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.