About our guest:
Nerina Rustomji is an associate professor of History at St. John’s University and the author of The Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins, Feminine Ideals. Nerina specializes in the intellectual and cultural formation of Islamic societies and the Middle East. In her research, she is interested in aesthetics, gendered configurations, biological and commercial exchanges, secularism, and America’s relationship with Muslim worlds.
About the book:
Amazon – The fascination with the houri, the pure female of Islamic paradise, began long before September 11, 2001.
The Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins, Feminine Ideals demonstrates how the ambiguous reward of the houri, mentioned in the Qur’an and developed in Islamic theological writings, has gained a distinctive place in the cultural eye from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.
The houri had multiple functions in Islamic texts that ranged from caretaker, to pure companion, to personal entertainment. French, English, and American writers used the houri to critique Islam and Muslim societies, while also adopting the houri as a model of feminine beauty.
The Beauty of the Houri narrates how theological ambiguity about the houri as a caretaker, pure companion, and entertainment in earlier Islamic texts was reinterpreted as a critique of Islam and a model of universal feminine beauty in later French, English, and American writings.
Transcript of the interview
Below, please read selected parts of our conversation that’s been edited for reading eyes.
Why men are obsessed with “Houri” or heavenly women figures?
I can tell you that there is this fascination, particularly with the Houris, but also there is a way that feminine models and feminine ideals become a collective enterprise. It happens more with women than it necessarily does with men. You suggest why it is an obsession. Or is it a fascination, is it that our imagination centers particularly on women and their forms and what we expect about them in ways that it does not necessarily center on men.
I think you’re absolutely right, the fascination is there and so is the energy, you know that fascination can be reverential, that fascination can be repulsive, that fascination can be with humor.
I mean there is so much in the figure of the Houri that has been offered through time for so many different groups.
Q: Is there gender attribution to Houris?
I think it’s a question that it’s very important to keep in mind what’s the method by which that question is being asked.
Is there a gender attribution when you look at the Quranic verses themselves where the Houris are mentioned four times explicitly and then somewhat implicitly. And then there’s some other verses that could be interpreted of no gender mark for the Houris.
If we look at the methodology of the Quranic commentaries, the commentators really were curious about the Houri; they were equally fascinated and were not quite sure how to grapple with the meaning of this term Houri.
They referred to the Houris in terms of their eyes, the intensity of the white and the black areas of their eyes, that’s been very striking.
And so in those early commentaries, the assumption is that the Houris are female, so from the very beginning, the notion of Houris being female gets built within the canonical tradition, or the Quranic tradition.
I think another useful methodology is looking at the analysis of the Quran not just in terms of the words but also looking at the context that the verses take place.
In so many of the Quranic verses, if not all, we talk about the Houris within a banquet-like setting of paradise. And they’re often paired with these male servers, or Ghelmans, who are pouring some kind of special drink.
And so in those verses, I think it’s important to recognize that you have this kind of pairing. And so I think there could be an argument that the Houis are female because you have that opposition within the context.
That is not to say that the argument is incorrect. I mean there is not a gender marker specifically within the verses but it gets interpreted that way.
What did you learn after you finished the book that you didn’t know before starting it?
I think what I learned that I didn’t expect to learn was how significant the Houri was for the developing tradition in Europe.
I knew there was a European fascination with the Houris. I mean, you have a European fascination with this idea of a Muslim woman, whether she’s in a harem or she’s an Oda-lesk, kind of like this entrapped sexual beauty, that fit within the lens of Orientalism.
But what I didn’t expect to find was how developed the Houris was as a model for Christian women, in an idealized model, a model of what a woman could be at her full possibility. And that just made me stop and realize that when we look at these feminine ideals, they don’t get siphoned into Christian and Muslim and early medieval and classical Muslim and contemporary, yet there is something so compelling about the figure of women that different groups borrow from different traditions. So that’s the kind of major area that I learned.
In the book, you write about female travel-writer and her take on Houris. Can you explain?
The writer that you were mentioning was Mary Montague. She accompanied her husband who is the ambassador of the Ottoman Empire. And she described the women in harem spaces as celestial beauties.
She didn’t use the term Houri specifically but it was very clear that she was drawing on some concept of a feminine beauty that was so beautiful that it was not part of this world, it was part of this other world.
But aside from her, you have also a French writer named Du Loir who left Marseille and traveled through the Ottoman Empire and wrote a series of letters. In 1640 one of those letters mentions this term of Houri and he chides Muslim men for not valuing their wives and instead [men] constantly talk about these beauties in heaven, these Houris that they’ll receive after their death when they enter paradise.
It was from that period onwards that the term Houri entered the French language and then it was also introduced into English in the next century. And when you see that term there is just this proliferation of Houris and specifically naming women or having women alluding to women as beautiful like a Houri or handsome like a Houri.
When I first came across these references I thought oh well okay this is a kind of Orientalism. But the more I looked at these references I realized that in these traditions particularly in the English literary tradition the Houri had two capacities. The first capacity was that the Houri symbolized this idea of an enslaved Muslim woman who was beholden to either the sultan or her husband. It suggested that the Houri didn’t have freedom. I thought it was a way of indicating that Islam was a religion that had oppression built within itself, particularly for women.
And the assumption continued through my study steadily, as an interpretation. But at the same time there was another kind of use of the Houri and that was that Houris had a kind of beauty that allowed them to be both beautiful and pure both bodily beautiful and pure. This is where the different writers start using the Houri as a Christian ideal or an ideal for Christian women.
Please listen to entire conversation here.
The Raw Footage of the Interview with Nerina Rustomji
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