The houris and the Quran’s Paradise: 5 facts

The Quran speaks of “ḥūr ʿīn“, companions with wide, lustrous eyes (44:54; 52:20; 56:22). It calls them “restraining their glances” (55:56). It gives no number.

The figure of seventy-two comes from a report in al-Tirmidhi, which Ibn Majah and Ahmad also record, listing the rewards of the martyr in the way of God. Its grading is disputed: al-Tirmidhi called it hasan sahih, Darussalam grades it hasan, some modern hadith critics accept it, and others call the chain weak.^[1]

A single report with a disputed grade does not carry the weight of a doctrine. Jurists build rulings on the Quran and on well-attested reports, and a reward on which the Quran is silent, and which rests on one contested line of narration, is held at that level of certainty. Even on the report’s own terms the number belongs to the martyr and not to every believer.

The Quran does not restrict spouses in Paradise to men. “Enter Paradise, you and your spouses, rejoicing.”^[2] It promises “pure spouses” to the believers (2:25; 3:15; 4:57). Scholars have said that the women of the believers will be there and that God will give each person a spouse suited to them.

Entry to Paradise is promised to men and women on equal terms. Whoever does righteous deeds, male or female, and is a believer, will enter it (4:124), and in Paradise each will have whatever the soul desires (41:31; 43:71).^[3]

The Quran’s descriptions of the ḥūr are addressed to men, and the book does not spell out the particulars of women’s reward in the same detail. The commentators noted the point and answered it by the general promise above. They differed on whether the ḥūr are a separate creation or the believing women of this world renewed, and neither view makes Paradise a place of one-sided reward.

The Prophet reported that God said: “I have prepared for My righteous servants what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no heart has imagined.”^[4] The Quran says the same: no soul knows what has been hidden for them of joy (32:17).^[5] A saying reported from Ibn Abbas holds that nothing of this world is in Paradise except the names.

The Quran’s pictures, of gardens, rivers, silk and companions, are taken from what people know. Faruqi, writing on how the Quran speaks of the transcendent, noted that its descriptions of God and the unseen use earthly words while denying that they apply “simpliciter”, the way a pointer works, and that the proper stance is bilā kayf, accepting them without asking how.^[6]

A critic will say that this is an evasion, since the descriptions are concrete. The tradition replies that the Quran sets the highest reward elsewhere: the approval of God, which it calls greater than the gardens (9:72).^[7] The sensory images are real promises, and they stand below the vision of God, which the tradition places at the summit.

The idea that a suicide attacker earns a number of virgins has no place in the sources. The Prophet said that a person who kills himself will be punished in Hell, and the Quran says “Do not kill yourselves.”^[8] The Quran also forbids killing the innocent, and scholars across the schools have rejected suicide attacks on civilians.^[9]

The report of the seventy-two applies to the martyr, defined by the jurists as one killed in lawful fighting, and the Quran itself promises no number to martyrs. A person who sets out to kill civilians has transgressed the Quran’s rule that killing one person unjustly is like killing all mankind (5:32), and has put himself outside the report’s terms.

A small number of contemporary scholars have defended attacks of this kind in particular wars. Most scholars rejected their view, and the classical books supply no precedent for it.

A theory that ḥūr means “white grapes” in Syriac is rejected by scholars of Arabic and Syriac. The word is ordinary Arabic and appears in the poetry of the pre-Islamic period, and the theory does not fit the verses’ sense.

The theory comes from Christoph Luxenberg’s book on the Syro-Aramaic reading of the Quran, which proposes that many obscure words are mistaken Syriac.^[10] Most reviewers have rejected the method. In the verses the ḥūr are married to the believers (52:20), described by the eyes and by the restraining of the glance (55:56), and a fruit does not restrain a glance.

The Arabic root points to the whiteness and blackness of the eye, which is how the classical dictionaries explain the word. The theory has the effect of removing a difficulty by changing the language, and the evidence needed to support such a change is missing.