The actual word in the Qu’ran is houri, which actually had no meaning in Arabic, being an East Syriac word for white raisins, and not an Arabic word at all.
The interpretation of the meaningless-in-Arabic-in-Mohammed’s-time word fell to Muslim jurists (That’s really all they have for clergy, you know, folks who interpret the Qu’ran, the Hadiths and existing fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) to make pronouncements of the content of sharia). They decided that it meant “the companions of paradise” whom they described as “chastely amorous virgins” with lots of commentary in the form of sensual descriptions of the delights of their companionship.
Actually that passage is one of the Qu’ranic passages that gives textual support to the firm tradition among Arab Christians that Mohammed, before setting up as a warlord and starting his own religion to support his conquests, had been a Christian missionary sent by the Assyrian Church of the East into then-mostly-pagan Arabia. The passage contains a lot of words which are nonsensical as Arabic, but perfectly good East Syriac, and seems to be derived from a Christian description of the delight of Paradise.
Interestingly the Bishop of Kirkuk at the time Mohammed began his preaching was one Mar Gabriel, and the tradition of calling the bishop of a city “the angel” of the city (evidenced in St. John’s Apocalypse, a.k.a. the Book of Revelations), persisted among Arabic and Syriac speaking Christians, so that “the Angel Gabriel” might have meant the Bishop of Kirkuk, rather than the Bodiless One who announced the Incarnation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, at least when Mohammed started writing.
(We Orthodox Christians under the Patriarchate of Antioch tend to know a bit more about Islam than is typical for Christians, since our brethren in the “Old Country” speak Arabic and have had to live among Muslims since the late 8th century.)
Thank you very much for that piece of history. My studies are in comparative religions and in my current duties, I spend a lot of time discussing the Muslim religion. I knew about the houris and the “white grapes” explanation. But I never thought about the different legends in terms of Syriac versus Arabic. Thank you very much.