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Nerina Rustomji, "The Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins and Feminine Ideals" (Oxford UP, 2021)
00:49:28
An interview with Nerina Rustomji
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- [00:01]
Nareena Rustumji
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Nareena Rustumji
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Sher Ali Tareen
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Nareena Rustumji
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The New Books Network.
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Sher Ali Tareen
Hello and welcome to a new episode of your favorite podcast, New Books and Islamic Studies, which operates online through the New Books Network. I'm your host Sher Ali Tareen. For each new episode we choose an important new book in the broader field of Islamic Studies and WeChat with its author. In her scintillating new book, the Beauty of the Heavenly Versions Feminine Ideals, Nareena Rustunji presents a fascinating and multi layered intellectual and cultural history of the category of the Houri and the multiple ideological projects in which it has been inserted over time and space. Space nimbly moving between a vast range of discursive theaters, including Western Islamophobic representations of the HOURI in the post 911 context, early modern and modern French and English literature, pre modern Muslim intellectual traditions and popular preachers on the Internet today. Rustam Ji shows the complexity of this category and its unavailability for economical definition. The beauty of the Hoori is intellectual history at its best that combines philological rigor with astute theoretical reflection, and all this Rustumji accomplishes in prose, the delightfulness of which competes fiercely with its lucidity. Here now is my conversation with Professor Narina Ri. Hello Narina, how are you doing? Wonderful to have you on the New Books Network or to talk about this really incredible and wonderful new book that I was Very excited to read and really learned a lot from and looking forward to this conversation about it, this much anticipated book, really, that is finally out. And it's really a thrill to have read it before we go into specific aspects of the book, Nareena, we have a tradition on the New Books Network on New books in Islamic studies that our first question is always biographical and very broadly speaking, if you could give a sense to our listeners about how you became a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies.
- [03:38]
Nareena Rustumji
Well, first of all, Shara, we thank you so much for your invitation and for reading the book and for really opening up this conversation. I am looking forward to being in conversation with you. You are such an astute reader. And so I am really looking forward to hearing what you have to say as well. So I came to the history of Islamic society and Islamic studies by way of studying with two remarkable historians. The first is Denise Spellberg, who is an exquisite intellectual historian who has forged new directions of study. And what she really was able to impart to me was the the richness of the primary sources and how you have to mine very deep to understand even the smallest phrases. And it's that kind of intellectual history as a foundation that I learned from her. And the second is Dick Bullitt, who has this extraordinary searching, creative mind, is a social historian who's embraced so many different new methodologies. He has a way of asking the big questions, but writing in a kind of lightness and humor. And I've long admired the way that he has communicated his ideas.
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Sher Ali Tareen
Let's go chronologically in terms of the unfolding of this book. The remarkable aspect of this book is the way how you move between very different set of, I guess, settings, archives, texts, both in terms of genre, more sort of traditional texts and online media, et cetera, but also between different settings ranging from contemporary America to 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century France and the US and then of course, Muslim intellectual history in the pre modern period. You begin the book in the present context, or rather I would say the post 911 context, with a very interesting and really captivating analysis of one of the letters, supposed alleged letters of One of the 911 hijackers, Muhammad Atta, and the mention of the houri there, and you connect that to this larger sort of theme of that chapter, which is ways in which this category of the houri became mobilized in American popular media and culture in the post 911 context. So if you could just speak a bit about some key threads of how that happened and this other sort of perception about this category of the Houri that it actually really means grapes and it has been so sort of misunderstood by Muslims of all varieties etc. So how did this, this whole theory of the white grapes etc also become part of this American popular culture discourse?
