mamdani has said his wife should not face scrutiny over her personal views since she holds no formal role in his administration, a defense that critics say has grown harder to sustain given her increasingly public profile as the city's first lady.

Neither Duwaji nor a spokesperson for the mayor's office has directly addressed the specific criticism over the Corsica retreat's framing of Mary as of this writing.