Islam, Modesty, and Sex in the West - Part II

Miuccia Prada in an interview with GQ Magazine, talking about the popular television show, Sex in the City:
GQ: The thing is, too many women see that show and they think that’s how their life should be. Rather than create their life, they imitate a stupid show. And that’s the worst thing you can do. Right?

MP: Oh no, it’s terrible. Also the way of total and sure unhappiness. It’s what I say all the time to my girls in the office here: The more they dress for sex, the less they will have love or sex. These girls throw away so much energy in this search for beauty and sexiness. I think that the old rules were much more clever and better than the rules now. The trouble is, most people are not so generous. Everybody wants love for themselves. I hear this all the time from the women I work with. I hear them say, “I want, I want.” I never hear them saying what they want to give.

GQ: Do you tell them that?

MP: Yes, of course. They don’t listen. With women, the more unhappy they are, the more undressed they are. This is true. Dignity’s another very important part of this. Sex and the City is the opposite of dignity. You have to have dignity for your body-this is with men and women. You need to have dignity towards how you are, how you dress, how you behave. Very important. Men are always much more dignified than most women.

GQ: Why?

MP: Because women have the stress of being beautiful, of age and youth. Men don’t have all that. And with women, that stress causes a lot of mistakes and bad choices-a lot of not being their true self. You know, the older I get, the more I prefer to talk to old people. Old people or kids.”

Ms. Miuccia Prada, Italian fashion designer and entrepreneur, seems to understaand the idea that a female’s liberty is not directly proportional to her state of undress within society. In fact, as the above excerpt from her interview demonstrates, she seems to be advocating the idea that more clothes means more dignity. And she speaks not only of apparel, but also of how this ties into one’s behaviour and resulting inner happiness. How delightfully Islamic of her, but I still wouldn’t wait with bated breath for the release of Prada branded burquas, a horrifyingly consumerist prospect to be sure.

Prada, fashioner of not only clothing, but also of popular demand, essentially sings the praises of an Islamic mainstay, modesty, and it doesn’t sound oppressive or backward.  It’s a logical observation, and most rational people can probably see the winning points of her opinion. Possibly because it comes from a successful business woman and not some male dominated religious authority.  The idea of female modesty may perhaps be historically associated with a patriarchal framework in Judaism and Christianity, but as this article will briefly try to illustrate, the idea of female oppression through modesty carries no truck within traditional Islam.  This article will attempt to broaden the understanding of Islamic feminism, and how its particular injunctions for male and female modesty arise from a substantially different background than that of the Judeo-Christian one. It is my hope that a more developed understanding of Islam would give rise to the belief that it is not incompatible with feminism, but rather a happy solution to the ills facing women today.

More often than not, hijab is in the midst of the crossfire, a symbol of contention for those who would try to imply that Islam is not consistent with feminist aims. As part of the Islamic dress code, the issue of covering, commonly understood via hijab, has been used and abused and bandied about to suit various agendas. In these troubling times when it stands as a powerful and potent indicator of the Muslim presence, it is tempting to relegate it to be merely that: a reactionary symbol, a symbol of defiance. But to a Muslim, the primary value of hijab is not in opposition, but as it stands as an article of faith in obedience to the modesty enjoined upon believing women by God.

Many articles about Islam and women find themselves mired in a constant attempt to explain this dress code, frustrating because there is more to the Islamic understanding of modesty than common apologias made for hijab, which is perhaps the most apparent, outward symbol. Muslims find themselves embroiled in a debate between feminists and a patriarchy formed by a Judeo-Christian framework, not a Muslim one, essentially obscuring the fact that Islam is able to empathize with essential feminist grievances, and that the two share many common ideals and aims. The mistaken assumption that all three Abrahamic faiths are alike in some kind of patriarchal, male dominant aspect obscures a true understanding of Islam and its inherent feminism.

Naomi Wolf writes in her book, The Beauty Myth, that “the burden of a tale that for thirty-five hundred years has taught women where they came from and what they’re made of is not going to be shrugged off lightly in the next two decades. Men, on the other hand, since they made gods in their own image, feel that their bodies are essentially all right…Women’s flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.”  She has a point. Western civilization, proudly rooted in a Greco-Roman firmament, has inherited an anthropomorphist tradition that attributes human form to the Divine, most notably, male human form. From the ancient Greeks who worshipped a Pantheon of gods and goddesses with Zeus at its head, to the Christian belief that holds Jesus in a divine light, we can see the presence of an implicit androcentrism. While perhaps the Catholic Church’s Eucharist rite, which has bread and wine transubstantiated into the ‘Body and Blood of Christ’, most strongly inculcates the idea of a physically human god, this concept has been finely milled and blended into cultural bias as a whole.

This idea, many feminists and religious scholars agree, can be found in the undercurrents of the attack upon the female body throughout Western history. Wolf notes, “the thin ‘ideal’ is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution”, arguing that the present day subjugation of women is taking place via the denigration of the female body, which is treated as if it were something continually in need of improvement. This oppression is seen in certain Christian schools of thought in the Middle Ages, in the Victorian era where menstruation was considered a disease, as well as in the secular brand of misogyny exhibited today: the enslavement of women to absurd, manufactured ideals. While historically some sought to deny sex, others in the present day enfeeble its true power by saturating our culture with a dilute and toothless version of it. 

