“When a woman’s sex is in itself dynamic and alive, then it is a power in itself, beyond her reason. And of itself it emits a peculiar spell, drawing men in the first delight of desire. And the woman has to protect herself, hide herself as much as possible. She veils herself in timidity and modesty, because her sex is a power in itself, exposing her to the desire of men. If a woman in whom sex was alive and positive were to expose her naked flesh as women do today, then men would go mad for her. As David was mad for Bathesheba.

But when a woman’s sex has lost its dynamic call, and is in a sense dead or static, then the woman wants to attract men, for the simple reason that she finds she can no longer does attract them. So all the activity that used to be unconscious and delightful becomes conscious and repellent. The woman exposes her flesh more and more, and the more she exposes, the more men are sexually repelled by her. But let us not forget that the men are socially thrilled, while sexually repelled. The two things are opposites, today. Socially, men like the gesture of the half-naked woman, half-naked in the street. It is chic, it is a declaration of defiance and independence, it is modern, it is free, it is popular because it is strictly a-sexual, or anti-sexual. Neither men nor women want to feel real desire, today. They want the counterfeit, mental substitute.”
D.H. Lawrence in A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928:

Shockingly, the word ‘modesty’ doesn’t have the greatest connotations these days. If it has any connotations at all, for that matter.  I know, I know, I too am stumped at why visions of Amish women and ridiculously impractical bathing suits don’t immediately set hearts aflutter, but rather conjure up images of uncomfortable sand irritation and barn raisings. And that is not counting the huge part of the millennial generation that doesn’t even have the decency to feel so strongly as to hate modesty, but is instead almost obliviously flippant when confronted with the word: Modesty? That’s, like, so Little-House-On-the-Prairie chic!

I’m going to go out on a limb here, when I say that modesty is public enemy number one, precisely because it has the unfortunate reputation of being unsexy. Because, let’s face it: these days, nothing is anything unless it’s sexy. I can’t turn on the television without hearing screeching talk show hosts delivering one fashion fatwah after another: Will you take a look at the unsexiness of that too-long skirt! What’s the point of having legs if they don’t look sexy! We don’t care if you need them to walk, you have committed the utterly heinous crime of being unsexy! Don’t even think about calling yourself a woman, unless you plan on hiking that thing up a good sexy four inches or so!

You can see how, in this way, modesty got totally shafted. Never mind that these popular cultural antics have totally eliminated the ‘sex’ from sexy, and left us with only ‘y’.  In its new neighbourhood, Modesty lives next door to Sexual Repression and Female Sexuality Control, and takes long moonlight walks with its buddies Oppression and Subjugation. In this cultural environment, then, it is completely unsurprising why the concept of hijab is widely construed as a quaint foreign oddity at its best, a coercive tool of oppression at its worst.

“Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that will make for greater purity for them; and Allah is well acquainted with all that they do. And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; and that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands…. And turn to Allah altogether, O believers, in order that you might succeed.”  (The Holy Quran 24: 30-31).

What really catches my eye about this verse is not the blatant instruction contained at a first glance cursory reading. That is obvious. It is not even, contrary to popular sentiment, the principle that women are not instructed to cover for men, but for God alone. It is not a woman’s responsibility to keep a man’s lusts in check: it is his own, which is clearly evident in the verse above.

What is especially relevant to me, in a time where binging and purging have become norms, where the methodical and bloody reconstruction of healthy faces and bodies is seen as a necessity, where shopping is used as a means to fill soul-sized voids, are the words: ‘display their beauty’. It is assumed, stated unequivocally twice in this verse that the believing women are beautiful, ALL of them. Alternative interpretations of the particular Arabic word use ‘ornaments’ instead of ‘beauty’, implying the inherent attractiveness and desirability that has been gifted to the female of the species.  Notice how it doesn’t say that about men, although they too are told to guard their modesty.

Which brings me back to our popular ‘get sexy or die trying’ culture, a culture which is primarily operating on the idea that we aren’t sexy to begin with. A sort of lingering and rampant stupidity must be presupposed upon the people this idea is aimed towards, which are in this case, women. Cosmetic companies and the fashion Gestapo commit flagrant highway robbery when they attempt to steal away our self worth (not a stretch when you think of the billboards lining our roads these days), with enough bold-faced audacity to try to sell it back to us. This is mercantilism at its very worst. We are not just ugly when we don’t use cosmetic products or when we choose not to publicly prance around in varying states of undress. No, but we are apparently also stupid, otherwise why else would we be marketed contradictory advertising campaigns that seek to undermine our womanhood and our intelligence: Real women have cellulite, that’s why you need to get out and buy our anti-cellulite cream!

To Muslims, the idea that the human body can be hated is an anathema. Implicit in the above Quranic verse is the assumption that the body is beautiful; not to be hated, not to be scourged, not to be hidden away because of some inherent loathsomeness. And yet, the worship the body is again, an anathema, contained in the realm of the highest heresy. It seems to me, that the current social attitude fluctuates between these two extremes: we either must hate our bodies, or work with slavish desperation to earn an approximation of the worshipped ideal. Consequently, the only way to gain approval is via our interactions with the opposite sex, and our deficiencies in this arena must be compensated by equal helpings of self-hate and self-fixation. Self-worthiness is only established when we obtain male approval, as if being an innately desirable woman is something one must work towards, as if it were not already a God given right and a fact of our existence.