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Nareena Rustumji
Yes, thanks for that question. You know, and it is an important one because the project initially I developed it in relation to what I was seeing in American popular media. And what I saw after September 11 is mention of the Houri became a kind of rebuttal to the let that was published, this purported letter of Muhammad Atta and also a rebuttal to the perception of the aims of the 911 hijackers. And that rebuttal was that the reward of these pure female companions or virgins of paradise was really an absurd way to look at reward in terms of religion. And it was a way to kind of denigrate the perceptions of the hijackers, but also the religion of Islam. What I thought that was so interesting about those kinds of rebuttals and these took place in kind of blogs and chats, they tended to be dark, very absurd, oftentimes bitter, is that they really drew on what I saw was a pre existing medieval polemic about the material and spiritual world and the possibility of having sexual relations in paradise. So that is how the houri was initially mobilized. And that's not to say that the hour was not. There wasn't an awareness of the hour before 9 11, but it got amplified in the social media space in particularly intense ways. And that's what really interested me is how did Americans understand this category and how did the Houri enter the American vocabulary? One interesting dimension of that is a book that was published by an author writing under the pseudonym Christoph Luxemburg. It was in German, which suggested a very different methodology for looking at the Quran. And in one of the chapters, each of the chapters is quite extraordinary, extraordinary in a kind of really strange methodology. One of the chapters regarded the Houri, where the argument in the book was that the houris are in fact not these feminine companions, but should be understood etymologically, drawing on pre existing Aramaic and Syriac sources to be white grapes. And so what's fascinating about this work is it was published in German in 2000. It was translated in English in 2007 but by 2002 it was commonly referenced in American news media. And the reason why is in 2002 the polemicist Ibn Warak wrote an article, Virgins what? Virgins and the Guardian, where he discussed this theory about the white grape and had his own kind of articulations of that rebuttal. So the rebuttal was not just that the 911 hijackers thought they were going to receive this versions, and that itself has kind of a false claim to it, but that, in fact, because Muslim societies did not have, according to him, the exercise of scriptural interpretation, Muslims were not aware that in fact, there are no female companions or virgins, but instead they are white grapes. And that itself started a kind of another type of rebuttal in American letters, short stories, blogs, different chat rooms about what the hijackers really received was grapes, or what it became known as. As a box of raisins. And it's this precise point of the grape raisin confusion that I realized that the theory itself had become so accepted and entrenched in the understanding of this very ambiguous Islamic concept that it was worth kind of unpackaging how that process took place. And that process really took place through media.
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Sher Ali Tareen
Now backing off from the current moment to sort of the early modern and modern context. And you do some very exquisite readings of English and French literature of different kinds, poetry, fiction, etc. And you argue, sort of the main argument that you make is that the figure of the houri in some ways does two things. One is it sort of tries to establish the backwardness or the kind of misogyny and the barbaric of the Muslim, which basically at this point is the Turk represented by the Ottoman Empire. And the other thing that it does, which was a very interesting argument, which I want you to speak a bit more about, is that it was connected to certain notions of ideal femininity and feminine purity, which was given a universalized form. So in some ways, the houri became a way of a Western articulation of what femininity and feminine purity should look like in the modern period. Perhaps. I know you give multiple examples in the book, so this might be a bit unfair, but perhaps if you could take a couple of examples to share with our listeners a bit, this part of your argument of the houri as a. As an understanding of ideal femininity and feminine purity in modern English and French literature.
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Nareena Rustumji
Yes, you know, absolutely. There are plenty of examples. And it's the. It's, you know, and they are so rich. And it's really the point in my own research that I realized that I had a book and not just something to say about 9 11. And that is when you look at the hour, you have these kind of multiple multiplicities that come through the literature. And as you mentioned, there is, you know, Definitely a narrative and an explanation about the Hour reinforces this vision that Islam is over sexualized and that Muslim men can be kind of oppressors, and that continues. Yet what really surprised me was seeing the wide array of how the houri was used. And the first credit, we need to give that to the actual term houry. The credit needs to go to this French traveler, de loire, who in 1640 is in Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire. He leaves from Marseille and he writes these letters that get published in 1654. And this 1640 letter is where he actually mentions as a term in relation to the Turkish men who do not appreciate their charming wives and instead, you know, talk about these. These female beauties. And what's significant about these letters is it takes the hour outside of the earlier theological text into what I would call a kind of lived historical space that is a European traveler interacting with people, learning from them, and in a kind of anthropological way of reporting about them. So from that introduction, in the 1650s, in the next century, century and a half, you start to see the introduction of houry in literature. And this is very much falling in line with many of the translation projects and other terms that are coming through in English as well. And so with the letters of Horace Walpole, you have in 19, sorry, 1743, he makes the first kind of reference to houries in English and this kind of ridiculous parody of a letter. And in 1945, and another letter refers to Lady Granville as being as handsome as the Houries. And it's that reference that made me pause and investigate further, because he wasn't just drawing upon this idea of an expanding English world that was widening in its own outlook and drawing upon, you know, other locales and vocabularies to complement this particular. This particular noblewoman. But what he was doing was setting up a kind of structure where hungry became not just an artifact, but something that was more deeply rooted into the model. One of the best places to see how that model expands is in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in 1820, where we encounter Rebecca, who is Jewish, but is referred to as a houri, a few times in the text and is so captivating in her beauty that the Larboyan de Bois Guilbert cannot stop himself from falling in love with her. So you see these references irrespective of religion, irrespective of station, that is to say, you know, nobility versus a woman who is not as entitled. But I think the most, for the purposes just of our discussion today, the most interesting place is in Jane Eyre. So Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre really does refer to kind of larger issues about empire, patriarchy, polygamy, through the story of Rochester and his governess, Jane Eyre. And in one of the passages when Rochester is, you know, riding this carriage back with Jane Eyre, they had gone to town to go shopping so that she could buy fabrics for their upcoming wedding. And Jane Eyre kept on, you know, Jane Eyre, who is austere, she is principled. She kept on kind of being attracted by these austere, simple fabrics. And he kept on wanting to show her the, like satins and the silks and all the colors.
