Only The ‘Pure’ Survive: Patriarchy, Religious Selectivity, And Women’s Honor – OpEd

Patriarchy systematically denies women basic respect and dignity by defining whose honor and social worth merit protection and whose do not. Even claims that appear protective often operate on gendered assumptions, assigning moral value according to adherence to prescribed codes of chastity, obedience, or religious conformity.

Take the following example. During the anti-fee hike agitations at Aligarh Muslim University in August 2025, female students who abstained from prolonged participation or expressed ambivalence were publicly branded as dalals. This targeting operated through a continuous churn of Instagram reels, WhatsApp clips, and live shaming rituals, amplifying the social censure of women who refused to perform the expected militant activism. 

One prominent female protester, who wore an abaya yet opposed extending the agitation, became a central target of AI-morphed videos, parodies, and relentless online mimicry. A student leader posted a reel invoking Islamic teaching: actions like these are claimed to go against the principle that one should not make false accusations (tohmat) against a believing woman (momin aurat), thereby bringing her shame (ruzwa) in society. This selective invocation of Qur’anic law mirrors the patriarchal logic embedded in texts like Surah an-Nur, where protection from defamation is granted only to women already inscribed as chaste, believing, and honorable, while others remain exposed to moral policing and social sanction. In contemporary practice, such claims of religious legitimacy function to discipline female behavior, policing desire, presence, and participation in public life through a highly selective, misogynist logic that denies equal protection and respect to all women.

Surah an-Nur constructs a very particular vision of femininity that receives divine protection from defamation, and this protection is carefully delimited. The text introduces a sharp contrast between women marked as chaste and those associated with sexual transgression. For example, verse 2 establishes a harsh punitive order: “The adulteress and the adulterer – whip each one of them a hundred lashes.” Adultery refers to sexual relations outside the sanctioned framework of marriage, whether through premarital or extramarital intercourse. This stigma around adultery the ground by dividing the social body of women into two categories: those who fall under the stigma of sexual sin and those who remain within the bounds of purity. 

Verse 4 explicitly states: “Those who accuse chaste women, then cannot bring four witnesses, whip them eighty lashes, and do not ever accept their testimony.” Here the law against defamation applies only to muhsanat i.e. women who are already recognized as pure, believing, and respectable. The presumption of innocence is therefore selective: only women inscribed in the register of chastity receive this shield. Others, those associated with adultery, prostitution, or even suspicion, fall outside this safeguard.

This selective immunity becomes sharper in verse 23: “Those who slander honorable, innocent, believing women are cursed in this life and in the Hereafter.” The triple qualification – honorable, innocent, believing – reveals the textual construction of the ideal feminine model. Such women embody modesty, piety, and conformity to divine law, and therefore slander against them invokes severe divine wrath. The verse implicitly excludes women who lack these attributes from the same level of protection.

Verse 26 makes this exclusion explicit: “Bad women are for bad men, and bad men are for bad women, and good women are for good men, and good men are for good women. Those are acquitted of what they say.” Purity becomes relational, tied to marital pairing and moral reputation. The “good woman” is acquitted from slander only because she belongs in the moral economy of good men and good believers.

Further, the instructions in verse 31 shape the embodied practice of this feminine ideal: believing women must “restrain their looks, and guard their privates, and not display their beauty except what is apparent thereof, and draw their coverings over their breasts.” Modesty here is performative proof of chastity, reinforcing the link between visible behavior and eligibility for protection. Women who dress “immodestly” are consequently made vulnerable to patriarchal defamation and harassment.  

The stories of Noah’s wife and Lot’s wife illustrate how women who don’t conform to the required moral character are deprived of any protection from defamation. Both women are condemned for a layered treachery that simultaneously undermines prophetic authority and violates wifely duties. For Noah’s wife, her loyalty to idols is portrayed as more than a personal spiritual error. Her devotion to the Sun Temple and her active discouragement of other women from listening to Noah cast her as a saboteur of his mission. The betrayal acquires a double meaning: she opposes God and she fails as a supportive spouse. Her derision toward Noah highlights this domestic infidelity, as if scorning the prophet in private compounds the gravity of public disbelief.

Lot’s wife is framed with even greater dramatic treachery. She does not merely reject her husband’s faith but actively collaborates with the lewd men of Sodom. The symbolic image of her grinding wheat or carrying a lamp to signal Lot’s guests to their would-be violators transforms her into an informer against divine truth within her own household. Here, disbelief fuses with espionage: she betrays God, undermines the prophetic mission, and turns against her husband’s trust. The exegetical emphasis on her taking money for these acts underscores a stereotype of women as corruptible through material gain.

This double bind reveals the patriarchal construction at work: the women’s sins are irreducible to faith alone, because their rebellion is always narrated through the prism of domestic disloyalty. By linking theological apostasy to marital betrayal, the texts establish a template where the wife’s obedience to her husband mirrors her obedience to God. Any deviation from spousal fidelity becomes a cosmic crime with eternal consequences. Conversely, the prophets’ incapacity to “save” their wives dramatizes the lesson that a woman stands or falls by her own choice of submission or rebellion, a choice framed within the hierarchies of male prophetic authority.

Thus, these stories discipline women through exemplarity: they function as negative models of what occurs when the woman rejects her ordained role as both believer and wife. Patriarchal ideology gains force here by collapsing the spiritual and the domestic, making marital loyalty indistinguishable from religious faith, and rendering women’s rebellion doubly dangerous, threatening both divine truth and household order.