And as Shaykh Abdul Hakim Murad says in reference to this particular idea, in this way, ‘ours is not a Western tradition.’ Here I must excerpt his enlightening work entitled ‘Islam, Irigaray, and the Retrieval of Gender’, which brings to light the idea that:

“Islamic theology confronts us with the spectacular absence of a gendered Godhead. A theology which reveals the divine through incarnation in a body also locates it in a gender, and inescapably passes judgement on the other sex. A theology which locates it in a book makes no judgement about gender; since books are unsexed. The divine remains divine, that is, genderless, even when expressed in a fully saving way on earth… Allah is not neuter or androgynous, but is simply above gender. Even Judaism, which generally has fewer problems in this area than has Christianity, does not go this far. In the Eighteen Benedictions said by pious Jews every morning and evening, we find the words: ‘Cause us to return, O our Father, to thy Law,’ while in Deuteronomy 8.6, we read: ‘As a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.’ Such references to God as Father are less common in the Old Testament than the New, but they are still abundant, and are thorns in the path of gender-sensitive liberal theologians. When we turn to the Qur’an, we find an image of Godhead apophatically stripped of metaphor. God is simply Allah, the God; never Father. The divine is referred to by the masculine pronoun: Allah is He (huwa); but the grammarians and exegetes concur that this is not even allegoric: Arabic has no neuter, and the use of the masculine is normal in Arabic for genderless nouns. No male preponderance is implied, any more than feminity is implied by the grammatically female gender of neuter plurals. “

In this sense, Islam and the feminists are not at odds with one another. That particular patriarchal system that the feminist movement sought to overthrow does not quite exist in the Islamic world, and indeed the secular affinity to paint all religions with the same brush will only serve to deprive our societies of prevailing truths present in Islam. There are spheres within Islam which men and women may dominate unequally, but always to a net equity, to a balanced social harmony.
The sublime medium, the exquisite middle road that is advocated by Islam, enjoins modesty upon both sexes. It rejects both self denial and excess: sexuality is not seen as evil, but is meant to be expressed in a private domain, kept out of the public sphere. This concept of modesty often construed as oppression, the shackling of individuality and liberty, and even as sexual frigidity, is in fact, a stalwart supporter of exactly the opposite. Islam has no concept of a celibate priesthood or nunnery. 

Males and females can coexist and thrive in their overlapping spheres without the encumbrance of a traditionally Western categorization of gender roles. These narrow interpretations that the feminist movement fought to eradicate have no source in Islam. Women, whether the numerous female scholars that line the annals of Islamic history, or those who fought in the earliest battles of Islam, have as multidimensional an existence as men, exemplified best by the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. “A’isha was asked, after the Blessed Prophet’s death, what he used to do at home when he was not at prayer; and she replied: ‘He served his family: he used to sweep the floor, and sew clothes.’ (Bukhari, Adhan, 44.) ” These varied roles do not conflict with the concept of modesty, which serves to preserve each gender’s unique vitality.

Shaykh Murad enhances this understanding further by commenting that “the naturalism of Islam constantly insists that holiness does not emerge from the suppression of human instincts, but from their affirmation through regulation, so that the natural rhythms of the body and the awe with which we regard them are not to be ignored, but need commemoration in religious ritual.” Thus, sex in and of itself was not and is not considered evil, just as women are not held to be responsible for the ‘original sin’, an idea which ultimately mars their standing in any society that gives such a notion credence. The inherent goodness or evilness of sex is dependent on context. Between husband and wife it can be considered an act of worship, between two married people who are unmarried to each other, it is considered a grave sin.

Islam and Muslims have a greater relevancy and responsibility than ever, more so in this day and age than in any other point in time. In bygone days, there would not be such controversy or misunderstanding of the modesty that is enjoined upon men and women by Islam. The Islamic dress code and injunctions to preserve modesty, like that of the Jewish laws of tzniut, are part of a largely universal concept which was understood in most every society. It is only now, in our present times, when the idea of modesty has sadly become intertwined with abuse, oppression, and the subjugation of women, a mistaken connection that was perhaps a result of the feminist attempt to overthrow a stifling Judeo-Christian patriarchy. Inadvertently but undeniably, power shifted to multinational companies and media outlets, and we find ourselves in a similar situation, if not an exponentially worse one.

And although this article primarily focuses on Islam in the West, the fact remains that there are undeniable and unacceptable abuses inflicted against women in predominantly Muslim countries in the East, not to mention throughout the world. The truth is, however, that such practices have come into being only in the absence of a functional Islam, never because of it. It is our duty as Muslims in the West, to recognize where the evils of divergent cultures tarnish Islamic societal foundations, threatening men, women, and the children who will inherit their communities. It is important to recognize that these insidious cultural mores are ruining our societies, from East to West, from North to South, and how the implementation of a functional Islam would restore a renewed sense of harmony between the sexes.

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