“In my family, my colleague told me proudly, “we had so much hayaa’ that my mother and all the girls would come to every prayer, even when we were menstruating. If we couldn’t pray, we would get dressed for prayer and sit in the row behind the men so that when our father and brothers finish praying, they would see us sitting there and have no idea that we weren’t able to pray because of our menses.”
Hayaa’ is an Arabic word that is often translated as modesty, but it has the broader meaning of “a respectable sense of shame.”
In Islam, true hayaa’ does not involve women being ashamed of their normal bodily functions nor does it involve women putting on pretenses to appease males or to maintain a false image. But unfortunately, in many cultures of predominately Muslim countries, the term has been so misconstrued that not only does it refer almost exclusively to the actions of women, it also defies the guidelines of Islam itself.
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet (PBUH) said, “Faith (Belief) consists of more than sixty branches (i.e. parts). And Haya (This term “Haya” covers a large number of concepts which are to be taken together; amongst them are self-respect, modesty, bashfulness, and scruple, etc.) is a part of faith.” (Bukhari)
Abandoning False Modesty
We Are All New Muslims Perhaps, one effective way to overcome the false modesty that is rampant in many Muslim families and communities is for us all to embrace the idea that, on some level, we are all learning about Islam for the first time. Whether we accepted Islam on our own or were born into a Muslim family, living as a Muslim must be a conscious choice.
Thus, if Muslims genuinely wish to live according to the guidelines of Islam, we must take time to study the religion for ourselves and filter from our minds and hearts false teachings, whether the falsehood came from anti-Muslim media propaganda or from the sincere efforts of our parents and cultural community who thought they were teaching us Islam.
Talking Sex: Embracing True Hayaa’
Sex is likely the most misunderstood subject pertaining to hayaa’ in Islam. Perhaps the misunderstanding has occurred because by nature sex is such an intimately private act, or perhaps the misunderstanding has occurred because when sex is engaged in outside the marriage bond, personal and social disasters can result, thus making sex one of the most feared and avoided topics in many Muslim communities.
However, the one whose very life embodied Islamic hayaa’in the most exemplary form, Prophet Muhammad himself, did not fear or avoid this subject. In fact, in an effort to teach the proper understanding of this subject and the Islamic guidelines of physical and spiritual purity, he customarily discussed sex with both men and women, even when both men and women were present.
Concerning men’s sexual intimacy with women, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said,
“When anyone sits amidst four parts (of the woman) and the circumcised parts touch each other a bath becomes obligatory”. (Bukhari and Muslim).
Also, the Companions of the Prophet customarily asked about this subject, as in the famous narration when Umar ibn Khattab asked the Prophet about entering a woman from behind (through her vaginal area), and Allah revealed a verse on the subject (Sunan Al-Tirmidhi, 2980).
Additionally, the female Companions also asked the Prophet about this subject. The female Companion Umm Sulaym said, “O Messenger of Allah, surely, Allah is not shy of the truth. Is it necessary for a woman to take a ritual bath after she has a wet dream?” The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) replied, “Yes, if she notices a discharge.”
The female Companion Umm Salama then covered her face and asked, “O Messenger of Allah! Does a woman have a discharge?” He replied: “Yes, let your right hand be in dust, how does the son resemble his mother?” (Bukhari).
If Allah, His Messenger, and the male and female Companions were not shy to discuss truth, even in the subject of sex, why then are we? Do we imagine that our personal and cultural hayaa’ is greater than their personal and spiritual hayaa’?
Glorified Ignorance and the Dangers of False Modesty
“I thought I was dying,” my friend told me as she recalled her first menses. “I had no idea what was happening to me.” Another friend told me how a family member ran from her husband on wedding night because she had absolutely no idea what he wanted from her and why he was removing his clothes.
One of my female teenage students asked me, “Why do some girls sit outside the prayer area when it’s time to pray? And what are pads for? What do you do with them?” And this student already had the physical signs of puberty, which means she could start menstruating literally at any moment. Though some of us might find these incidents “cute” or funny, the truth is that they represent a very dangerous trend of “glorified ignorance” in some Muslim communities.
The glorified ignorance trend defines modesty as an exclusively female trait, and the more ignorant a woman is about her body and sexuality, the more revered and “evident” her modesty is.
However, men are expected to be anything but modest, often to the extent that they are expected and even encouraged to blatantly disobey Allah’s command to come not even close to Zina (fornication or adultery). What has resulted is cultures of controlled, subjugated, and oppressed women, where the honor of the family or tribe rests with the “glorified ignorance” and asexuality of the women adhering to cultural codes of modesty.
But even in members of these cultures who have immigrated to the West and sought to abandon misogynistic definitions of honor and modesty, the negative effects of culturally-reinforced false modesty continue to disrupt marriages.
Often, both men and women remain sexually unsatisfied because while a woman’s ignorance of her body and sexuality might be sexually arousing to some men on wedding night, this glorified ignorance gets old and tiresome over time, especially for those who wish to stay within the limits set by Allah and derive sexual satisfaction from only their spouse.
Tragically, the women themselves suffer psychologically, as many feel ashamed of their sexual desires and view it as “inappropriate” to speak about what arouses them or to initiate any sexual contact.
Unmarried girls (and sometimes boys) from cultures that glorify ignorance often pray while they are in janaabah (a state of ritual impurity) because when they have a wet dream, they have no idea they need to make ghusl (ritual bath) before praying. Many of them do not even know what sexual ejaculation or orgasms are. And naturally, if a young married woman from a culture of glorified ignorance has no idea about sex on her wedding night, it is only natural that, after having intimacy, she won’t know that she has to take a ritual bath before praying again.
