Bibliotheca Polyglotta

While Jeffery thinks that the name for the virgins of the Islamic Paradise is related to the mPers hurūst ‘beautiful’; that the idea itself reminds of the Zoroastrian teaching about the Daena (influenced by earlier Sem sources?); and that the loanword then came under the influence of Aram words for ‘white’, the current opinion among Arab lexicographers, but also e.g. in EI², is that the Qur’anic ḥūr is the pl. of ḥawrāʔᵘ, f. of the colour adj. ʔaḥwarᵘ ‘(contrast between black and) white.’ How ever that may be, what seems to be certain is that the sg. ḥūriyyaẗ is a secondary formation from the pl. ḥūr.

hist

▪ eC6 ʕAbīd b. al-ʔAbraṣ (ed. Lyall, vii, 24): wa-ʔawānisu miṯla ’l-dumà | ḥūru ’l-ʕuyūni qad-i ’stabaynā ‘And maidens like ivory statues, white of eyes, did we capture’.
▪ eC7 ḥūr (pl.; ‘pure, fair-skinned’; also said to mean ‘having eyes marked by contrast between the deep black and the pure white in them; pleasant’) Q 44:54 ka-ḏālika wa-zawwaǧnā-hum bi-ḥūrin ʕīnin ‘so it will be, and We will wed them to wide-eyed houris’. – Cf. also Q 52:20, 55:72, 56:22.
▪ ḥūru ’l-ʕīn (applied to women) ‘having eyes like those of gazelles and of cows’, according to some only used when the whiteness of the eyes is combined with a whiteness, or fairness, of complexion – Lane.

cogn

▪ Usually seen as cognate with the complex treated s.v. ↗ḥawar ‘(marked contrast between black and surrounding) white’
. ▪ For a possible non-Sem origin (accord. to Jeffery), cf. DISC below.

