essay on modesty in islam

• Give Your Zakat

Reader on Modesty in Islam

In the Name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate

Welcome to SeekersGuidance Readers, your essential compass in the vast ocean of Islamic knowledge. Our Readers offer a thoughtfully curated collection of articles, answers, podcasts, and courses, each focusing on a specific theme, and meticulously compiled from the rich resources of SeekersGuidance. These guides are more than just a source of information; they are a pathway to enlightenment, a bridge connecting you to deeper understanding and wisdom.

In the Quran, Allah tells us: “O children of Adam! We have sent down for you clothing to cover your nakedness and as an adornment. But, the best of clothing is mindfulness of Allah. This is one of Allah’s Signs, so that you may take heed.” [Quran, 7:26]

Our attire is not just a fabric we wear; it’s a reflection of our inner state, a shield safeguarding us, and a silent language speaking volumes about our respect for ourselves and our Creator. It’s an act of mindfulness, a conscious choice that connects us with Allah and serves as a constant reminder of our sacred bond with Him.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) said:  “Allah is more deserving of modesty than people are.” [Tirmidhi; Abu Dawud]

This hadith encapsulates the essence of modesty in Islam—a virtue that extends beyond mere dress to encompass our behavior, thoughts, and overall conduct.

Our comprehensive guide delves into the multifaceted aspects of modesty in Islam, addressing a wide array of questions and concerns. With insights from our trained and reliable scholars at SeekersGuidance, this guide offers clarity and direction on a topic of paramount importance in our faith. Let this guide be your stepping stone to a more mindful, modest, and spiritually fulfilling life in adherence with Islamic teachings.

Clothing and Modesty in Islam

• Sunna Clothing
• Can Muslim Women Wear Tight Jeans and Tight Dresses at Home?
• Are Jeans Allowed for Men?
• Is Wearing Jeans Prohibited in Islam for Women?
• Is it Recommended to Wear a Kufi (Cap) at Home as a Sign of Modesty?
• Modesty: Kohl, Jilbabs, and Allah
• Is the Prayer of a Woman Praying in Leggings Valid?
• Praying While Wearing Soccer Shorts With Compression Leggings Underneath
• Denim Clothing, Saris, and Imitating the Unbelievers
• Can Someone Assault Another If She’s Not Dressed Properly?
• Is Dressing Immodestly a Sin?
• How Do I Deal with Scantily Dressed Female Colleagues?
• Are Males Allowed to Dress Up as Females?
• Must a Muslim Woman Cover Her Feet according to Shafi’i School?
• Is It Permissible to Wear Elegant, Colour-Coordinated Loose Clothing?
• Is It Permissible to Look at Women Who Do Not Cover Their Awrah without Lust according to Hanafi Fiqh?
• What Is Considered Modest for Women in Women-Only Gatherings?

Modesty in Attire and Social Conduct

• Can a Muslim Woman Wear Tight Jeans ?
• The Awra (private area) of a Man
• Is it Haram to Like One’s Beauty?
• Socializing with People Who Swear
• Can a Muslim be a Fashion Model

Ethical and Moral Questions Related to Hijab

• Are Good Deeds Unaccepted If You Don’t Wear Hijab?
• How Can Hijab Be Relevant in a Xenophobic Society If It Is Meant to Protect Us?
• Hijab in the Workplace.
• Does Watching Hijab Pornography Lead to Disbelief?
• Can a Son Force His Mother to Wear a Hijab?
• Am I a “Dayyuth” If I Let My Wife Go out Without Hijab?
• Can I Remove My Hijab In Front of a Blind Man?
• Is It Permissible To Ask My Wife To Wear a Hijab During Intercourse?
• Is It Obligatory That One’s Hijab Covers the Chest Even if One’s Shirt Is Loose?
• Do Women Have to Wear Hijab After Menopause—What About When They Are Elderly?
• Can a Woman Wear a Wig Instead of a Hijab on a Job Interview?
• How Should We Understand the Relation Between Umar and the Verse Regarding Hijab?
• Can I Marry Someone Who Doesn’t Wear the Hijab as a Second Wife?
• Is the Fast of a Woman Not Wearing the Hijab (Veil) Valid? (Shafi’i)
• I am Struggling to Wear a Hijab. Is It Better for Me Not to Wear It at All?
• Do I Need to Wear a Hijab in Front of My Male First Cousins?
• Have I Sinned Because My Male Workmates May Have Seen Me Accidentally Without Hijab?
• Can You Clarify the Standard Explanation of the Verse of Hijab? [Shafi’i]
• Denying the Obligation of Wearing Hijab

The Practice and Challenges of Wearing a Hijab

• Wearing a Hijab in Hot Weather
• Hijab in the Workplace
• Removing the Hijab
• Hijab and Abaya in Hot Weather
• Can I Make a Bun under My Hijab?
• Difficulties with Hijab in the West

Cultural and Social Contexts of Hijab

• Is Hijab Worn Out of Culture or Obligation?
• Hijab Clothing: Desi-style, Arab-style, or Western-style?
• Can I Post My Pictures on Social Media While Wearing the Correct Hijab?
• Is It Permissible To Go Outside With Family Members Who Don’t Wear Hijab?
• Is It Sinful for Me To Step Out With My Family Members Who Don’t Wear Hijab?

