Excessive in my mind. Luxenberg is *clearly* wrong in many respects, Morris is right about that. The Qur'an certainly uses hur'in to refer to women, in an intentionally sexual sense. However the leading 'Arabic' reading of hur'in ('big white eyes'), meaning beautiful women, is pretty much gibberish to my mind, and Morris seems sympathetic the (to my mind exceedingly unconvincing and forced) Devin Stewart attempt to explain it this way.
So if both the Arabic and Syriac explanations for this curious development suck, as I feel to be the case, then what are we to do with the houris?
Morris criticizes Luxenberg for arguing that the concept of virginal houris can be traced back to a Persian influence, arguing that Luxenberg's citation does not support that. He further says Luxenberg doesn't cite his claim that the Arabic usage is a borrowing from Syriac. Whether his citations make these points or not, I cannot say, but Arthur Jeffery quite cogently explained the entire usage as a *Persian borrowing through Aramaic*, in his epochal book on the foreign vocabulary of the Qur'an, and given that most of the Qur'an's paradisal imagery shows an intensive Persian influence, Jeffery's argument appears quite likely to me. Link!
https://archive.org/details/foreignvocabular030753mbpJeffery (p. 120) "it does seem certain that the word hur, 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 that Muhammad, under the influence of the Iranian (sorry can't transliterate Pahlavi) used it of the maidens of Paradise."
The houris appear very early in the Qur'an, and because Luxenberg wants to argue that these early texts are essentially Christian texts that have been misread (which cannot have a sexual paradise!), he sees the idea of houris as virginal women being essentially impossible on dogmatic grounds. But he's surely wrong on that. They really are designating sexualized female beings at the earliest juncture, no misreadings. Conversely, there is a powerful current of academia that wants to see the houris as an essentially internal Arabic development, despite the fact that the arguments for this, to resort to colloquialism, flat-out suck; they are just as weak as Luxenberg's approach. In my book it is clear that the Ephremic paradisal imagery was *dogmatically transformed* such that even by the earliest stages of quranic composition the Ephremic *sexual paradisal metaphors* had become understood as literal sexual realities in paradise. How this dogmatic transformation took place, and why there seems to have been such an intensive Persian influence on the process, remains one of the most fascinating and difficult questions in Qur'anic Studies! There are no convincing theories that I've seen yet. Feel free to volunteer some ....
Topic: Qur'anic studies today