Beards of Paradise: Hair in the Muslim Eschaton

Abstract

This chapter examines a late-medieval Arabic treatise by the Syrian scholar Ibrahim al-Naji (d. 900/1494) devoted to the question of whether the blessed in paradise sport beards, as well as repercussions of the discussion in a number of late-medieval Islamic compilations of eschatological hadiths. At first glance, al-Naji’s treatise may seem no more than an amusing oddity. However, as I argue, al-Naji does not use eschatological imagery to make predictions about a future afterlife (at least not primarily) but to cultivate an orthodox cultural and religious identity in the here-and-now. A seemingly obscure eschatological question thus can be shown to serve distinct ideological aims: al-Naji’s denial of the ideal of beardless beauty can be read as an instance of the age-old rejection of the Greco-Roman background from which Islam arose, as well as as a reorientation, championed by certain scholars of the Mamluk period, of Islam toward its Arabo-Semitic origins. My contribution thus seeks (1) to contribute to the study of Islamic eschatology as narrative mythology, and (2) to make an historical argument about the changing parameters in Arab-Muslim facial sensitivities and identity formation in the Mamluk Near East.