Hijab, Safety, and Personal Choice

• Can I Remove My Hijab To Escape the Abuse in My Home?
• Is It Permissible for Me To Remove My Hijab Because I Fear for My Safety in Poland?
• Can I Take Off My Hijab for Safety Concerns or for a Job?
• Will Allah Hate Me for Removing My Hijab?

Understanding the Hijab and Its Requirements

• Requirements of Hijab
• What Are the Requirements of Hijab?
• Does My Hijab Not Count If I Don’t Wear It Correctly?
• What Extent of Raising the Hijab Is Considered to Be Like the Hump of a Camel?
• Can One Cover One’s Chest With Loose Clothing, or Must the Hijab Be Drawn Down Over It?
• Is My Volumised Hijab Like A Camel Hump and Therefore, Cursed?
• Does the Hijab Have to Cover the Chest?
• Is It Sufficient to Wear Baggy Trousers and Long Tops with a Hijab?
• Is It Sufficient To Wear a “Shalwar Kameez” and Hijab As One’s Islamic Clothing Due to Custom?
• Hijab and Covering
• Is the Hijab Obligatory?
• Is Hijab Necessary to Recite the Quran, Send Blessings on the Prophet, or Make Supplications?

Legal and Ethical Considerations

• Permissibility Of Selling Hijabs To Non-Hijabis
• Can I Write the Quran on a Hijab for an Art Project?
• Is It Permissible for Me To Take Off My Hijab Since I Have Reached Menopause as a Teenager?
• Will Allah Hold Me Accountable for My Wife and Sister Not Observing Hijab?

Hijab and Family Dynamics

• Parents’ Disapproval of Hijab
• How to Share with My Parents about Secretly Wearing the Hijab?
• What To Do About My Pictures Online From the Time Before I Wore Hijab?
• Parents won’t let me wear hijab until I respect them more
• My Husband Won’t Let Me Wear the Hijab
• Can Parents Force Their Daughter to Wear the Hijab?
• How Do I Cope With My Parents’ Fear and Disapproval of Hijab?
• How Can I Convince My Family Members to Wear the Hijab?
• Can I Obey My Parents If They Forbid Me to Wear the Hijab?
• Pressured by my Parents to Take Off my Hijab: How Should I Respond?
• My Non-Muslim Parents Get Upset When I Wear the Hijab
• Should I Wear the Hijab? – My Parents Don’t Agree

Personal Struggles

• I Struggle to Wear Hijab Daily – Does That Make Me a Hypocrite?
• Should I Remove Photos Online of Me Without Hijab?
• Should I Wear the Hijab Despite the Difficulty to Get a Job Wearing It?
• Is removing Hijab and Make-Up a Form of Apostasy?

Hijab in Social Context

• Young Muslims in Co-ed Schools
• Posting Pictures Online
• Explaining why I wear hijab
• Can I Remove My Hijab for My Safety?
• Should I Go To A Family Gathering Where My Cousin Will Be Without Hijab?
• Can I Send a Picture Of Myself Without Hijab To a Potential Suitor’s Mother?
• Is It Permissible to Look at Women Who Don’t Wear Hijab?
• Marrying a Practicing Non-Hijabi
• Prayer, Past Sins, and the Hijab
• A Beautician With Non-Hijab Clients: Am I Accountable When They Go Out Uncovered?
• Weddings & Hijab: Advising a Future Spouse
• Should I Remove the Hijab Because I Am a Bad Example for Others?
• Maintaining Hijab During One’s Wedding: Advising a Potential Spouse

Niqab and Its Rulings

• Doesn’t the Niqab Remove Women from Society?
• What Is the Ruling regarding Meeting a Potential Spouse as a Niqabi Revert?
• Do I Have to Wear a Niqab in a Muslim Country?
• Am I Permitted to Supplicate for a Wife Who Wears a Niqab?
• Is It Necessary for Women to Wear the Niqab in the Hanafi School?
• The Lawful Nature of Niqab (Face Veiling)
• Do I Need to Wear a Niqab?
• Is Niqab Obligatory in Our Religion?
• Wearing the Niqab and Rulings Specific to the Family of the Prophet (Maliki)
• Properties of a Muslim’s Clothing
• The Blessing of Being a Woman
• Hijab is Not an Oppression to Women
• The Properties of Speech
• Personal Arrogance Checklist
• Imam Ghazali’s the Importance of Character
• Good Character is Not Becoming Angry
• Raising a Muslim with Manners
• Difference Between Self-respect and Arrogance
• Prophetic Guidance on Humility and Being Gentle with Believers
• Balancing Confidence and Humility
• Dalia Mogahed on The Hijab: A Case of Misplaced Blame?
• Adab 13: The Proprieties of Clothing and Dress

