Modesty And Gender In Islam: A Reconciliation

In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Grantor of Mercy.

Islam centralized certain moral qualities that serve a foundational role upon which all other virtues can be built. Ḥayāʾ (healthy shame) is without doubt from among these qualities, so much so that the Prophet ﷺ deemed it the very hallmark of Islam, saying, “Every religion has its signature character trait, and the signature character trait of Islam is ḥayāʾ.”¹Sunan Ibn Mājah (Cairo: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabīyah, 2011), no. 4181; authenticated by al-Albānī. Ḥayāʾ carries the meanings of conscientiousness, shame, modesty, bashfulness, and all related feelings that deter a person from behaving indecently. A thorough research paper by Yaqeen Institute expounded on ḥayāʾ being a hardwired, defining characteristic of humanness (male and female), a quality of God Himself (genderless), and a virtuous hallmark of all His prophets and most pious servants. But after establishing these necessary foundations, does Islam allot greater importance to the ḥayāʾ of women than men?

There is no doubt that within the context of social relations, enjoining ḥayāʾ upon women is more pronounced in Islam’s sacred texts than in men. For instance, while modest attire is necessary for both genders, it is known in Islamic law that women must cover their bodies in public to a greater extent than men. This has even been considered self-evident for nearly all of human history, and today’s secular discourse does not magically disprove the civilizations that for millennia concurred on this and were beneficiaries of it.

But how do we reconcile expecting greater ḥayāʾ of women with the presumption of gender equality ensuing from God’s fairness? A Muslim should always recall, before anything, that justice, mercy, and wisdom permeate everything that God prescribed. Unless we operate from that paradigm, a person will struggle to seek out something while suspecting that it does not exist. And while some of the equity, wisdom, and mercy of the Shari’ah may be discernible, a Muslim also recalls that only God is the All-Knowing and Most Wise, and this necessitates that full wisdom is forever beyond our reach as finite beings. Furthermore, some rationalizations –at times offered by Muslims- on the legal distinctions between genders in Islam are empirically indefensible, and others are outright rejected by Islam’s scriptures, and often traceable to other traditions.

One of the most compelling ways to appreciate the female-specific code of modesty in Islam is to notice how it ensures women’s best interests before anyone. This can be explained in many ways, but let us start with males being considerably more sexually driven than females:

1. Gender ideologues aside, scientists all link testosterone to sexual urge, and studies suggest most men think about sex far more often than most women.
2. 72% of all porn viewers are men, female nudity in films eclipses male nudity, 80% of the world’s prostitutes are female, and between up to 80% of men have paid for sex, depending on the country (no comparable data exists for women, and most crime reports do not control for sex in reporting prostitution arrests, given that they are almost universally male solicitors).
3. Female activists occasionally call for “sex strikes,” which involve depriving men of sex in order to force their hand on a political or domestic cause. It remains difficult to imagine a group of men getting together to say, “We are going to deprive our wives of sex until they [fill in the blank],” for obvious reasons.
4. Men lead in sexual scandals by a large margin, and regularly succumb to sexual infidelity despite the financial ruin at stake, and the peril of jeopardizing their public image or career forever. Can we easily recall a powerful female public figure who was exposed in a scandal for being found with a prostitute in a hotel?

All this is not to demonize men, but to realize the truth in the Prophet’s ﷺ words, “I have not left behind any test more harmful to men than [their lust for] women,”²Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 5096; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, no. 2740. and the need to account for those who will inevitably fail this test, and invite ruin upon themselves and others in the process. Given that sex has such a formidable command on males, and that their nature is considerably more aggressive, is it unreasonable to suspect that many men will try to seduce or rape women? The reality is that women will be the primary beneficiaries of promoting ḥayāʾ as they are the primary targets of sexual aggression. Ḥayāʾ, therefore, represents the first line of defense in these battles, the outer walls of her space, and the silencer of any whisper of hope in her pursuer’s mind (as well as the whisper of her own lower appetite, calling her to illicit sexuality). As Allah says,

“…so do not [O women] be soft in speech, lest he whose heart is diseased becomes hopeful.” [Surah Al-Ahzab: 33;32]

This should never be misconstrued as victim-blaming (rape is a capital offense in Islam),³See: Hina Azam, Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 99; see also: Sunan al-Tirmidhī, no. 1453-1454. nor for positing that women are the sole guardians of chastity and virtue (Islam punishes both fornicators equally and men are also exhorted to maintain ḥayāʾ).⁴“The adulteress and the adulterer—whip each one of them a hundred lashes, and let no pity towards them overcome you regarding God’s Law, if you believe in God and the Last Day. And let a group of believers witness their punishment.” Qur’an 24:2. A woman’s ḥayāʾ is but part of a holistic framework that calls for joint responsibility, but at the same time refuses to assume a utopian fantasy where everyone actually heeds that call.⁵Adapted from: https://medium.com/occasionalreflections/on-gender-diversifying-our-spaces-687f7277c962. This “angelic milieu” did not exist even in Madinah during the Prophet’s ﷺ era, which housed the “best community ever produced for humanity.”⁶Qur’an 3:110. It is therefore even more necessary in an age where immodesty, self-aggrandizement, the hyper-sexualization of women and young girls, extramarital relations, and sexual assault are rampant. While promoting ḥayāʾ—in all members of society—is not a comprehensive solution for all this, it is an indispensable component of the arsenal that must be leveled against it.

In a similar vein, Dr. Alastair Roberts writes on males having particular tendencies to certain vices such as violence when meaningful relationships like marriage do not exist to curb them. Without it, he argues, negative patterns of male behavior tend to arise: they seek to actualize their sense of male identity by demonstrating external agency, albeit in a destructive way. Sadly, between depression and gender-based violence, women suffer most of all from these toxic phenomena. A robust marital culture sets norms of behavior by harnessing male power to serve and protect, and utilizes the male’s sexual appetite to cement marriages and grow families. This applies to the unmarried as well, by socializing them into self-control, maturity, and not objectifying the opposite sex—in addition to spiritual discipline and other forms of impulse regulation taught by Islam. Nour Goda, an Islamic activist for women’s rights, explains, “It’s not that men are unable to commit—it’s that they don’t have to. This is the consequence of the sexual revolution wrought by secular feminism. There was a time during which women made men man up. Today, we give them everything they want, for free and without accountability.”⁷جوده, “It’s not that men are unable to commit—it’s that they don’t have to,” Facebook, December 20, 2017, accessed December 12, 2020 and slightly adapted with author’s permission (private account).

Therefore, the disproportionate enjoinders for ḥayā’ across genders which we may notice in the Qur’an and Sunnah, particularly in the realm of interpersonal relations, is part of a divinely balanced mechanism that holistically guards society against imploding into vice and rendering its most delicate sectors vulnerable as a result.

And Allah knows best, and may His finest peace and blessings be upon His Messenger, Muhammad .

Related:

– Podcast: Beyond The Matrix – Masculinity And Modesty In Islam | Imam Tom Facchine

– The Purpose of Hijab: Reclaiming The Narrative