Houri

thumb|Houris in [[Jannah|paradise, riding camels. From a 15th-century Persian manuscript.]]

In Islam, a houri (; ),

Another, reported by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj Nishapuri, relates that
Al-Tirmidhi reports
According to a report transmitted by Ibn Majah in his Sunan:

Quranic commentators

Sunni sources mention that like all men and women of Paradise, the houris do not experience urination, defecation or menstruation.

Ibn Kathir states that jinns will have female jinn companions in Paradise.

Contemporary

According to Smith and Haddad, if there is any generalization that can be made of "contemporary attitudes" toward the nature of the hereafter, including Houri, it is that it is "beyond human comprehension ... beyond time", that the Quran only "alluded to analogously".

Imam Reza

According to 8th Shia Imam, Imam Reza, the heavenly spouses are created of dirt (Creation of life from clay) and saffron.

Symbolism

Muhammad Asad believes that the references to houris and other depictions of paradise should be understood as allegorical rather than literal, citing the "impossibility of man's really 'imagining' paradise". In support of this view he quotes Quran verse 32:17 and a hadith found in Bukhari and Muslim.

Shia philosopher Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai mentions that the most important fact of the description of the houris is that good deeds performed by believers are re-compensated by the houris, who are the physical manifestations of ideal forms that will not fade away over time and who will serve as faithful companions to those whom they accompany.

Similarities to Zoroastrianism

The houri has been said to resemble afterlife figures in Zoroastrianism narratives:<blockquote>The Zoroastrian text, Hadhoxt Nask, describes the fate of a soul after death. The soul of the righteous spends three nights near the corpse, and at the end of the third night, the soul sees its own religion (daena) in the form of a beautiful damsel, a lovely fifteen year-old virgin; thanks to good actions she has grown beautiful; they then ascend heaven together.

The orientalist Arthur Jeffery argues in his book Foreign 'Vocabulary of the Qur’an' that the two concepts closely correspond to each other. Possibly the word "houri" also has an Iranian origin, but this is heavily debated among scholars. Jeffery believes it might have been borrowed from the Pahlavi word 'hurūst'. Although the word itself might have been borrow by the Arabs from Aramaic, the relation to the 'maidens of paradise' likely came under influence of this Pahlavi word,</blockquote>

Gender and identity

It has traditionally been believed that the houris are beautiful women who are promised as a reward to believing men, with numerous hadith and Quranic exegetes describing them as such. In recent years, however, some have argued that the term ḥūr refers both to pure men and pure women (it being the plural term for both the masculine and feminine forms which refer to whiteness) and the belief that the term houris only refers to females who are in paradise is a misconception. by describing them with the indefinite adjective , which some have taken to imply that certain passages are referring to both male and female companions. In addition, the use of masculine pronouns for the houris' companions does not imply that this companionship is restricted to men, as the masculine form encompasses the female in classical and Quranic Arabic—thus functioning as an all-gender including default form—and is used in the Quran to address all humanity and all the believers in general.

In The Message of The Qur'an, Muhammad Asad describes the usage of the term ḥūr in the verses 44:54 and 56:22, arguing that "the noun ḥūr—rendered by me as 'companions pure'—is a plural of both aḥwār (masc.) and ḥawrā (fem.)... hence, the compound expression ḥūr ʿīn signifies, approximately, 'pure beings, most beautiful of eye'."

Annemarie Schimmel says that the Quranic description of the houris should be viewed in a context of love: "every pious man who lives according to God's order will enter Paradise where rivers of milk and honey flow in cool, fragrant gardens and virgin beloveds await home".

Relation to earthly women

Regarding the eschatological status of this-worldly women vis-à-vis the houris, scholars have maintained that righteous Human women of this life are of a higher station than Men's Female Hoors. Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar Baḥraq (d.1524) mentions in his didactic primer for children that "Adamic women are better than the dark-eyed Damsels due to their prayer, fasting, and devotions".