Videos and Podcasts Relating to Modesty

• Praiseworthy Traits of a Muslim
• Content of Character
• Dress and Adornment by Sheikh Yusuf Weltch
• Beyond Hijab: Modesty Amongst Women in Islam
• Modesty in Islam – Shaykh Ibrahim Osi-Efa

Courses on Modesty

• Purification of the Heart for Youth
• The Pursuit of Noble Character: Essential Hadiths on Adab and Akhlaq for Youth

Related Posts

Is it permissible to leave the masjid during quran recitation, what types of jokes are considered blameworthy in islam- shaykh abdul-rahim reasat, what should newly practicing muslims prioritize in their lives – shaykh abdul-rahman reasat, what is the islamic ruling on wearing a niqab.

Accessible to all, supported by you

Learn With Us

• Course Catalog
• Live Schedule
• Student Login

Seek With Us

• Ask a Question

Get to Know Us

• Our Reports
• Privacy Policy

Get Free Courses & Prophetic Guidance in Your Inbox

Email Address *

Modesty in Islam

“Modesty and faith are connected with one another just like two things fastened by a rope. If one of them is gone, the other is also lost” [1]. Imam Baqir (AS). Modesty is a special sense that prevents one from saying inappropriate words and making mistakes. It refers to an uncomfortable feeling accompanied by embarrassment, caused by one's anxiety about being exposed to some unworthy or indecent conduct. This concept, as one of the highest and most fundamental moral qualities, is known as Haya in Islam. Modesty in Islam describes shyness and shame, but Haya represents a more profound implication that is based on faith. In many sayings (Hadiths), it has been quoted that modesty is linked with faith and originates from it [1, 2]. Hence, it is one of the most important characteristics that every Muslim should acquire and possess [3]; particularly Muslim women (“haya is a good characteristic for all, but is better for women” [4]).

Modesty in Islam: natural and acquired

There are two types of modesty: natural and acquired. An example of the former is the feeling of shyness and humility naturally occurring in a young child that makes him/her cover the private parts of the body from others. Or, in the story of Eve and Adam (PBUT) where they realize their nakedness and try to hide their genitals. This kind of modesty is common sense that exists within all human beings, believer or non-believer: “God Almighty divided the modesty among people just as He divided the provision” [5], and what differentiates them from animals: “If modesty did not exist … the promises wouldn’t be kept … Nobody would do any good, and nobody would refrain from the evil … if it weren’t for modesty, many people wouldn’t stop sinning.” [6]. Modesty serves as a cover on the soul that conceals the defects and calms down wrath and lust [7]. No one can, therefore, justify his/her sins and mistakes because of not being naturally given a sense of modesty.

The latter, on the other hand, can be only attained as a result of knowing and perceiving the Glory of Allah and minding His presence everywhere and in every second. In Islamic ethics, modesty is more than just a question of how a person dresses and acts in social interactions; instead, it is reflected in a Muslim’s conduct before God, before others, and even when one is alone.

Modesty towards others

Modesty towards others entails that one has decent and reasonable behavior in public, avoids indecent talks and vain activities, and respects everyone around him/her. If one has developed this ethical aspect within him/her and obeyed this sense, he/she will become ashamed when someone notices him doing something wrong. This feeling will be even worse when the other person is in a higher position. This, consequently, stops him/her from repeating that action.

To clarify the importance of modesty towards people, Imam Ali (AS) said that the evilest of all is who is not ashamed of his actions in front of people [8].

Modesty towards others includes especially the opposite gender and involves not gazing at them [9], harming them in any way or indulging in any forbidden (Haram) relation with them. In Surah Nur, Allah guides both men and women to the key to modesty by saying that believing men and women should lower their gaze and guard their modesty (24:30-31).

A good instance of modesty in the interactions between opposite genders is described in Surah Qasas, verses 23-26, between the daughters of Shoaib (PBUH) and Moses (PBUH). These verses demonstrate that the daughters of the prophet work and appear in society, but they care about how they interact with others; they concentrate on what they should do without having unnecessary dialogues with men. They communicate as much as necessary, with respect and dignity. Their speech is direct and clear-cut with Moses, so are Moses’s words. Even the way they both walk is with care and shyness [10].

Modesty towards Oneself

Modesty towards oneself means that a person treats himself fairly in private. It is caused by the unpleasant feeling that arises when thinking of or doing something improper which consequently stops one from forbidden (Haram) thoughts or illicit acts. It was mentioned that when one does something indecent and suddenly notices the presence of others, he becomes ashamed (if he still possesses the natural modesty that is laid within his soul); a higher level of Haya is being ashamed of oneself when no one else is present. This kind of modesty is known as the yield of faith: “The shame a person feels from himself originates from [his] faith.” [11].