Having denied this, having ripped off every veil of self restraint, having thrown caution to the winds and indulged our desires to the extreme, we find that we missed the point entirely. Super-saturating public space with sex and fantastical nude human imagery has left most men and a lot of women, quite simply, bored. As feminist Naomi Wolf herself puts it, “the ubiquity of sexual images does not free Eros, but dilutes it.” And therein lies the rub: By using scantily clad women to advertise bland objects like washing machines, are we making a statement that the human body is not inherently sexual, but rather an asexual tool? By diluting Eros through the proliferation of these images are we somehow becoming more sexual? Are we paradoxically stripping the sexuality from the very bodies that we constantly try to make sexier?

In ‘A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue’, Wendy Shalit offers examples from Judaism and the return of many women to traditional Jewish laws of sexual modesty, or tzniut, a parallel to those found within Islam.. Her powerful argument for modesty illustrates how the lack thereof has afflicted women. She writes, “When modesty was given a sanction, woman not only had the right to say no to a man’s advances, but her good opinion of him was revered. Today, on the other hand, when our popular culture tells us that women should lust equally to men and feel comfortable about putting their bodies on display in coed bathrooms, on coed beaches - coed everything - women seem to be reporting that they feel only more at the mercy of male desire. The anorexic disfigures her body to become unwomanly because if she no longer has the right to say ‘no’, at least she has her body language at her disposal. So natural modesty has a way of reasserting itself, even in desperate and neurotic fashion. “

Thus, the anorexic today hates her ‘fat’ thighs, and strives with an almost monastic zeal to be rid of them. But thighs only become a fixation when they are seen in relation to other thighs. Cellulite becomes a disastrous concern when the public has a virtually unlimited supply of thighs to look at. This is merely a fact. Thighs that exist in a vacuum, wherein there are no other thighs to compare to, are not loathed blubber but examples of magnificent engineering. They are intrinsically wonderful as the conduits of blood vessels and nerves that innervate our legs, enabling us to walk and move around. They ought to be considered with high regard not only for form, but undoubtedly for function.

Before you think I am waxing poetic on thighs because of some obscene fascination, consider the Old Testament admonition: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath…Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” (Exodus 20:4-5; also Deuteronomy 5:8-9). Neil Postman actually wrote an entire book regarding the ill-effects of images projected through the television, and noted in ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness’, that “the God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking.” The Holy Quran is the Divine Word; the very act of reading it is proving an elevated degree of being. The Word is, then, necessary to counteract the pernicious imagery that permeates our cultural arena. It is the proliferation of the image, in magazines, on television and movies, that serves as a vehicle for the subordination and exploitation of women, and exceedingly of children and males as well, as corporations discover the vast markets of human insecurity that remain untapped.

And so, the truly empowering force of modesty can be seen in the woman who fully accepts her desirability, her femininity, her ability to attract a male, her feeling that her sex is too powerful to remain unguarded. This is an innate sense of the female’s power; it is a subconsciously realized truth, one that is so deeply connected with the female psyche that it cannot be labeled as conceit. Thus, the Islamic notion of hayat, or shyness, is like a veil placed upon women to protect them from the power that is their sex. Wendy Shalit writes that “it is usually a reflection of self-worth, of having such a high opinion of yourself that you don’t need to boast or put your body on display for all to see. A modestly dressed woman is one who is too important for ‘public use.’” If modesty is this self-confident, and self-confidence is so sexy, then isn’t modesty sexy?

Shalit elaborates upon this idea of modesty, opposing the popular misconception that it is anti-sex: “Conventional wisdom has it that the woman who returns to modesty is hiding, running away from sex. This is because today modesty is often confused with prudery. But it is not prudery. Indeed, promiscuity is really much closer to prudery…Promiscuity and prudery are both a kind of antagonistic indifference, a running away from the meaning of one place in the world, whereas modesty is fundamentally about knowing, protecting that knowledge, and directing it to something higher, beyond just two.”

Modesty protects the sacred element of human sex; ‘beyond just two’ is a union sanctioned by God, a marriage of souls to be protected by Divine laws and given status within society. And marriage is not, as many pop culturists love to trumpet, merely ‘a piece of paper’. Islam recognizes sex within marriage as an act of worship, and without modesty we cannot recognize just how holy the union between man and woman is.

We can therefore see how absurd it is to associate modesty with the repression of sexuality. If anything, modesty is the veritable bold, underline, and italics function that seeks to affirm and distinguish human sexuality, elevating it beyond animal procreation. We must understand all women were made beautiful and inherently attractive, and not just in the cliche way that cosmetic companies will have us believe. In order safeguard and protect what we have been given, we need to understand that we have indeed been given it in the first place.

Being beautiful and attractive, and yes, sexy is a Muslim woman’s birthright. And if the Holy Word of God says so, who are we to argue against it?

In Part Two of Islam, Modesty, and Sex in the West, the difference between Islam and the other two Abrahamic faiths with regards to feminism, gender constructs, and sex will be explored.