Whether the Descriptions of Paradise Are Literal

When heaven is described as having maidens and beautiful attendant youths, is this to be taken literally? The answer is yes and no — and philosophers generally can deal with a yes-and-no answer. There is a type of paradox here. On the one hand, it is not said that it does not mean that; on the other hand, it is certainly not said that it means it as we understand it here.

Paradise, according to the Muslims, is best described according to revelation as what no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and what has never occurred to the human mind. So there is an idea that we really cannot understand what it is, but we know that it is going to be the greatest experience of felicitousness. It is called saʿādah. And one of the thirteenth-century scholars actually said that sexual pleasure was the highest physical pleasure that God has given the human being — not the highest pleasure altogether, because they believed the mental was higher, but the highest physical one; and he actually said that this was to give the human being a taste, just for a moment, of a glimpse of the approximation of the delights of Paradise.

So the Muslims have never been prudish about those types of things. The Prophet (peace be upon him) was not a sexualist by any means, and people who say that do a gross disservice to his character, because he was not — and he could certainly have been, and even had he been, he would not have been faulted by his people. But he was not. His wives were elderly women; they were widows and orphans, with the exception of one.