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Sher Ali Tareen
And.
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Nareena Rustumji
And in this exchange, this very flirtatious exchange, as he's trying to hold her hand, he makes this reference to the houris and her is possibly part of this. And she has a very sharp rebuke. And what you see in this exchange as gets teased out, I think, in many points in English literature are competing models of what a Christian purity would look like for women. On one hand, you have this kind of principled modesty that is not aligned with a kind of cosmopolitan luxury, and that would be represented by Jane Eyre, plain and simple. That's who Jane is. But Rochester is forwarding something else, which is the possibility of a heroine who is equally principled, but embraces the cosmopolitanism that is part of this widening world for the English. And so this is how the houri becomes this kind of universalized notion of femininity and feminine purity. It's a purity that accords with Christian values, but it's one that can embrace the kind of material, the material gains of a widening empire. And in that kind of tension, you see that also in American monthly magazines where there are references to American ladies who are houris. There are poems about houris. And it's, I think, very much in accord with this idea of how to maintain the purity, but also the allure that may have been recognized as being the allure of or. Or the allure that was recognized as being attractive about other places and other empires.
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Sher Ali Tareen
Now let's move to the other sort of, I guess, way in which the scatter of the Hoori gets mobilized and one of the more most interesting moments in this book was when you talk about the critique of what are seen as overly sensual conceptions of the afterworld in Islam that we find in Latin Christendom. In terms of Christian writers writing about the afterworld and finding it a bit too sensual in Islam, could you speak a bit about that intellectual trend and how might that have informed later European attitudes towards the houri as a symbol of, you know, Muslim male oppression or overly sensual sort of sexualities of Muslim male subjects, etc.
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Nareena Rustumji
Yeah, that, you know, that is that vision of the houri, and particularly of the Islamic afterlife or Islamic afterworld is so deeply rooted. And in fact, I think as I suggested before, it never really goes away. It's just one kind of vision about this very different cosmology. And that cosmology is really based in Christian understandings of the division between the material and the spiritual world. So in the, you know, Christian eschatology, the there, there's an afterlife. There isn't as developed an after world. And what I mean by that is that the, the future world is one that is understood as its proximity to the divine. It has this kind of spiritual component to it and it does not. It's not as populated with material realities or even the kinds of social relations you see in other eschatologies. By contrast, what we see in kind of Islamic eschatology is that you not only have an afterlife where you have relations with other people, there's the ability to meet ancestors, meet progeny, but that it is articulated through the terms of a material world. So there is good stuff, textiles, jewelry, food, food, drink. And in that larger landscape you have the the capacity to have sexual relations which is part of, part of the Islamic traditions of eschatology, but the. Also part of the tradition that is incredibly sensational for theologians of Latin Christendom, you know, on, on two counts. The first is that. That there is this kind of material dimension to perfect cosmology. But the second is just the kind of very plain and direct capacity for, for sexuality which becomes kind of abhorrent, disgusting in these texts, almost a kind of taboo. And the way that you see this play out in the theolog is the kind of reference to the perpetual virgins, the focus on Muhammad as a prophet and his kind of sexual appetites. But you also see it in, for example, the texts like Marco Polo, who in talking about the assassins, you know, refers to these beautiful women in paradise in the tales of Prester John in the 14th century, you really have this discussion of the invocation of perpetual virgins. And you see it, you know, as late as Lady Mary Montague, who in the Ottoman Empire, even though she's writing in the mid to late 1700s, is, you know, referring to these kind of celestial beauties. So this is the kind of difference and the tension that having, replicating and transforming the earthly world into cosmic perfection is something that is just not within the framework of Latin Christendom and the kind of intellectual history that's part of it.
