Virgins? A fresh 72, or your wife with HHR (Heavenly Hymen Reconstruction)? If you look, it’s all on the menu, sir.
Brocade couches? Seating this way, sir. Silver goblets; fruit? Follow me to the dining area, madam. This is Jannah, the paradise promised by the Qur’an to the Righteous. And frankly, one can’t understand all the fuss.
It’s been there all along, and been quietly worked towards for centuries by God-fearing Muslims everywhere. Before, nobody seemed to care where Muslims went to when they died. Now everyone wants to know about that Great Mosque in the Sky. Because they heard some guys talking on CNN about getting laid by 72 virgins with big black eyes as a reward for martyrdom at enemy hands.
Then this year, The New York Times carried what the writer clearly thought to be a very witty piece pointing to a less sensual version of paradise for Muslim martyrs — one stocked not by virgins, but white grapes. This all because the Aramaic word for hur (the lovelies promised in paradise) is used to describe fruit, not women.
Carefully clutching its petticoat to its ankles, the scandalised article reminds us: “It has long been a staple of Islam that Muslim martyrs will go to paradise and marry 72 black-eyed virgins.”
It’s a “staple” absent from the writings of the well-known “jihadists”, from Ali Shariati to even the Godfather of radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb — all of whom talk about the merits of martyrdom, but make no mention of virgins.
But this is not the point. The point is, even if there were, so what of it? If it’s any business of yours.
It’s high time someone spoke up on behalf of the sensual paradise. So what if there is sex in the Muslim heaven? (What would a world, this one or the next, be without it?)
For far too long, a hotchpotch of experts and analysts has been getting away with dragging Jannah into a slightly seedy corner — as though it were something to be ashamed of.
It’s old hat that Arabs (equals all Muslims, remember?) are known to be a nation favourable to the pleasures of the flesh. Latch on to the virgins story as the perfect hook and voila, the orientalism of sherbet, wine, and ample-buttocked women has a new outlet. Thing is, it’s not necessarily a racist assumption far from the truth. The Qur’an certainly doesn’t seem to think so.
Islam has never treated involuntary bodily urges as venereal disease. The Prophet Muhammad is purported to have said: “Three things fondest to me are prayer, scent, and women” (“But the closest to me is prayer,” commentators affix in bold print).
So, our heaven’s bigger’n yours!
Think about it: we have Omar Khayyam and the 1001 Nights. The Papists have Saint Augustine. And here is even more incentive for Christians to convert: just read the Bible. It has a very austere, toned-down version of the afterlife. There will be a “river of the water of life”.
But there certainly won’t be any slipping between the sheets. “But the men and women who are worthy to rise from death and live in the age to come will not then marry. They will be like angels and cannot die” (Luke 20).
The pro-choice lobby and the camp crowd should note: “And so I tell of you, what you prohibit on Earth will be prohibited in heaven, and what you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven” (Matthew 18).
But the Qur’an is streaks ahead.
Beverages? White wine, “delicious to the drinkers, wherein there is no headache nor are they made mad thereby” (37:46). And not just by the glass, but in “rivers” (47:15) Nothing to wear? “Their raiment will be fine green silk and gold embroidery” (76:21). Which of the favours of your Lord would you deny, asks the Qur’an.
On the babe front, though, things are tricky. Firstly, there is no mention of quotas. The figure stems from an obscure but paradoxically oft-quoted hadith (saying) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, whereby he reportedly said the reward for every believer who enters heaven is “an abode where there are 80 000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and rubies”.
Secondly, the martyrs aren’t the only ones in line. The Qur’an makes repeated mention of “fair ones, with lovely eyes”. And “those of modest gaze, whom neither man nor jinni [demon] will have touched before them”. It is at this point where creative commentary comes in. One has even gone so far to describe them as “damsels with swelling breasts”.
This has been latched on to by renowned Qur’anic commentator Jalalludin al-Suyuti, who has a particularly lascivious take. Quoted in La Sexualité en Islam, by Abdelwahab Bouhdiba (1975), al-Suyuti enthused: “The erection is eternal.” He adds: “Each elected will marry 70 hur besides the women he married on Earth, and all will have appetising vaginas.”
Depending on how much one trusts translation, the word hur is gender-neutral — leaving room for manoeuvre for the righteous women who get to enter Paradise. Then there is the Arabic word gilman (52:24) —with reference to the everlasting male youth, “whom when thou seest, would take for scattered pearls” that will also be on hand (though for which sex is a matter of even trickier dispute).
Those glad to be free of domestic drudgery will be disappointed: some commentators say the references to companions in the Qur’an are only for the unmarried. Those with wives can expect to be paired with them (albeit fresher and reincarnated) in Paradise.
Thing is, the Qur’an makes it clear, this is all a parable (47:15) — told to the Arabs, in the language of the Arabs, and in a description the Arabs would understand.
Things might have gone awry had the Qur’an been revealed elsewhere. What if your preferences as a believer are for Alek Wek, or pap?
What is also lost is the rich Sufi tradition within Islam, which says heaven and hell are not physical locations.
Teachings like those of Ibn al-Arabi and Sadr al-Din Shirazi (Mulla Sadr), who viewed ascent to God as being through the realm of imagination. Heaven or hell, according to these mystics (whose work is only now being “discovered” by the Western world) is not to be viewed as a reality in a separate location, but to an inner world of the imagination.
There is indeed something to be said for a preacher using promises of getting laid en masse to lure “children ardent for some desperate glory” to blow themselves up, or walk as human shields over landmines to clear the way for tanks (as happened in the Iran-Iraq War).
But were I to blow myself up for a cause, I’d be far more comforted knowing there were babes and fine furniture on the other side — as opposed to the “cut my dick off and stuff it in the confessional box” version in other parts.
This is not to mention how tricky life could be on the other side in the land of milk and honey if you’re lactose-intolerant, or on Atkins.
All if I were a man, that is.