Against this backdrop, there are positive exemplars also. Purity and virginity as markers of feminine virtue occupy a central place in the Qur’anic and exegetical portrayal of Asya, Mary, and Khadija. Asya’s marriage to Pharaoh is deliberately unconsummated, either because God rendered Pharaoh impotent or as a symbolic sign of her moral and spiritual autonomy. This lack of sexual intimacy is narrated as an extension of her righteousness: she remains untouched by a morally corrupt husband, thereby preserving her bodily and spiritual integrity.

Exegesis links this directly to Mary’s virginity, which is likewise framed as a miraculous state, granted by God, in which she bears a child through divine intervention rather than sexual union (she “guarded her womb” and accepted divine intervention, becoming a vessel of God’s Word). Both cases construct female virtue as inseparable from sexual innocence or strict control over reproductive potential, presenting chastity as a tangible, observable criterion for moral and spiritual legitimacy.

Khadija, too, is celebrated as al-tahira, “the pure,” a title that emphasizes her sexual integrity and moral rectitude, despite the fact that she was previously married. Exegetical interpretations and contemporary pious literature often reshape her life narrative to stress a quasi-virginal purity, suggesting that true feminine virtue requires not only devotion to God but also careful management of sexual and reproductive life.

In this framework, purity functions on multiple levels: it is spiritual (faithful adherence to God), corporeal (control over one’s sexual activity), and relational (not tainted by morally corrupt male influence). The connection between virginity or chastity and virtue reinforces a patriarchal logic: women’s moral worth is coded into their bodies and their sexual choices, and their capacity for divine favor or exemplary status is inseparable from these physical markers. In other words, women are constructed as spiritually legitimate only when their reproductive and sexual potential is morally regulated, either through miraculous means, as in Mary, or through circumstances that prevent sexual intimacy, as in Asya’s marriage.

Placed alongside an-Nur, the construction of ideal femininity becomes clearer: women are protected from slander and granted divine favor only when they embody chastity, piety, and unwavering loyalty to God. Those who deviate, even by suspicion of betrayal, are stripped of that protection and exposed to condemnation.

Let us discuss one last example. Tunisian sociologist Abdelwahab Bouhdiba examines two figures, Aysha and Zuleikha, to show how these narratives construct contrasting models of womanhood. Aysha represents the “Virtuous coquette,” a woman whose charm and beauty are acknowledged but strictly contained within moral limits, making her socially and spiritually acceptable. Zuleikha, by contrast, is the “enigmatic temptress,” whose active desire challenges social norms and divine order. 

The Quranic story of Joseph (Yusuf) and Zuleikha provides a vivid example. Unlike the biblical version, where Joseph resists temptation of Zuleikha immediately – “Joseph resists temptation. He emerges victorious. He prefers to be unjustly accused rather than commit adultery” – the Quran dramatizes a scene of intense seduction and moral testing. In this scene, Zuleikha actively approaches Joseph, attempting to draw him into sexual transgression. Her desire is depicted as palpable and insistent: “For she desired him; and he would have taken her, but that he saw the proof of his Lord”. The narrative carefully stages the tension of the moment: Zuleikha’s allure and initiative create a seductive scenario, while Joseph’s sanctity and divine guidance intervene to prevent sin.

Bouhdiba emphasizes that the story frames this moment as a conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle: “The end of the temptation and Joseph’s ‘awakening’ is the reality principle defeating the pleasure principle”. Zuleikha’s erotic agency is therefore both central and transgressive; the story makes clear that her initiative threatens social and spiritual order. She becomes the archetype of the undesirable woman, whose autonomous sexuality must be contained within divine and social boundaries. Through this scene of seduction, Islamic narratives communicate lessons about femininity: women are celebrated when their beauty and charm are controlled, but desire expressed independently becomes a site for moral and spiritual caution.

This caution is even more visible in Bouhdiba’s account of the post-Quranic continuation of the Joseph-Zuleikha narrative. Zuleikha’s initial state after the death of her husband illustrates the archetype of an excessive female desire: despite her aging, loss of wealth, and widowhood, “her love for Joseph and her passion for him went on increasing from day to day in her heart. Her patience was exhausted. Her condition became very serious”. This establishes her as morally and socially unregulated, whose desire requires containment and rectification. Her subsequent conversion from idol worship is the first stage of purification: “One fine day she threw her idols to the ground, became converted and began to believe in the Living Eternal God”. Bouhdiba emphasizes that this spiritual alignment is inseparable from her sexual and social rectification: the narrative frames her submission to God as a prerequisite for her eventual union with Joseph, illustrating that female passion must be subordinated to divine authority.

The legend further enforces the model of the submissive woman through ritual observance and patient restraint. Before Joseph’s approval of their union, Zuleikha prepares for ṣalāt, completing her prayers despite the intensity of her desire: “Joseph returned to his house and wished to retire with Zuleikha… but Zuleikha first prepared herself for the ṣalāt. Joseph waited while she completed her ṣalāt”. Bouhdiba reads this as a demonstration that female initiative must be mediated by obedience to divine and social norms: desire is legitimate only when disciplined, ritualized, and oriented toward God. Submission here is performative as well as ethical; it structures the temporal and bodily comportment of the woman, ensuring that erotic fulfillment aligns with sacred frameworks.

Finally, Bouhdiba situates Zuleikha’s narrative within the broader Islamic ethic of female submission. Love and desire are tolerated, even admired, but must operate within moral and spiritual boundaries: “There are chosen women as there are chosen men; and the men as well as the women may be condemned. Or perhaps one should say that they are tested, but hardly ever condemned when they love to excess”. Zuleikha’s journey – from impassioned widow, to repentant convert, to ritually disciplined and divinely sanctioned bride – provides a concrete model of the kind of female submission Islam valorizes: passionate yet obedient, morally reformed, spiritually aligned, and socially and ritually disciplined.