Modesty towards God

Modesty towards God is called the best level of modesty [12]: “be modest in front of Allah for He has a right to your modesty” [13]. To accomplish this, one should first believe that nothing can be concealed from God “Does he not know that Allah sees [him]?” (96:14). In fact, Allah sees and knows everything, and is closer to humans more than themselves: “and We are nearer to him than [his] jugular vein” (50:16). Consequently, a modest person toward God will avoid any indecent act, in public or private, and will leave sinful thoughts behind.

References: M. al-Kulaynī, “Al-Kafi”, vol. 2, p. 106. M. B. Majlesi, “Bihar al-Anwar”, vol. 75, p. 309. M. al-Kulaynī, “Al-Kafi”, vol. 2, p. 106, T. 5. A. Q. Payande, “Nahj Al-Fasahah”, p. 578, T. 2006. S. H. al-Amili, “Wasail al-Shia”, vol. 20, p. 135. M. B. Majlesi, “Mofazzal monotheism”, Chapter: Human Senses. “Nahj al-Balagha”, no. 223 “Ghurar Al-Hikam”, no. 5464 M. B. Majlesi, "Bihar al-Anwar”, vol. 101, p. 40. N. Makarem Shirazi, “Tafsir Nemooneh”, vol. 16, p 58-59. “Ghurar Al-Hikam”, no. 4944. “Ghurar Al-Hikam”, no. 5451. H. T. Nuri Ṭabarsi, “Mustadrak al-Wasail”, vol. 8, p. 462.

Share This Article

What Are Your New Year Resolutions?

The last days of the year are perhaps the most hectic times of our lives. Everyone is busy wrapping up what has remained unfinished, an incomplete project, an undecided relationship or an unsaid word.

Among all these noises, one might stop for a moment and look back at the 365 days that have passed so quickly, and how they have gone by. “What have I accomplished? What are the mistakes that I am repeatedly making? Have I reached my goals? Have I become a better (or worse) person? Have I even changed? How much have I fulfilled my responsibilities as a Muslim?” these are the questions that we always ask ourselves at this time of the year.

And when the last seconds of the year come, we start thinking of the days that are before us; of our new resolutions, plans, and decisions. 2019 or 20 are not different if our days are not going to be more productive and better than before. 

Look back at the past, Plan to Be Better in Future

Islam recommends us to evaluate ourselves regularly and look back at our actions [i]. However, this does not mean that you should just remember your past mistakes, regret making them and do nothing. Every new day is a chance for us to put aside one bad habit and go toward the perfect version of ourselves, not being satisfied with our past achievements and always setting new goals.

Loser, Winner, Cursed

According to Imam Ali (AS), you are a loser if your two days (or two years, two weeks, etc.), are spent the same, meaning that you have not improved or have not added anything to your life.

This could be reading a book, watching a worthwhile movie, planting a tree, caring more about your parents, etc.  The worse thing is when you are degrading and your present day is no better than yesterday. This kind of person is cursed, Imam Ali (AS) believes.

You win the cup if you live a better and more productive day than yesterday! Of course a day, or two days, etc. are only metaphors, and they can mean any span of time. What is important is how you pass these moments, days or years.

Have a Life Purpose

The new year is also a chance to renew our goals and purposes. I know that it might sound like a cliche, yet it is impossible to deny the importance of motivation or a drive to push you and make you ambitious.

You might have many purposes, some long-term and some short-term, some financial or spiritual. And do not just think about your goals, but take action toward achieving them [ii].

Islam guides us toward becoming a better person and thus sets specific goals for Muslims to be aware of in their lives. A Muslim’s ultimate purpose which will spread in all aspects of his/her life and every decision and every move is to get as near as possible to that eternal source of blessing and peace, Allah, and be worthy of His worship [3].   

Be a Better Person Regarding Allah, Yourself and Others

Being ambitious is not enough. It is important to feel responsible as well. Islam differentiates three people as the ones to whom we hold some responsibilities, which have to be fulfilled simultaneously; including Allah, ourselves and others. Our first and foremost responsibility is toward Allah, our One, and Only Creator.

Perhaps a few minutes before the New Year is the best time to think of His blessings to us and decide to appreciate them more through worshiping Him sincerely and devote some time of our life to praying. Secondly, we are responsible for ourselves; taking care of our mind and spirit, having a plan for our life and continually following it, observing a healthy lifestyle, etc.

And finally, we have some responsibilities toward others, other human beings, other creatures, our surroundings, etc. To be a better person, we should be careful in our interactions with other people, be conscious of how we treat the environment and animals and strive to build a better world. 

Make a New Year Resolution, keep Doing it, Evaluate Your Outcome 

You can start a new year with a plan for your next 365 days. As Muslims, our life plans should always reflect our Islamic values. Having that in mind, think of what you want to achieve; how you can better fulfill your responsibilities toward Allah, yourself and others as enumerated in Islam (specify the actions that you should commit and the things you have to avoid doing to guarantee your commitment to those responsibilities), or where you want to be this time next year. Have a look at the big picture and set little goals which will lead you to that ultimate purpose and help you become a better Muslim.