Other authorities appear to indicate that houris themselves are the women of this world resurrected in new form, with Razi commenting that among the houris mentioned in the Quran will also be "[even] those toothless old women of yours whom God will resurrect as new beings". Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari mentions that all righteous women, however old and decayed they may have been on earth, will be resurrected as virginal maidens and will, like their male counterparts, remain eternally young in paradise. Modernist scholar Muḥammad ʿAbduh states "the women of the Garden are the good believers [al-mu'mināt al-ṣalihāt] known in the Qur'an as al-ḥūr al-ʿayn, (although he also makes a distinction between earthly women and houri).

Verses that are thought to refer to women from earth in paradise (Q.2:25, 3:15, and 4:57) talk of "purified companions" [azwāj muṭahhara], which distinguishes them from ḥūr, who are by definition "pure rather than purified". and Islamic commentaries.

Reference to "72 virgins"

The Sunni hadith scholar Al-Tirmidhi quotes Muhammad as having said:

However, others object that the narration granting all men seventy-two wives has a weak chain of narrators.

Another hadith, also in Jami at-Tirmidhi and deemed "good and sound" (hasan sahih) gives this reward specifically for the martyr:

This hadith is sometimes erroneously attributed to the Quran.

Outsider translations of the Qur'an

N. J. Dawood

The translation of the "Koran" (Qur'an) by N. J. Dawood, published as a Penguin paperback, describes houris as "chaste" and "virgins".

Dawood was a native speaker of Arabic but not a Muslim or a religious scholar. His expertise was poetry and his translation treated the text as a work of artistic literature. His 1956 edition re-ordered the Surahs to match the Bible, to make it easier for Western readers to understand.

Ziauddin Sardar, criticized Dawood' translation as containing "distortions that give the Qur'an violent and sexist overtones", in an article published by The Guardian comparing to a modern translation by Tarif Khalidi.

Sardar described the very popular Dawood translation as "largely responsible for the current misconception that Muslim paradise is full of "virgins" - despite the fact that the Qur'an explicitly denies any carnal pleasures in paradise".

Dawood's knowledge of the Arabic language is extensive and respected, and he also translated government documents, but him not being Muslim has made his translation controversial.

However, another interpretation of Atrab (in Q.56:37 and also Q.78:33) by Muhammad Haleen describes Houri "as being of similar age to their companions". An Islamic Books pamphlet also states Houri will "have the same age as their husbands so that they can relate to each other better", but also adds that they will "never become old"; (Translations of Q.56:37 and Q.78:33—for example by Mustafa Khattab's the Clear Quran and by Pickthall—often include the phrase "equal age" but do not specify what the houris are of equal age to.)

On the other hand, the houris were created "without the process of birth", according to a classical Sunni interpretation of Q.56:35 in Tafsir al-Jalalayn, so that the heavenly virgins have no birthday or age in the earthly sense.

Other sources, including a tafsir of Ibn Kathir (see above), emphasize the purpose of the use of kawa'ib in verse Q.78:33 "is to highlight the woman’s youthfulness", though she is an adult, she "has reached the age when she begins to menstruate"; and that she is of the age of "young girls when their breasts are beginning to appear".

Meaning of the term kawa'ib

Verse Q.78:33 describes Houri with the noun ka'ib, translated as "with swelling breasts" by several translators—like Arberry, Palmer, Rodwell and Sale (it is also translated as "buxom" or "full bosomed"). At least two Islamic Fatwa sites (islamweb.net and islamqa.info) have attacked the use of these translations by those who "criticize the Quran", or who "seek to make Islam appear to be a religion of sex and desire".

Ibn Kathir, in his tafsir, writes that kawa'ib has been interpreted to refer to "fully developed" or "round breasts ... they meant by this that the breasts of these girls will be fully rounded and not sagging, because they will be virgins." Similarly, the authoritative Arabic–English Lexicon of Edward William Lane defines the word ka'ib as "A girl whose breasts are beginning to swell, or become prominent, or protuberant or having swelling, prominent, or protuberant, breasts".

However, M. A. S. Abdel Haleem and others point out that the description here refers in classical usage to the young age rather than emphasizing the women's physical features. Others, such as Abdullah Yusuf Ali, translate ka'ib as "companions", with Muhammad Asad interpreting the term as being allegorical.