disc

▪ Jeffery1938, 117-20: »Except in [Q] 55:72, it is used always in the phrase ḥūr ʕīn. The occurrences are all in early Sūras describing the delights of Paradise, where the ḥūr ʕīn are beauteous maidens whom the faithful will have as spouses in the next life. – The Grammarians are agreed that ḥūr is a pl. of ḥawrāʔ and derived from ḥawira, a form of ḥāra, and would thus mean ‘the white ones’. ʕīn is a pl. of ʔaʕyanᵘ meaning ‘wide eyed’ (LA, xvii, 177). It thus becomes possible to take ḥūr ʕīn as two adjectives used as nouns meaning ‘white skinned, large eyed damsels’. The Lexicons insist that the peculiar sense of ḥawira is that it means the contrast of the black and white in the eye, particularly in the eye of a gazelle or a cow (cf. LA, v, 298; and TA, iii, 160). Some, however, insist equally on the whiteness of the body being the reference of the word, e.g. al-Azharī in TA, “a woman is not called ḥawrāʔ unless along with the whiteness of the eye there is whiteness of body.” One gathers from the discussion of the Lexicographers that they were somewhat uncertain as to the actual meaning of the word, and in fact both LA and TA quote the statement of so great an authority as al-Aṣmaʕī that he did not know what was the meaning of ḥūr as connected with the eye. – The Commentators give us no help with the word as they merely set forth the same material as we find in the Lexicons. They prefer the meaning which refers it to the eye as more suited to the Qurʔānic passages, and their general opinion is well summarized in as-Sijistānī, 117. – Fortunately, the use of the word can be illustrated from the old poetry, for it was apparently in quite common use in pre-Islamic Arabia. Thus in ʕAbīd b. al-ʔAbraṣ, vii, 24 (ed. Lyall) we find the verse wa-ʔawānisu miṯla 'l-dumà | ḥūru ’l-ʕuyūni qad-i ’stabaynā ‘And maidens like ivory statues,¹ white of eyes, did we capture’, and again in ʕAdiyy b. Zayd: hayyaḥa ’l-dāʔa fī fuʔādika ḥūrun | nāʕimātun bi-ǧānibi ’l-malṭāṭi ‘They have touched your heart, these tender white maidens, beside the river bank’, and so in a verse of Qaʕnab in the Muḫtārāt, viii, 7, we read: wa-fī ’l-ḫudūri lawānu ’l-dāri ǧāmiʕatun | ḥūrun ʔawānisu fī ʔaṣwātihā ġinanū ‘And in the women’s chamber when the house is full, are white maidens with charming voices’. – In all these cases we are dealing with human women, and except in the verse of ʕAbīd the word ḥūr could quite well mean white-skinned, and even in the verse of ʕAbīd, the comparison with ivory statues would seem to lend point to al-Azharī’s statement that it is only used of the eyes when connected with whiteness of the skin. – Western scholars are in general agreed that the conception of the Houries of Paradise is one borrowed from outside sources, and the prevalent opinion is that the borrowing was from Persia. Sale suggested this in his Preliminary Discourse, but his reference to the Sadder Bundahišn was rather unfortunate, as Dozy pointed out,² owing to the lateness of this work. Berthels, however, in his article “Die paradiesischen Jungfrauen im Islam”, in Islamica, 1: 263 ff., has argued convincingly that though Sale’s Ḥūrān-i Bihišt may not be called in as evidence, yet the characteristic features of the ḥūr of the Qurʔānic Paradise closely correspond with Zoroastrian teaching about the Daena. The question, however, is whether the name ḥūr is of Iranian origin. Berthels thinks not.³ Haug, however, suggested its equivalence with the Zoroastrian hūmat ‘good thought’ (cf. Av ?????; Skr suman); Av hūχt ‘good speech’ (cf. Av ?????, Skr sūkta), and Av hūvaršt ‘good deed’ (cf. Av ?????),⁴ but the equivalences are difficult, and as Horovitz, Paradies, 13, points out, they in no way fit in with the pre-Islamic use of ḥūr. Tisdall, Sources, 237 ff., claims that ḥūr is connected with the modern Pers ḫor ‘sun’, from Phlv χvar ⁵ and Av havarə,⁶ but this comes no nearer to explaining the Qurʔānic word. – It is much more likely that the word comes from the Phlv hurūst, meaning ‘beautiful’, and used in the Pahlavi books of the beauteous damsels of Paradise, e.g. in Arda Virāf, iv, 18, and in Hādōχt Nask, ii, 23,⁷ where we have the picture of a graceful damsel, white-armed, strong, with dazzling face and prominent breasts. Now, Phlv hurūst is a good Iranian word, the equivalent of Av hū raoδa,⁸ and though these Pahlavi works are late the conceptions in them are early and there can be no question of borrowing from the Sem. – To this Iranian conception we may now add the influence of the Aram ḤWR. Sprenger was doubtless right in his conjecture⁹ that the root Ar √ḤWR ‘to be white’ came to the Arabs from Aram. The Hbr ḥāwar occurs in Is. 29:22 in the sense of ‘becoming pale through shame’, and Syr ḥᵊwarā is commonly used to translate Grk leukós and is thus used for the white garments of the Saints in Rev. iii, 4. Carra de Vaux,¹⁰ indeed, has suggested that Muḥammad’s picture of the youths and maidens of Paradise was due to a misunderstanding of the angels in Christian miniatures or mosaics representing Paradise. This may or may not be so, but it does seem certain that the word ḥūr in its sense of ‘whiteness’, and used of ‘fair-skinned damsels’, came into use among the Northern Arabs as a borrowing from the Christian communities, and then Muḥammad, under the influence of the Iranian hurūst, used it of the maidens of Paradise.«
▪ Luxenberg2000: 221ff. interprets Qur’anic ḥūr as an Aramaism with the original meaning of ‘white (grapes)’.

1. So in al-ʔAʕšà we find ḥūrun ka-ʔamṯāli ’l-dumà, cf. Geyer, Zwei Gedichte, i, 196 = Dīwān, xxxiii, 11. 2. Het Islamisme, 3 ed., 1880: 101. 3. “Das Wort Ḥūr dürfen wir natürlich ebensowenig in den iranischen Sprachen suchen.” 4. The three words occur together in Pand-nāmak, xx, 12, 13. Cf. Nyberg, Glossar, 109, 110. 5. Horn, Grundriss, pp. 111, 112; Shikand, Glossary, 255. 6. Bartholomae, AIW, 1847; Reichelt, Awestisches Elementarbuch, 512; cf. Skr khar [sic!]. 7. See also Minoḫird, ii, 125-139, for the idea. 8. Bartholomae, AIW, 1836. 9. Leben, ii, 222. He thinks it may have come to the Arabs from the Nabataeans. 10. Art. “Djanna”, in EI, i, 1015

west

▪ (Huehnergard2011:) Engl houri, from Ar ḥūriyyaẗ ‘nymph, houri’, from ḥūr, pl. (also used as sg.) of ʔaḥwarᵘ, f. ḥawrāʔᵘ ‘characterized by the quality ḥawar, i.e., intense whiteness of the sclera of the eye in contrast to deep blackness of the iris’ (cf. ḥawira, vb. I, ‘to have this quality’). – (EtymOnline:) houri ‘nymph of Muslim paradise’, 1737, from Fr houri (1650s), from Pers ḥūrī ‘nymph in Paradise’, from Ar ḥawra [sic!] ‘to be beautifully dark-eyed’, like a gazelle + ‑i, Pers formative element denoting the sg. – EtymOnline.

deriv

► ḥūriyyaẗ al-māʔ, n., water nymph, nixie.

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