Then, keep track of your plan during the year, observe your progress and see how much of your plan you have fulfilled and to what extent you have been devoted to your Islamic responsibilities. As Imam Ali (AS) beautifully puts, you should strive to build your life as if you have eternity before you, and at the same time be aware of the day (i.e., The Day of Judgment) that you will be questioned about your actions and manners in this world [4].

The last days of the year are like the exam days, but this time you would examine yourself. As Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) puts, when it comes to evaluation, you should be harder on yourself than when you are evaluating other people’s deeds [5]. You would evaluate whatever you have done up to that time and how much of that big picture that you had in your mind has completed.  

Finally, if we are willing to make the most of our lives, we have no other choice than be aware of our every step and every action that we take. And, every new year marks our promise to ourselves and Allah to be the best we can and continue going toward this goal.   

[i] Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said: “Evaluate yourself before you would be evaluated [by Allah on the Judgment Day]” [1]. [ii] Imam Ali (AS) said: “Your efforts make you worthy” [2].

References: Al-Hurr al-Aamili, Wasā'il al-Shīʿa, vol.16, p.99.     Nahj al-Balaghah, Wisdom no. 47. Quran (36:61) Shaikh al-Hur al-Aamili, Wasā'il al-Shīʿa, vol.2, p.535. Ibid, vol.16, p.98.

Facts about Imam Hussain (AS): A Biography

Throughout the history of humankind, there are not many figures who stood up for all the people whose voice have not been heard, whose rights have been taken away and lives stolen. And there are not many men or women whose apparent defeat turn out to be their ultimate success, immortalizing their message and their actions. Imam Hussain (AS) was one of these rare kinds whose voice is still heard from beneath the ashes of history. A figure whose sacrifices have kindled a light for anyone willing to follow his lead and make this world a better place to live. In what follows, we will have a glance at the life of this eminent Islamic personality.

Imam Hussain's (AS) Birth

Hussain ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib known as Abu 'Abd Allah and Sayyid al-Shuhada' (Lord of martyrs), the third leader (Imam) of Shias, was born on January the 8th on 626 A.D ( 3rd of Shaban, 4th Lunar year (Hijri Ghamari)) [1] in Medina as the second grandson of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH&HP) . His father was Ali ibn Abi Talib (AS), the first chosen leader by Prophet (PBUH&HP) and his cousin, and his mother was Lady Fatima (AS), the beloved daughter of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH&HP) [2]. He was only seven years old when the dear Prophet of Islam (PBUH&HP) passed away [3]. 

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH&HP) loved him dearly, and there has remained many accounts in which Prophet(PBUH&HP)  directly admits his love and affection for his grandson, Hussain (AS). For instance, he said: “Hussain is of me, and I am of Hussain, God loves those who love him” [4]. It is also narrated that "When the Prophet (PBUH&HP) was asked whom he loved more among his family, he replied, 'Hasan and Hussain.'" [5] He also used to put him on his lap, kiss him and said, “You are noble, son of a noble person and [will be] the father of noble ones; you are a leader (Imam) and son of a leader (Imam) and the father of leaders” [6].

His Children 

There is disagreement about the number of Imam Hussain’s (AS) children. Some believe he had six children, four boys, and two girls [7]. While others believe it to be nine, six boys, and three girls [8]. Some of the most notable ones who were present in the event of Karbala include Ali ibn al-Hussain (Imam Sajjad (AS)) who becomes the leader after his father’s martyrdom, Ali al-Akbar, the six-month-old Ali al-Asghar, and his daughters Sukayna, Fatima and Ruqayya [i].

Some of His Prominent Characteristics 

His regard for the poor .

Imam Hussain (AS), like his father and grandfather, Imam Ali (AS) and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH&HP), was never ignorant toward the ones in need and those who struggled for their livelihood. Aside from helping them financially wherever and whenever he could, he always treated them with respect and equal to other people. Once he was passing somewhere when he saw a group of impoverished people who were sitting on their cloaks and eating some dry bread crumbs. They invited him to join them. He kindly accepted and sat down with them, eating whatever they ate. Then he invited them to his house and offered them whatever he had of food [9]. 

Even while praying, he couldn’t turn a blind eye to the request of a needy person. He tried to recite the remainder of his prayer faster so that he could help that person and fulfill his need [10]. He would also pay the debts of those who were struggling with financial problems. For instance, he paid the debt of a dying man to relieve him of the burden of owing another person before his death [11]. After his martyrdom, some old scratches were found on his back, which turned out to be the marks of the heavy bags containing food. He used to carry them on his back every night to give them to the poor without being noticed [12].

His Patience

Imam Hussain (AS) is widely known for his patience in the real sense of the word. First of all, he would not get angry quickly. Even when a Syrian man insulted him and his father, Imam Hussain (AS) didn’t lose his temper. Instead, he forgave him and treated him kindly and with generosity [13]. 

Furthermore, considering the event of Karbala and the many unbearable hardships he and his family went through, such as seeing his children suffering from thirst, martyrdom of his brother, sons and his dear companions and the thought of his family to be taken as a captive, we never see him complaining to Allah or surrendering to this deep pain. This patience, for sure, was the result of his deep faith in Allah and having no doubt in whatever He chooses for him.  