Moreover, some Muslim girls are shunning Islamic relationships altogether in favor of the “less judgmental” non-Muslim culture of male-female interaction. “I would rather deal with non-Muslim guys,” a teenage girl told me. “At least with them, I won’t feel judged for what I think or feel.”
“You won’t believe what just happened,” the assistant teacher, who was elder to me and had immigrated to America from a predominantly Muslim country, said as she entered the staff room of the Muslim school where I worked.
The other teachers and I smiled knowingly as we looked toward her. We had grown accustomed to the comical stories that happened daily between teachers and students, especially in the elementary section.
“The teacher asked the second-grade girls what they want to be when they grow up,” the assistant teacher continued as she pulled out a chair and sat down at the table where we were sitting. “And one-by-one, each girl talked about what she wanted to be.”
We chuckled, anticipating that one of the students had said something the teacher hadn’t expected.
“Some girls said, ‘I want to be a doctor when I grow up,’” the assistant teacher said, mimicking the child-like voice of the students. “Some said, ‘I want to be a nurse,’ and one girl said, ‘I want to be a firefighter.’”
“And then one girl said the strangest thing,” the assistant teacher said. We grew quiet, light smiles on our faces as we awaited the punch line to the story. The assistant teacher twisted her face and raised her voice slightly to underscore the oddity of the girl’s statement: “When I grow up,’” she mocked, “’I want to be a mommy.’”
There was laughter from me and other teachers. “Aww, maashaAllah,” I said, still smiling. “That’s so cute.” Other teachers nodded in agreement and shared the same sentiment.
“Cute?” the assistant teacher repeated as she glared at me, her eyebrows furrowed in disapproval. The darkness of her expression quieted me, as it did the others, and we looked at her in confusion.
My smile faded as I met the woman’s gaze and searched my mind for what I had said wrong. “Yes,” I said tentatively, thinking perhaps the assistant teacher had misunderstood me. “That’s really cute that she wants to be like her mother.”
“No,” the assistant teacher disagreed, her face contorted at she looked pointedly at me. “That’s not cute. That’s disgusting.”
Silence fell on the staff room at the intensity of her last word. Even those who were not participating in the conversation stopped their own discussions to turn toward us.
“If she wants to be a mommy when she grows up,” the assistant teacher said, disgust still in her voice, “all she’ll do every day is think about sex.”
Though it has been nearly ten years since the discussion, I remember the conversation in the staff room as if it were yesterday. I remember how no matter how much I, as well as others, tried to explain to the woman that the little girl’s dream had nothing at all to do with sex, the woman was persistent: the poor little girl had been so corrupted by “American thinking” that her only dreams for the future lay in fantasizing about sex day after day until she could bring it into fruition by becoming a mother in real life.
At that time, I was speechless in shock. Did this woman really imagine that a seven-year-old girl’s desire to be a mother came from anything other than a pure, innocent admiration of the girl’s own mother?
“Well,” the assistant teacher said to me in frustration at the end of the conversation, “either you have hayaa’ [modesty or a sense of shame] or you don’t.”
Istared at her in disbelief. Was she saying what I thought she was?
“And if you don’t have hayaa’,” she said, “there’s no way for you to understand where I’m coming from.”
My mouth fell open, and even some of the teachers from the woman’s home country spoke up in disagreement with her.
The assistant teacher shrugged smugly. “That’s the problem with Americans. They don’t have hayaa.’”
“You can’t say that,” some teachers protested, shaking their heads emphatically in disagreement.
“Oh really?” the woman said, her voice suggesting that she would prove to all of us that Americans had absolutely no modesty or sense of shame.
“There was one American woman who was Muslim,” the assistant teacher said, “and when she was pregnant, she actually told her children!”
Some of us laughed at the ridiculousness of the assistant teacher’s perspective.
“And do you know what she did?” the assistant teacher asked, her tone suggesting that this would surely make us understand. “She let her child touch her stomach and feel the baby moving.”
Silence fell in the staff room. Was this woman serious?
“And what’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Because now the child is going to be thinking about her parents having sex!”
Let’s Not Talk About Sex
I left the staff room that day in a daze. I could not fathom what cultural and personal experiences could lead a person to obsess about staying away from the topic of sex so much that she saw it in places where it wasn’t present at all…and then imagined that her phobia of sex was actually an indication of a high level of modesty and Islamic spirituality.
“I’m an indigenous American,” I told the woman that day, “and most of my extended family are Christians. I went to public school and heard and saw many inappropriate things,” I said. “But I’m telling you, I’ve never in my life heard of an American thinking that a little girl wanting to be a mother or parents telling their child they’re expecting a baby has anything at all to do with sex.”
I shook my head. “If anything,” I said, “it shows how your culture obsesses about sex.”
How Did We Come to This?
I wish I could say that the conversation with the assistant teacher was the last time I heard Islamic modesty connected with avoiding the topic of sex at all costs. But it wasn’t. Time after time I continued to hear about “let’s not talk about sex” so much that I felt as if I’d never heard sex talked about as much as it was from the “anti-sex” Muslim circles. In Islamic classes, in fatwas, in discussions of women’s dress—you name it—these Muslims couldn’t get enough of discussing how to not think about sex, which of course meant that they thought about it more than the average person.
I myself have left certain Muslim classes and religious gatherings to protect myself from the corruption I feared I would suffer if I remained around such immodest, inappropriate thinking in the name of “Islamic modesty.”
“My goodness! Who thinks of such things?” I found myself often saying after hearing of yet another way Muslims should dress or carry themselves [that went far beyond what Allah commanded], just to avoid inciting others to think about sex.
How did we come to this?
Only Allah knows. But my experiences in different Muslim cultures and communities in America and abroad have given me a glimpse into what might be happening to this ummah as it relates to the beautiful blessing that Allah has given the husband and wife in the form of sex and intimacy