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Sher Ali Tareen
Now let's move to another major segment of this book, which of course is on understandings of the concept which gets represented as the houri later in English in the Muslim intellectual traditions, especially in the pre modern period. The thing that I found quite interesting about this segment of your book is how conceptions of this concept of the houri shift as we shift from different genres, from the Quran to Quran commentaries to the Hadith, to other Muslim intellectual traditions, other traditions of the Muslim humanities, one might say. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how these understandings shift from genre to genre, how it gets more expansive and how different sort of genres have their own way of understanding and presenting this particular category.
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Nareena Rustumji
Yes, it's a great question and it's an important question because I think that the modest place to start and to end is to realize that there is no one singular meaning of lahori, even though that is the question that comes up in all, all the, all the literature, which is what are, what is Ahuri and what are her characteristics? But instead what we see are really multiple meanings and multiple frameworks through different literatures. So to start with, in the Quranic verses, I find that the hour is an incredibly. An ambiguous Reward. And it is not, as this chapter is called, a reward, it's not called the reward. You know, I think it's important to recognize that the houri is one of many rewards. And the ambiguity is there in the verses where you don't necessarily even have a clear sense of an actor. They take place. Often these verses are in the context of banquet settings. They invoke questions or they invoke the capacity of purity. And they also sometimes are paired with these male servants as well. But in these ambiguous verses, or because of the ambiguous verses, you really have a kind of a grappling with this very ambiguous and evocative reward. And you see that in the commentaries that try to address the terminology of the houri, try to clarify what the houry is in relation to women, what the houri is in relation to color. You know, you know, I'm always struck by the discussions about the color of an eggshell. So you have, even though this kind of dominant understanding of the houry as a female companion who is designated for a male believer in paradise in the Quran and the commentaries, that that ambiguity is still kind of built within, within the terminology. What happens, I think what's interesting in the Hadith and here the time frames are, you know, paralleling the commentaries as well, is you have a greater description that comes along with the houri, including a description in terms of the senses as well as the, the products of the hour, what she's made of, you know, what are the, what is the jewelry, what kinds of brocade, what her body is physically made of, which is this kind of opulent materials. By the time you have, really in the eight hundreds onwards, what I call these eschatological manuals, and what I mean by that is small narratives that take traditions of the hadith but put them within a narrative form and really form these kind of early tours of paradise. The houry becomes a kind of prime figure in paradise, and particularly the prime female of paradise to such a point that the houry becomes the most active, the active figure who speaks or beckons to the believer, who introduces the believer to his palace or his ground. So you have a kind of narrative development that happens through over several centuries within that narrative development. And kind of outside of that kind of theological, those theological genres, you also have in the fadal and jihad traditions, much more formulaic ways of designating the houri or marriage to the houris as being a reward for. A reward for battle. And so the cosmic marriage of the hour has its own kind of temporal and spatial framework. So that seeing the houri before death or seeing the houri in a garden before battle signals a particular intention, but also signals a kind of in between state, between earthly lived experience and what is promised afterwards. What I think that's really interesting in those traditions is that the houri becomes even more formulaic. So you don't necessarily have descriptions, that ambiguity is not there. All you have is this invocation of marriage as a reward. And I think it's interesting that some of these traditions also describe Christians who are so overjoyed with seeing this magnificent female figure on earth that they too convert. So, you know, it's one of those places, like when I noticed Rebecca was a houri in Ivanhoe, that you have this kind of crossing of, I guess, traditional or constructed religious lines and cosmologies. Beyond that, you also have mentions of the houri in literatures like Al Jahed's Risalat al Qiyan, which talks about sinking slave girls and invokes traditions, the kind of aesthetics of the houry, but also suggest that it could be possibly the other way around, that traditions of the hour are literally being inscribed in some of. On the bodies of some of the singing slave girls. So there's something really interesting that's happening in the that kind of literature as well, that's suggesting that in lived historical experience there was this kind of play with the idea and some of the symbols that were associated with the hoary.
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Sher Ali Tareen
Moving to another genre where you analyze this category, which is more contemporary articulations of the houri and place its place in Muslim eschatology in the present moment through things like, you know, cassettes and the Internet, and through the voices of what one might call popular preachers. I wanted to focus on one particular figure that I found particularly fascinating in this latter segment of your book. The famous or infamous, depending on the perspective, Anwar Al Awlaki and the way that he mobilized this category of the houri. Now, could you talk a bit about him and his understanding? And in this segment you also make, of course, a very important point about the media that people like him employed in transmitting the message. And why is that media also very important to your point, to your argument in this, in this part of your book?