His Courage 

Imam Hussain (AS), saw the injustice that was imposed upon the society of his time and realized how what the rulers called Islam was far from the true teachings of Islam. Oppression, tyranny, unjust use of public property, etc. made life miserable for people. Therefore, he stood up against what was wrong. But he never gave up his human virtues for the sake of furthering his purpose. He was courageous for the right cause. Neither was he after usurping the throne, nor manipulating people for his own sake. In that case, He would have been selfish rather than courageous.

His Love for Allah and Devotion to Him

Imam Hussain (AS) was known among the people of his time for his sincere and constant prayers and devotions to Allah. He traveled the distance between Medina to Mecca to participate in Hajj rituals twenty-five times in his lifetime on foot. He had a deep affection for the prayer (Salat). It has been narrated that on the night before the battle of Karbala, Imam Hussain (AS) told his brother, Abbas ibn Ali (AS): “Ask the enemy to let us spend this night praying and supplicating to Allah and reciting the Quran. My Merciful Lord knows how much I love praying, reciting the Quran, supplicating and repenting”. Also, in the midst of battle, while the enemy was attacking him and his companions on every side, he stood to perform the midday prayer (Salat al-Dhuhr) in the congregation [14]. 

His Exemplary Knowledge 

Imam Hussain (AS) was the inheritor of Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH&HP) vast knowledge and foresight. Everyone, whether friends or enemies, admitted this characteristic in him and found no one to be even close to him on this matter. He would answer people’s questions on different issues so wisely and with such command that impressed every person who had heard of it. There remain many sayings and quotes from him, each containing a moral teaching and a lesson that would help us lead a better and more productive life [15].   

The Events Leading to His Uprising

After the death of Muawiah, the caliph of Muslims at the time of Imam Hassan (AS), his son, Yazid usurped the throne. He was the first caliph who was chosen monarchically after Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH&HP) death, and he was far from a suitable choice for the leadership of Muslims. He was an indecent tyrant who did not even follow an Islamic lifestyle in appearance. For instance, he would drink alcohol manifestly; which is a strictly forbidden act in Islam. Thus, Imam Hussain (AS) who lived in Medina at that time refused to accept Yazid’s oath of allegiance, despite Yazid’s threat to behead anyone who refuses to do so [16]. When the governor of Medina came to Imam Hussain (AS) to take his oath of allegiance, he asked for a few days to think and decide. Afterward, he left Medina to Mecca, where still remained some people who did not bend down under Yazid’s forceful allegiance [17]. 

In Mecca, many people were attracted to the intellectual, spiritual, and religious characteristics of Imam Hussain (AS). Also, the notable people in Iraq and especially Kufa who had received the news of Muawiah’s death wrote many letters to Imam Hussain (AS). They asked Imam Hussain (AS) to come to Kufa and accept their political leadership along with their intellectual and religious guidance [17]. Imam Hussain (AS) did not care much about these letters, at first. But when he saw the increasing number of letters sent from Kufa to him, he decided to send one of his relatives, called Muslim ibn Aqil, as a representative, with a letter to the heads of Kufa tribes to validate their invitation. 

Over ten thousands of people of Kufa took the oath of allegiance with Muslim as Imam Hussain’s (AS) representative. So, Muslim wrote a letter to Imam Hussain (AS) and ensured him that Kufa was the right place for Imam Hussain (AS) and his companions to move to [18]. Thus, Imam Hussain (AS) along with his family and some of his companions left Mecca to Kufa. Also, he sent another representative, called Gheis, to Kufa, to inform them of his journey. However, people of Kufa were soon terrified and scattered from Muslim’s side. They even threw Muslim out of the resting place that they had given him before. The new governor captured Muslim and beheaded him [19]. Gheis (the second representative of Imam Hussain (AS)) also reached Kufa and declared Imam Hussain (AS)’s message to people of Kufa. However, the forces captured him and dropped him down from the top of a castle in Kufa [20].

Before his martyrdom, Muslim covertly sent one of his companions to Imam Hussain (AS), to inform him of people’s disloyalty and dishonesty and to stop him from coming to Kufa. But his message and the news of Kufa people’s infidelity, reached Imam Hussain (AS) when he had already left Mecca behind and was on his way to Iraq, near Kufa and Muslim had already been martyred. Imam Hussain (AS) decided to continue his journey toward Iraq and Kufa.

On the 7th of Muharram (10th of October 680 AD), Ibn Ziyad’s army blocked Imam Hussain (AS)’s and his followers’ access to the Euphrates (Furat river). About five hundred soldiers were ordered not to let Imam Hussain’s (AS) followers reach the river. On this night, a number of Imam Hussain’s (AS) companions managed to take some water from the river, and it was the last time they could do so [21]. 

