Houri

Houris in paradise, riding camels. From a 15th-century Persian manuscript.

In Islam, the houri (Arabic حورية, also ḥūr or ḥūrīyah) refers to splendid beings or celestial virgins who await the saved in paradise.

Quotes

Scripture

• As to the Righteous, they will be in Gardens, and in Happiness,- Enjoying the (Bliss) which their Lord hath bestowed on them, and their Lord shall deliver them from the Penalty of the Fire. (To them will be said:) "Eat and drink ye, with profit and health, because of your (good) deeds." They will recline (with ease) on Thrones (of dignity) arranged in ranks; and We shall join them to Companions, with beautiful big and lustrous eyes.
  • Qur'an, At Tur 52:17-20, Yusuf Ali.

• In them will be (Maidens), chaste, restraining their glances, whom no man or Jinn before them has touched.
  • Qur'an, Ar Rahman 55:56, Yusuf Ali.

• We have created (their Companions) of special creation. And made them virgin - pure (and undefiled), - Beloved (by nature), equal in age,- For the Companions of the Right Hand.
  • Qur'an, Al-Waqia 56:35-38, Yusuf Ali.

• Verily for the Righteous there will be a fulfilment of (the heart's) desires; Gardens enclosed, and grapevines; And voluptuous women of equal age.
  • Qur'an, An Naba 78:31-33, Yusuf Ali.

Literature

• The blessed Verse 56 treats of the six Blessing – chaste spouses in Paradise. The blessed Verse is saying that there shall be women in those palaces in Paradise who restraining their glances solely look at their husbands and love no one but them and no jinni or man has ever touched them. Thus, they shall be virgin and undefiled in any respect.

  It is narrated on the authority of Abudhar Ghaffari that the woman in Paradise shall say unto her husband:

  "By the Glory of my Lord! I find nothing better than you in Paradise. Praise be to God Almighty Who married me unto you."

  • Ayatollah Allamah Al-Hajj Sayyid Kamal Faqih Imani: An Enlightening Commentary into the Light of the Holy Qur'an, vol. 17. Translated by Sayyid Abbas Sadr-'ameli. Al-Islam.org.

• Then the lady took the cup, and drank it off to her sisters' health, and they ceased not drinking (the Porter being in the midst of them), and dancing and laughing and reciting verses and singing ballads and ritornellos. All this time the Porter was carrying on with them, kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering; whilst one thrust a dainty morsel in his mouth, and another slapped him; and this cuffed his cheeks, and that threw sweet flowers at him; and he was in the very paradise of pleasure, as though he were sitting in the seventh sphere among the Houris of Heaven.
  • The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad (tr. R. F. Burton)

• It is true that simple-minded religious men have conceived their goal as a state of continued existence beyond the grave filled with all happy things and experiences. But plainly such happy things and experiences were no more than symbolic, and the happy heavens containing such things have the character of myth. To the human mind, fast fettered by the limits of its poor imagination, they stand for and represent the goal. One cannot conceive the inconceivable. So in place of it one puts whatever one can imagine of delight; wine and houris if one's imagination is limited to these; love, kindness, sweetness of spiritual living if one is of a less materialistic temper. But were these existences and delights, material or spiritual, to be actually found and enjoyed as present, they would be condemned by the saint along with all earthly joys. For they would have upon them the curse, the darkness, the disease, of all existent things, of all that is this or that. This is why we cannot conceive of any particular pleasure, happiness, joy, which would not cloy - which to be quite frank - would not in the end be boring.
  • Walter Terence Stace, Time and Eternity (1952) p. 6-7.

• ’Twas on the sixth of June, about the hour
    Of half-past six—perhaps still nearer seven—
  When Julia sate within as pretty a bower
    As e’er held houri in that heathenish heaven
  Described by Mahomet, and Anacreon Moore,
    To whom the lyre and laurels have been given,
  With all the trophies of triumphant song—
  He won them well, and may he wear them long!
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I

• What pictures to the taster rise,
    Of Dervish or of Almeh dances!
  Of Eblis, or of Paradise,
    Set all aglow with Houri glances!
  • John Greenleaf Whittier, "The Haschish" (1854)

• He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
  His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
  • G. K. Chesterton, "Lepanto" (1911)

• Thy wife or thy daughter, that Eastern houri that thou lockest under thy arm as thou wouldst thy treasure-casket?
  • Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820), Chapter VII

See also

• Jannah