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The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 6, 2009, Friday
HEADLINE: Islam's Afterworld; Reflecting on the Humanities
BYLINE: NINA C. AYOUB and EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN
BODY:
Seventy-two virgins for each man deemed a martyr. If there is a fixed idea in the West about paradise in Islam, it can be found in that numbered bevy, and little else. Yet while these women -- houris -- exist in Islamic ideas of heaven, their natures vary, their cultural history is complex, they are not just for martyrs, and they may appear as everything from numerous companions to one faithful wife. They are also not the only otherworldly beings sharing paradise with the devout -- thus deserving -- dead.
Islam's paradise seems a blissful if busy place, at least as revealed in Nerina Rustomji's intriguing new book, The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture (Columbia University Press). While there are other Arabic terms, heaven and hell are mainly rendered as al-janna, the Garden, and al-nar, the Fire, she says. "Nearly every sura, or section, in the Qur'an invokes the Garden and the Fire," writes the scholar, a historian at St. John's University, in New York. "References to the afterlife are so pervasive that the concept loses visibility as an article of faith." Rustomji's approach is grounded in material culture and the afterworld's complex relation to early Muslims' lives and struggles on earth.
Beyond the holy book, Rustomji draws on the Hadith, or compilations of sayings and deeds of Muhammad, early biographies of the prophet, eschatological manuals, and images of afterworlds and gardens in art and life.
She shows how Muhammad's visions of heaven and hell were ridiculed by other Meccans who dismissed the prophet, his revelations, and his followers. She also shows how such visions figured in battles Muslims fought later from Medina to take Mecca. Houris suddenly appear as battlefield nurses. They bring the world of paradise nigh, Rustomji muses, even though heaven and hell await the dead only after Last Judgment.
Muhammad also acts to bring the afterworld's reality to believers. In one evocative account, he is praying in the wake of a solar eclipse and makes a gesture of reaching and holding something invisible in his hand. They are grapes, he tells his people, examples of the never-ending fruits in paradise. Muhammad raises the "prophetic stake," Rustomji says, in his claims to have traveled to the afterworld. The prophet is awakened by the angel Gabriel and then travels the skies on a hybrid steed, Buraq, to Jerusalem. He communes there with Moses, Jesus, and Abraham in a kind of prophetic brotherhood, but soon asserts the primacy of Islam as he leads the other three in prayer. During the journey he bears witness to both heaven and hell.
While the Fire is a place where unimaginable pain is suffered in solitude, the Garden is a place of beaming, laughing, and society. In exhortations, believers are admonished to shun in this world what will be embraced in the next. For example, they are told they will be allowed such behaviors as drinking wine -- pleasure-filled but not intoxicating -- wearing silk, and using silver vessels.
In another respite from human want, the topography of heaven both reflects and transforms the Hijaz, the region of Mecca and Medina. No rivers exist in Arabia, Rustomji points out, but rivers of water, as well as milk, wine, and honey, flow freely in the Garden. Among the trees of heaven are the desert's lotus and acacia, but in paradise they bloom without their thorns. Needing no desert defenses, they are recurrent examples, she says, of aspects of heaven "patterned on earthly realities, but relieved of earthly burdens."
***
In 1997, Princeton University Press published What's Happened to the Humanities?, an influential collection of essays about the future of the humanistic enterprise. The tone was one of gloom and doom. "If we wanted to be truly apocalyptic we should even consider the possibility that nothing of much present concern either to 'humanists' or to their opponents will long survive," opined Frank Kermode in his upbeat contribution.
If the Winter 2009 issue of Daedalus is to be believed, a decade later, in the midst of a crisis in the job market, the humanities have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and are confidently striding into a sunlit future. The essays convey a "sense of assurance," according to the journal's guest editors, Patricia Meyer Spacks, a professor emerita of English at the University of Virginia, and Leslie Berlowitz, chief executive of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Citing data from the academy's Humanities Indicators Prototype, an online resource tracking trends in the humanities, Edward L. Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and a well-known historian, argues that the disciplines most closely identified with the humanities show signs of growth. Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton, is enthusiastic about how the Google Library Project and Google Book Search have revolutionized humanistic research, adding that the "occasional sight of a scanner's finger or other body parts in a Google Books image detracts little from the greatness of what this remarkable company has already wrought."
But, as Grafton points out, the abundance of online resources and the increased number of books published each year have precipitated a financial and spatial crisis for research libraries: "It's not quite apocalypse in the stacks," Grafton writes, "but it's certainly a time of shaking, if not of breaking, what had seemed permanent institutions of unquestioned value." Indeed, Grafton's ambivalence speaks to a more pervasive anxiety that still clings to the humanistic enterprise.
Humanists, it would appear from the Daedalus issue, feel the need to justify their existence. Michael Wood, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, writes that "we have, in the last 10 years or so, entered a phase of self-exploration and self-explanation based mainly on the assumption that others do not understand what we do or why it matters." Richard J. Franke answers the call, articulating a case for the humanities on the grounds that imaginative minds are best equipped to confront the practical and ethical challenge of shaping public policy. "The humanities can provide the context for fundamental questions bridging politics, science, ethics, art, and philosophy," writes Franke, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
But can the humanities still afford to provide that context? Noting that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts together made grants of slightly more than $200-million in 2007, Don Michael Randel, former president of the University of Chicago, quips, "There are defense contractors who have grave difficulty keeping track of amounts so small." Randel's outrage is, apparently, justified. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of labor relations and economics at Cornell University, and Harriet Zuckerman, a professor emerita of sociology at Columbia University, demonstrate that, all in all, the fiscal health of the humanities -- measured in terms of the number of jobs available and university-library expenditures -- suggests a patient on life support. "The major financial problems the nation is confronting have already begun to affect institutions of higher education adversely," Ehrenberg and Zuckerman conclude. "The benefits the academic humanities confer on society are not understood well enough, by a sufficient number, to justify the belief that much better days are ahead."
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