The Battle of Karbala and Imam Hussain’s (AS) Martyrdom

On the 9th of Muharram, called Tasu’a, yet another ruthless and cruel commander, named Shimr, came to help Umar ibn Sa’ad’s army. Umar ibn Sa’ad’s army made many attempts to entice Imam Hussain’s (AS) followers and dissuade them from accompanying Imam Hussain (AS). But they did not succeed. On this day, Imam Hussain (AS) and his followers were besieged completely, and their access to water was entirely blocked. They had no water supply anymore. According to some accounts, except for the women and children, those who could fight along with Imam Hussain (AS), were about 72 people.

Imam Hussain (AS) was the last warrior in the battle of Karbala. His companions were all martyred, and he was now alone. It has been said, that for some time the soldiers from Kufa, did not come to fight with Imam Hussain (AS). Perhaps the people of Kufa were ashamed of themselves. Since they were the ones who invited Imam Hussain (AS) and now they were fighting against him. Despite his exhaustion and his wounded body, Imam Hussain (AS) fought against his enemies courageously and powerfully.

Imam Hussain (AS) was losing his strength. A person threw a stone toward Imam Hussain’s (AS) forehead, which made it full of blood. When he wanted to wipe it with his clothes, another soldier shot a poisoned arrow toward Imam Hussain’s (AS) chest. Another strike caused Imam Hussain (AS) to lose his remaining strength and fall on the ground. Shimr ordered his soldiers to give Imam Hussain (AS) the last strike and kill him, but no one dared to do so. Shimr himself came and beheaded Imam Hussain (AS) [22].

Imam Hussain’s (AS) Universal Status through the Centuries

Imam Hussain’s (AS) revolution and the incident of Karbala carried a message for all humankind, of any religion, belief or nationality. His movement not only gives us the lesson of peacefulness but also teaches us to never be silent in the face of oppression and injustice and stand against it despite any difficulty. Thus, despite the passing of so many centuries, he is still held as a hero who can be the perfect role model for those seeking justice and humanity. Every year, on the tenth of Muharram, called Ashura, the day on which Imam Hussain (AS) was martyred, many people from all over the world gather and commemorate his personality and his exemplary movement. Also, millions of people attend the annual gathering of Arbaeen Walk which is a three-day journey on foot, walking the distance between Najaf to Karbala located in Iraq to honor and revive his lasting message of peace and truthfulness.

[i] There are some disagreements about the presence of a girl called Ruqayya as the daughter of Imam Hussain (AS). Some sources, including Lubab al-ansab, a sixth/twelfth-century source, and Kamil-i Baha'i, from the seventh/thirteenth century, report that he had a four-year-old daughter, who passed away in Damascus.

References Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-umam wa l-mulūk, vol. 2, p. 555. Imam Hussain Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, vol. 10, p. 369. Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, vol. 3, p. 142. Tirmizī, Sunan, vol. 5, p. 323.  Mawsu'at kalimat al-Imam al-Husayn, Baqir al-'Ulum Research Institute, p.91.  Mufīd, al-Irshād, vol. 2, p. 135.  Ṭabarī, Dalāʾil al-imāma, vol. 1, p. 74. Ibn ʿAsākir, Tārīkh madīnat Damascus, vol. 14, p. 181. Ibn ʿAsākir, Tārīkh madīnat Damascus, vol. 14, p. 185.  Muhammad b. 'Ali b. Shahrashub, Manaqib Al Abi Talib, vol.4, p.66.  Ibn ʿAsākir, Tārīkh madīnat Damascus, vol. 43, p. 224. Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-umam wa l-mulūk, vol. 5, p. 417 & 441.  Shaykh 'Abbas Qummi, Nafasul Mahmum, Relating to the heart rending tragedy of Karbala, p.21.  Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-umam wa l-mulūk, vol. 5, p. 338. Mufīd, al-Irshād, vol. 2, p. 34, 36-37. Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-umam wa l-mulūk, vol. 5, p. 347 & 395. Mufīd, al-Irshād, vol. 2, p. 53-63. Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-umam wa l-mulūk, vol. 5, p. 405.   Mufīd, al-Irshād, vol. 2, p. 86. Ṭabarī, Tārīkh al-umam wa l-mulūk, vol. 5, p. 453. 

Category Article

• Family (32)
• Lifestyle (222)
• New Muslim (37)
• Pillars (19)
• Practical Principles (20)

Popular Article

• 40 Inspiring Quotes of Imam Hussain (AS…
• What Does Islam Say about Watching…
• What Does Islam Say about Friendship?
• Is It Permitted to Marry a Transgender…
• What Does Islam Say About Drugs?

Category Gallery

• Infographic (178)
• Picture (495)
• Podcast (127)
• Video (218)

Popular Gallery

• 6 Verses of the Quran about Prophet…
• A Glance at the Life of Prophet…
• 8 Pieces of Advice to the Young Ones by…
• Five Sayings of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH…
• The Battle of Karbala: A Timeline

Podcast of the week

• prophetMuhammad
• children in islam
• islamic life
• islamic family
• family in islam
• Islamic life style
• drinking alcohol in Islam

About Islam

• # Quran 382 Articles
• # Spirituality 382 Articles
• # Discovering Islam 382 Articles
• # Shariah 382 Articles
• # Videos 382 Articles
• # Family & Life 382 Articles
• # Fatwa & Counseling 382 Articles
• # Muslim News 382 Articles
• # Youth Q & A 382 Articles
• # Donate 382 Articles
• Spirituality

How Modesty Strengthens Faith

Along with fear and love of Allah , modesty is a requisite of faith. The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) made it clear that modesty is part of faith (Muslim).

