FAMILY LIFE
The World Turned Upside Down How the lack of Islamic modesty among our men and women affect our community BY NOOR SAADEH
W
hen I embraced Islam over 30 years ago, the contrast to my previous life was quite shocking. Suddenly I saw that everything in the world was upside down. Like most new converts, I thought that running away to live in a “Muslim” country was the only viable choice. Holding tight to my Islamic values in an immoral and immodest society would surely be like holding a hot coal, as so aptly described in “Sunan al-Tirmidhī” (hadith no. 2260). I quickly learned that Muslim societies had their own share of problems, albeit then without the disintegration of modest and moral values. It was better to stick it out here and share my newfound faith with fellow Americans, who surely would see the value, truth and logic of Islam as I did. And then, maybe together we could make a change. The world of the late 1980s now seems Pollyannaish compared with the realities of 2020. Could we ever have imagined a covered Muslimah being featured in Playboy (“Playboy’s interview with a Muslim woman mocks modesty and offends women,” Sept. 28, 2016)? Hugh Hefner, whose objectification of women earned him his fame and fortune and defined his time, opened up a Pandora's box and normalized women’s sexualization. This trend has only gathered more steam. Halima Aden, a Muslimah, who retired from this profession late last year, had graced the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue in a skintight burkini — the magazine’s most eagerly anticipated and arguably the most popular one (“Halima Aden Makes History as the First Model to Wear a Hijab and Burkini in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit,” April 29, 2019, https://swimsuit.si.com/). What next? Open a catalog, a newspaper, a magazine or an ad and, regardless of the location,
alluring female models are posing suggestively, marketing everything from cars to toothpaste, and others are alluding brazenly to subjects that were once only suitable for the bedroom. Network television still mandates some censorship, but Netflix et al has no such limitations. Vulgar language and
full-frontal male and female nudity, but more explicitly the latter, have become normal and enter our homes at all hours of the day and night. The more we are exposed in every sense, the less we are scandalized. What happened to modesty? Haya’ (7:26), a Quranic term commonly translated as bashfulness, decency, diffidence, honor, humility, inhibition, modesty, self-respect, shame, shyness or even timidity, would be severely condemned by feminists the world over. In our race to compete and assume
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equality with men, we have never abandoned the position of objectification — we have actually increased it! Has it ever been more of a man’s world? To a certain degree, some men also follow some of this trajectory by embracing tighter clothing, jewelry and nails buffed and shined. Walk down any city street during the summer, and you can see men sporting longish shorts and a shirt, while their female counterparts are wearing the minimum of clothing allowable. Women’s clothing seems to become more revealing every year. Just when we think it can’t get any worse, what’s fashionable proves us wrong once again. We cannot deny these effects on our men. Although there is no known published record of pornographic consumption within our community, Islamic scholars have reported an increasing number of inquiries related to this now common behavior and widespread epidemic. The antonym of haya’ is not just immodesty, but lewdness and obscenity (Sarah Gulamhusein, “Pornography Addiction: An Epidemic”, https://inspiritedminds. org.uk/, March 27, 2108). Yet somehow Muslimahs must still uphold a man’s honor. The Quranic mandate to lower one’s gaze (24:30), which was directed first toward men, seems impossible today. Our scholars admonish Muslim wives to dress and behave like women of ill repute at home to keep their husbands happy and prevent their eyes and actions from straying. And yet such advice clearly violates the very definition of haya’! These women and their non-Islamic lifestyle have become our new role models. Most troubling of all, how does the young mind interpret and understand all of this? One of the Quran’s miracles is its eternal preservation, perfect relevance for all times and societies (15:9, 56:77-80, 85:21-22) and unchangeable rulings. In the early 19th
