In Islamic paradisiacal depictions, imagery of lush gardens or plentiful banquets are often accompanied by description of the houris (huriyah) as feminine ethereal virgins promised to the believer in the afterlife. Variously translated as "splendid companions of equal age", "lovely eyed", or "pure beings" of “modest gaze,” houris occupy an ambiguous space between the human and nonhuman insofar as they retain semblance to a chaste, beautiful woman and yet are typically described as translucent and/or incapable of producing menses. While Qur’anic discourse on the houris mentions them in passing, many medieval Islamicate romances adopt the figure of the houri as a way of defining the beloved’s beauty and noble lineage. In this paper, I analyze an early example of this adaptation of Qur’anic presentations of paradisiacal houris to a female, earthly beloved in ‘Ayyuqi’s tenth century Persian romantic epic Varqa & Golshah. I argue that descriptions of the beloved Golshah’s houri lineage (huran-nezhad) define the ideal feminine through her respective whiteness, chastity, and ethereality, and as such illustrate anxieties surrounding purity in medieval Islamicate literary discourse. I begin my analysis by examining the Qur’anic passages and pre-Islamic poetry that mention houris. Following Jacob and Neuwirth, I maintain that imagery of the houris as figures with dark, lustrous eyes can be seen in both pre-Islamic banquet poetry and paradisiacal Qur’anic depictions from the early Meccan period. Such figures, I argue, tend to not be overtly gendered although they are typically depicted as a reward for the solitary male poet or believer. The houris of Qur’anic discourse, moreover, are distinctly nonhuman actors whose mention fades with the later Meccan and Medinan descriptions of a communal and familial paradise. Yet against Neuwirth and Lange, I do not suggest that this shift in Qur’anic paradisiacal imagery led to the diminished presence of houris in popular imagination and instead point to houris’ literary afterlife in medieval Islamicate literature, notably in the romance. Through a close reading of descriptions of Golshah as a houri or of houri lineage in ‘Ayyuqi’s Varqa & Golshah, show how the romance fleshes out the image of the houri and makes houris human through physical depictions of idealized femininity and whiteness. These depictions recycle the image of the houri in order to classify an ideal feminine type, which further displays anxieties around gender, ethnicity, and purity present throughout the work.