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Nareena Rustumji
Yeah, this part of the book, you know, is more exploratory in nature. Because what I do in this part of the book is I start looking at videos, particularly YouTube videos, of which many are no longer accessible. So I've archived the ones that I've worked on. And what these videos do is they offer what I call tours of paradise. So earlier I talked about the eschatological manuals as this kind of precursor of a narrative that takes someone through different levels of paradise and hellfire and shows what is significant about the different levels of different punishments and the different rewards. But what I found with the YouTube videos is that they were creating the same kind of narrative for a digital age. And these two tours of paradise became kind of platforms for preaching. They're also platforms for developing. What scholars have really focused on is affective ties in digital communities. And the tours of the paradise can range, and I do cover a range of them in the book. Why Anvarlaki is so interesting is that his tours of paradise were quite developed in this kind of multi series volume. And in these volumes, he discusses the houri and the kind of capacity of the houri as a reward, as one of these rewards of paradise. And in one of the passages, what he does is he talks about a text by Ibn Al Nahas, one particular section, which is part of a larger piece in his own Ibn Nahas writings about what stops you from going on jihad. And one of the queries is the affection you have for your wife. And so Ibn Al has this kind of dialectic he has within this section where he shows that the capacity and the constitution of the houri is so much more superlative than the wife. So this text from the 15th century, Anwar Laqi takes and kind of folds it into his tours of paradise. And what's really remarkable about it is, you know, the ways that in the kind of multiple representations of these tours, you have the images that are associated with them. And so it becomes, you know, two interesting things come out of these very dynamic YouTube videos. First is this kind of present presentation of earlier text and exposition of them. But second of all is through the visualization of that argument and using the kind of techniques in the YouTube video that you can. Or he made kind of connections with more kind of contemporary practices. So that is to say, he uses the category of the houri both as a kind of commentator, but also invoking what becomes, you know, the. The 20th and 21st century jihad movements. What was interesting for me as I was studying many of these videos, is if we focused on the video itself as a text, we could do a formal analysis, which is basically what I do in the chapter. But at the same time, if you recognize that the site itself is not static, that it is constantly in movement and you're seeing what's popping up, what's on the right hand column in movement, you could see that even for him in particular, his more his explanations or expositions that aligned with more classical explanations of the houri would be accompanied with Jihadi material, you know, that was invoking affective ties, using the houri as a way to develop kind of community and you know, using representations of empire, for example, often through like video game imagery. So there was something very interesting happening, not just in his lectures, but how those lectures were getting reformulated, taken down, put up in some other form that I found it to be very dynamic and quite significant. This episode is brought to you by Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. It's best enjoyed over ice or in your coffee, delivering vacation vibes any way or anywhere you drink it. Find out more@ramchata.com drink responsibly Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands Pojoaaukee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
- [38:17]
Sher Ali Tareen
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Sher Ali Tareen
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Nareena Rustumji
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- [39:00]
Sher Ali Tareen
Learn more@WhatsApp.com you end the book on a very interesting question. The first as you mentioned in the book that the first chapter is about American responses to the question of what did Muhammad Atta receive? And you end the question with this very intriguing and the book rather with this very intriguing question of what do women receive in the afterlife after world? Not to collapse the very fine distinction that you make between the two. And you again go through some very interesting voices in contemporary Islam, a range of different voices and how they respond to that question. And you lay that out very clearly for the readers under particular subsections of what do different groups of Muslims scholars say about that? Again, could you perhaps share with our listeners maybe a few of these major trends or differences in terms of what do women receive? How that question is addressed?
- [39:59]
Nareena Rustumji
Yes, and it's an important question. You know, earlier I invoked the question that you see in the even in the medieval sources, which is, you know, what is a houri and what are her characteristics? But when I, you know, found myself talking about the houri with public audiences and also researching contemporary discourse, the question, the main question, the important question is what do women receive? And in this sense, this final chapter is paired with that first chapter to say that there is a vibrant scriptural interpretation, if you are looking at the right question. And so that question of what do women receive? That's why in the chapter, I wanted to make it as direct as possible and to lay out some of the possible answers. And so that could be misogyny, eternity with one's husband, a higher status than the houris or male houris. And I think what's really interesting about the range of answers is that they assume a different principle of equality. So if equality is understood as sameness, then women, as Fatima Mernisi would argue, receive a kind of misogyny, as do, as she argues in her work Women and Muslim paradise, that all women and all religious cosmologies receive misogyny. Paradises are designed for men, they're not designed for women. But if the principle of equality recognizes some capacity of difference or parity, a parody of reward, not equal reward, then you either have an interpretation that suggests that, you know, you get what you want in paradise, everyone, everyone has the capacity to feel joy and happiness and they get what they need. Or that. Or that. If you see the principle of equality as being, you know, equality is in sameness, you either get the argument that there can be true companionship. So focusing on the particular characteristics and gender of that companionship is not as significant as the meaning of companionship itself, or I was surprised to read the possibility of male houris as well. What's so fascinating to me about the range of those answers is this kind of question of what do women receive in and how those interpretations play out. Because I don't think you don't see that kind of question in the earlier sources. So, for example, in sources from, you know, the eight hundreds, you. You have questions about what is the placement of women. You know, if they've had multiple husbands or their fiance died, you know, who will they be paired with? Who will be the eternal companion. Yet those questions never assume the possibility of the language, a kind of more modern language about equality. And so I think the nature of the question and how it shifts in the 21st century is really remarkable.
