A recent report highlights what must surely appear as “fake news” to Western sensibilities: the fact that “marrying” supernatural women in Islamic paradise — the notorious hooris — actuates young Muslim men in general, Palestinian suicide bombers (“martyrs”) in particular.
The examples offered by the report are many.
In one video, the mother of dead terrorist Abd al-Jabbar al-Sabbagh shared their final moments:
He said to me: ‘Mom, this is the last week you’ll see me. That’s it, bid me farewell.’ I said: ‘Sweetie, why?’ He said: ‘That’s it, I feel I won’t remain much longer.’ I’m satisfied, I’m going to the Dark-Eyed Maidens [Hoor al-‘Ayn in the original Arabic] in Paradise, I want Martyrdom.’ I said: ‘Allah will be satisfied with you.’ Martyrdom is beautiful, not everyone who seeks it merits it, but the farewell is difficult.
In another video discussing her “martyred” nephew, Intisar Nafea said of Ashraf Nafea:
Praise Allah, [teen Martyr] Ashraf [Nafea] raises our heads up high. On Aug. 1, [2024,] he was supposed to turn 18 years old. I wanted to do a birthday for him. He said: ‘Get me married.’ I said: ‘[You will have] 72 [Virgins] like your uncle.’ He said: ‘Right. I don’t want to marry women from this world, I want to marry [women] from the world to come.’
The brother of terrorist Uday Al-Zayyat said:
I told him: ‘Go on and get married’ … He told me: ‘Actually I want the Dark-Eyed Maidens of Paradise.’ Praise Allah, Allah granted him Paradise, Allah willing he will see the Dark-Eyed Maidens of Paradise.
The wives of other “martyrs” posted things like, “All of you make sounds of joy for him. Don’t cry, he’s a groom and let everyone accompany him to his wedding.”
So who are these “dark-eyed virgins” who “yearn” — as another Palestinian once phrased it — for martyrs, for those Muslims who, in the Koran’s words, “slay and are slain” (9:111)?
The proper Arabic term for these entities is hoor al-‘ayn, commonly known by the English transliteration hoori (also “houri”). They are supernatural, celestial women — “wide-eyed” and “big-bosomed,” says the Koran (56:22, 78:33) — created by Allah for the express purpose of sexually gratifying his favorites in perpetuity.
One of the canonical hadiths — a statement attributed to Muhammad that mainstream Islam acknowledges as true — has Muhammad saying,
The martyr [shahid, one who dies fighting for Islam] is special to Allah. He is forgiven from the first drop of blood [that he sheds]. He sees his throne in paradise…. And he will copulate with seventy-two hooris. (See also Koran 44:54, 52:20, 55:72, and 56:22.)
While the hooris may invoke images of scantily-clad genies and/or other wild tales from the Arabian Nights to the Western mind — and thus be dismissed as “fairy tales” with no capacity to inspire anyone — the fact is, desire for these immortal concubines has driven Muslim men to acts of suicidal terror, past and present, as recorded in both Muslim and Western historical sources.
“As for religious enthusiasm and ardour for the holy war,” writes historian Marius Canard, “it is certain that numerous Muslims were moved by this sentiment… There are numerous accounts [in Arabic sources] describing combatants going to their deaths with joyful heart, seeing visions of the celestial hoori who is calling to them and signaling to them.”
Indeed, the hooris are depicted as being ever present on the fields of jihad, beckoning their would-be lovers to rush to their embraces by engaging in wild acts of “martyrdom.” This is evident from the West’s first major military encounter with Islam, the fateful Battle of Yarmuk (636). There, one Muslim came upon a fallen comrade “smitten on the ground, and I watched as he lifted his fingers to the sky. I understood he was rejoicing, for he saw the hooris.” Another Arab chieftain told his men that a headlong charge against the “Christian dogs” is synonymous with a “rush to the embraces of the hooris!”
“The Muslim preachers did not cease to encourage the combatants [at Yarmuk]: Prepare yourselves for the encounter with the hooris of the big black eyes!” explains a medieval Persian historian. “And to be sure, never has a day been seen when more heads fell than on the day of the Yarmuk.”
Nearly a millennium later, on the night before the sack of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks also invoked the hooris to kindle the men’s fighting spirit. Wandering “dervishes visited the tents, to instill the desire of martyrdom, and the assurance of spending an immortal youth amidst the rivers and gardens of paradise, and in the embraces of the black-eyed virgins [hooris].”
At the pivotal battle of Mohacs in 1526, seventy thousand Muslim invaders—described as devotees of “jihad and martyrdom,” eager for “a perpetually happy life” with “the hooris”—defeated the hitherto mighty kingdom of Hungary, built a massive pyramid of heads, and returned to Constantinople with one hundred thousand slaves.
From the start, Western observers have corroborated the mesmerizing effects of the hoori’s siren call. Marco Polo (d.1324) explained why after assassinating their target, the hashashin (whence the English word “assassin”) would not flee but wait to be hacked down by their victim’s guards or men: They were eager to enter “paradise, where every species of sensual gratification should be found, in the society of beautiful nymphs [hooris].”
In an eighth-century “interfaith dialogue” between Caliph Omar II and Eastern Roman Emperor Leo III, the latter wrote: “We [Christians] do not expect to enjoy there [heaven] commerce with women who remain forever virgin,” for “we put no faith in such silly tales engendered by extreme ignorance and by paganism.” But “for you who are given up to carnal vices, and who have never been known to limit the same, you who prefer your pleasures to any good, it is precisely for that reason that you consider the celestial realm of no account if it is not peopled with [supernatural] women.”
If Muslims venerate and seek to emulate the world of early Islam, it should come as no surprise that these Sirens of Islam are still working their magic, above and beyond the opening anecdotes concerning Palestinian indoctrination.
For instance, Naa’imur Rahman, a Muslim man from north London, who was “found guilty of plotting to blow up the gates of Downing Street and assassinate Theresa May… was motivated by the idea of being met by virgins in paradise after the attack, the court heard.” During discussions with an undercover officer, Rahman said that he was eager to “take her [May’s] head off, yeah”:
I want to go to jannah [heaven] when I’m doing it. I don’t want to come back. I want them to kill me, but I just want to do my thing before I’m killed…. [I’ve been] thinking a lot about hur al ayn [hooris]… In sha allah [Allah willing] I meet them soon.
Prior to the battle for Mosul in late 2016, the Islamic State’s “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, said:
All [who die fighting], without exception, will enter paradise as martyrs. Moreover, you will enter paradise with four more hooris than other martyrs. For just as you stand by me now, so will they stand by you—or under you, or above you—so that you might forget what will happen to you by way of violence, death, and degradation in this war.
All this is a reminder that the Muslim mindset and the motivations behind it are many and multifaceted. Few in the West still seem to understand this and see it as, at best, an aberration. Thus a French reporter who once infiltrated and spent time with the Islamic State said, “I never saw any Islam. No will to improve the world,” only “suicidal” men looking forward to being “martyred” on, as they explained it to him, their “path to paradise,” where “women [hooris] are waiting for us.”
Until such time that Western secular minds stop projecting their own materialistic paradigms onto Muslims in general, jihadists in particular, and start understanding Islam’s paradigms and motivations on their own terms, the West will continue to ignore the oldest and simplest advice concerning war: “know your enemy.”
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