The head-cover and modesty

The claim is that modesty in Islam is a one-sided levy, imposed on women so that men need not govern themselves.

The order of the verses

The instruction to women appears in Qur’an 24:31. The instruction to men appears one verse earlier, at 24:30, and it comes first: men are told to lower their gaze and guard their chastity. The command to men is not an afterthought appended to soften the command to women. It precedes it.

The Prophet made the male obligation concrete. A man who glances once at a woman is excused. To look again, deliberately, is a sin. The duty is placed squarely on the man’s own eyes and his own restraint.

What follows

Modesty is therefore a shared standard, binding on both, with the man’s obligation stated first. Any presentation of Islamic modesty that loads the whole weight onto women has omitted 24:30, and it has usually omitted it because the men doing the presenting found it convenient to.

That omission is not only a polemicist’s habit. It is a habit inside Muslim communities, where the enforcement energy directed at a woman’s clothing has no counterpart in the energy directed at a man’s staring. The complaint that women carry this alone is frequently an accurate description of how a particular community behaves. It is a false description of what the text requires.

The remaining objection

The argument that the head-cover is impractical, that a climate is hot, that it is inconvenient, is an argument about difficulty. Difficulty is not the same as arbitrariness, and a command is not refuted by the observation that keeping it costs something.