October 05, 2007
Assistant Professor of History Nerina Rustomji, Ph.D., has won a
$30,000 fellowship grant from the ACLS (American Council of Learned
Societies) to launch a one-year project that will explore historic
and contemporary notions of the houri, the female
companion awarded to a Muslim male upon his entry into paradise,
according to Islamic tradition.
Rustomji’s project also earned a grant from the American Center of Oriental
Research, a branch of the American Council of Overseas
Research. This grant will allow her to extend her project
through next summer while researching in Amman, Jordan.
An expert of Islamic societies, Rustomji is on leave this
academic year to work on her project, which is a direct extension
of her recently written book, The Garden and the Fire: Heaven
and Hell in Islamic Culture, which she hopes to publish next
year.
The ACLS is a leading organization set forth to advance the
fields of the humanities and social science. According to the
group’s website, Rustomji was one of 65 fellows selected this year
from a pool of 1016 applicants.
The fellowship will allow Rustomji to “to investigate the place
of female companionship in paradise,” she says. “Within Islamic
tradition there’s a place for wives, and there is another category
for houris, who I call ‘pure’ female companions.”
Rustomji says that there are many misconceptions about the
houri, particularly in America and Europe, and often promulgated by
the media. One of the false claims her study will attempt to refute
is that the houri can be directly interpreted as “virgin.”
“There’s a debate within the global Islamic world about what
‘virginity’ means,” says Rustomji, noting that several Muslim
writers don’t limit the term to its sexual connotations. “Many
think the term is more about honor and purity.”
Rustomji says that another commonly espoused falsehood is that
Muslim men must engage in Jihad in order to have access to houris
in the afterlife.
Rustomji’s project will delve deeply into the political arena
and attempt to explain why a religious phenomenon such as the houri
has drawn catcalls from various critics who associate it only with
violence. She references the 2005 Danish cartoons that so famously
came under fire for lampooning is Islamic prophet Mohammad. (One of
the cartoons took an unflattering poke at houris.)
“There’s a strong polemic within Europe and America, and I want
to look at the political angle of how people understand this trope
of a female as a way of understanding Islam,” says Rustomji.
“There’s no one coherent understanding of what the houri is. The
way in which people explain it reveals more about their politics
than it does about Islam.”
The debate over interpretations of the houri extends to Islamic
cultures as well. Rustomji says that some texts seem to suggest
that the houri is a celestial transformation of a man’s earthly
wife, while others distinguish houri and wife as two separate
beings. Even the Koran is ambiguous, she notes.
Rustomji, who is fluent in Arabic and has researched manuscript
collections in London, Paris and Syria, says she is “driven” by
primary sources such as the Koran, Koranic commentaries and
mystical, scatological and colonialist texts. “They are all so
alive,” she enthuses, noting that today’s globalized world has made
the study of historical Islamic texts imperative among
scholars.
“The field of Islamic history is really new in some ways,” she
says. “There’s a whole field out there waiting for professors and
students to discover. That’s what makes it so exciting. And many of
the things you study in medieval Islamic history really do have a
resonance in contemporary times, especially in today’s political
environment.”
Rustomji received her doctorate at Columbia University and is a
member of the Middle East Studies Association. She teaches an
assortment of undergraduate-level Middle Eastern history
courses.