joshim

According to the paper Out of Sight and Therefore Out of Mind: Early Sunnī Islamic Modesty Regulations and the Creation of Spheres of Privacy, [^1] the fitna principle was not the primary concern of scholars who sought to regulate women’s dress. Rather, “by regulating physical and visual access to women’s bodies and by restricting the flow of sensitive information about them, Islamic law allowed people (primarily the male members of a woman’s family) to protect and control their social image and public reputation.” This was because:

“In classical Islamic society, as in many other societies, the reputation of a person and his or her family was a valuable and crucial asset in various areas of life. Thus, for example, a person’s reputation would affect his or her ability to forge economic and social relations and would determine a person’s trustworthiness for the purpose of testifying in court. Damage to a person’s good name could result in social ostracism and economic destruction. In early Islamic society, as in later periods, a family’s honor and reputation were linked to, among other things, the chastity of its women.”

The essay points to the fact that slave women were allowed to expose much of their bodies in public spaces because their chastity had no bearing on the reputation of their masters. This is noteworthy since “bodies of slave girls were not, by definition, less arousing than those of free women.”

Aside from challenging the view that women’s bodies are pudendal, hence sexually corrupting to those who see them, this also challenges the common belief that female veiling is obligatory by divine decree, and never up for interpretation. If it is a compulsory act of ʿibādat, why was it dependent on social status?

Historically, modesty regulations were subject to change:

“Moreover, modesty regulations suggest that scholars throughout the classical period were practical, and not completely doctrinaire, in determining what constitutes appropriate exposure of a person. They adjusted the modesty restrictions they imposed in accordance with what their society defined as a) each gender’s daily tasks and b) what constituted normal exposure between men and women.”

So what would Islamic modesty regulations look like today were this process to continue? The emphasis on female veiling would perhaps change significantly in a society which rejects the culture of placing undue focus on the chastity of a woman and linking the reputation of her family to her appearance.

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Tagged: #tradition #women #veiling #modesty

Notes:

[^1]: Alshech, E. (2007). Out of Sight and Therefore Out of Mind: Early Sunnī Islamic Modesty Regulations and the Creation of Spheres of Privacy. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 66(4), 267-290. doi:10.1086/524180.