- [43:33]
Sher Ali Tareen
So, Nareen, as a final question about this book, I just realized I didn't give a chance because the individual chapters are so fascinating and interesting. We just jumped right into it. But as A final question, perhaps if I could have you take a step back. How would you describe to the listeners the main sort of take home point that you want to communicate to the readers in terms of the contribution of your book to the study of Islamic, you know, Muslim representations of Islam and study of religion more broadly speaking? So how would you describe the sort of couple of major take home points in terms of what you've tried to do in this book to the readers and listeners?
- [44:15]
Nareena Rustumji
I think the way that I would articulate it is that in the Figure of the Houri we see a feminine figure who is so useful that the meaning of the houri cuts across time, cannot be contained by periodization or genre, and even, you know, expands beyond the idea of what is Islamic and what is not Islamic. And so it's particularly figures like this that allow us to take a more expansive approach in Islamic studies, but also allows us to look at what I see as kind of one of the fundamental themes that cuts across so many of the genres and the methods employed in this book, which is different ways of articulating asymmetries of power within text about men and women and trying to understand that within the framework of a cosmology where women offer so so much in terms of a model for ethics, a model for aesthetics, and are so useful that that model gets conflated with earthly women. And so in that sense, I think really what I try to do in these different chapters and Sher Ali, you were quick to pick up, you know, that every chapter not only has a different genre, but it has a different method to explore that genre that the Figure of the Houry has compelled across time. It has compelled across genre. And the book is a way to.
- [46:14]
Sher Ali Tareen
Explain how well, as we come to the end of our time. Narina, could you talk to us a bit about what the next project might be?
- [46:24]
Nareena Rustumji
Well, the next project is, you know, I've spent some time thinking about the material, the relationship between the material and the spiritual, not only in terms of especially Islamic studies and religious studies, but also in terms of the historical discipline, that relation between material culture and intellectual history. And having done that, you know, I myself want to go into a slightly different direction. And I have to say, you know, as I was thinking about this question, I've never been able to, to my satisfaction, answer the question that everyone asks each other, which is, what do you work on? In the early part of my career, I would identify my languages and my periods, and that didn't seem satisfactory. And that in another point in my career I would list what I consider to be my historical methodologies, cultural or intellectual history. And that was lacking specificity. At a certain point, I just gave up and I said, I just work on whatever I want to. And that was just dodging the question. And so it's really through the project, this houri project, that I was able to articulate that what animates me is this intersection of politics and aesthetics. And going forward, I'm going to be turning more to the aesthetics and getting back to the medieval roots to, so to say, my hands in the dirt and looking at more social, biological and technical histories.
- [48:03]
Sher Ali Tareen
Thank you so much, Narena, for your time and for this conversation and for this really wonderful book that I'm sure not only will spark many conversations and debates in the study of Islam, but will also make for an excellent text to teach in undergraduate and graduate courses. It's really exquisitely written. It's a really, really difficult material, but has been presented in really accessible and lucid ways. So thank you so much for your time today.
- [48:33]
Nareena Rustumji
Thank you for your questions and thank you for this wonderful conversation.
- [48:39]
Sher Ali Tareen
So this was my conversation with Professor Nareena Rustumji about her wonderful new book, the Beauty of the Hoodie. I hope you enjoyed this episode of your favorite podcast, New Books in Islamic Studies, which operates online through the New Books Network. I hope you will join us next time also for another fresh episode of nbis. Until then, this is your host, Sher Ali Tareen, signing off. Take care. Stay well and keep listening to new books in Islamic Studies.