60+ Branches of Faith: How to Prioritize

The reference is not to natural bashfulness, which we profess and practice in our mutual relations, but to the modesty that man must practice in his relationship with Allah.

If we are not modest in our relationship with Allah, it will undermine modesty in other relationships, resulting in a loss of aesthetic beauty.

What’s True Modesty?

Modesty has a bearing on human life in a variety of ways and defends man against Satan’s snares. In the following hadith, the Prophet (PBUH) brings out its comprehensive function:

Moving Beyond Merely Performing Acts of Worship

Abdullah ibn Masud reported that the Prophet (PBUH) observed, “Be of true shyness of Allah.”

" title="Advertise and Market to Muslims" target="_blank">Ads by Muslim Ad Network

When those present affirmed that they were modest, he guided them to the real meaning of modesty. According to the hadith, true modesty is to:

– be watchful of one’s mental faculties and the ideas which one entertains;

– keep an eye on one’s stomach and what it consumes;

– be constantly mindful of one’s death and the disintegration of one’s body in the grave.

– Besides, one who looks forward to the Hereafter does not run after the joys of this life.

And meeting these qualities makes one truly modest towards Allah. ( At-Tirmidhi )

Main Elements of Modesty

Knowing the nature of god: a must.

Divine attributes infuse into one the consciousness of the need to maintain modesty. Those who possess true knowledge of these attributes have strong belief in them and feel genuinely shy of Allah.

By contrast, those ignorant of divine attributes, or those who are not careful about them, are not shy of Allah or fellow human beings. They are little better than animals who do not have any perception of modesty.

Let us illustrate the above point of how a correct perception of certain attributes infuses into one the virtue of modesty and its impact upon conduct. Of all the divine attributes, the idea of His perfect knowledge makes one really conscious of one’s own conduct.The believer should be always mindful that Allah watches each and every act ( An-Nisaa’ 4:1 ).

Likewise, one should have the conviction that He is aware of the treachery committed by the eyes and of the secrets within the breast ( Ghafir 40:19 ). It is also important to realize that we are always accompanied by Allah.

{There is no whispering among three but He is their fourth, nor among five but He is their sixth, nor fewer nor more, but He is with them wheresoever they may be}  ( Al-Mujadilah 58:7 )

Evidently, those who believe in the import of that verse cannot commit any misdeed, even in privacy, which may embarrass them in the sight of Allah, for they cannot conceive of any place where they are not seen by Allah.

This persuades them that any sin they commit is being observed by Allah. Only a pervert or fearless person could commit a crime while conscious of that reality.

Day and night we observe numerous manifestations of Allah’s glory and power. In the face of these, we should not entertain any false notion about our own supremacy and greatness. Man is no more than a fly or an ant in this vast universe. The mountains around us are high in comparison to us. Compared to the oceans, we scarcely weigh a drop.

Given this, if we think highly of ourselves and walk around arrogantly, it is a sort of self-mockery. A parable tells of a fly that sat on a bull’s horn. After some time, the fly asked the bull whether it should move away lest its weight burden the bull. The bull replied that it was unaware of the fly’s existence and it was immaterial to it whether the fly sat there or not.

How to Let Go of Your Ego and Arrogance

The same is true, in a measure, for certain arrogant people who attach too much importance to themselves. They walk arrogantly on earth and always speak in harsh tones. While admonishing them, Allah tells them,

{ And do not strut on the earth insolently. You will not by any means rend the earth. Nor can you match the mountains in stature. }( Al-Israa’ 17:37 )

Human beings stand nowhere in comparison to the numerous manifestations of Allah’s power and glory. Therefore, we should be all the more modest and humble.

We should take to heart the truth that all our faculties and resources are granted to us only by Allah. We are not the creators of any of these and we do not possess them except by His leave.

If we realize this, we are less liable to commit ingratitude or disobedience or rebellion. We cannot do anything without drawing upon the very resources granted by Allah.

Human beings are favored with these resources so that we may lead our lives as grateful and obedient servants of Allah. However, if we abuse these in favor of treachery and rebellion, it constitutes a heinous crime. So, we should be constantly and profoundly aware that it is Allah Who has blessed us with these favors. The Quran reiterates this truth many times.

Some persons think very highly of their contribution to the faith. They mistakenly consider themselves as the ones who have done good for Allah and His Messenger. However, even the greatest sacrifice offered by them does not really belong to them. If they donate money in His cause, money was granted in the first place to them by Allah.

The Door of Repentance Is Wide Open

If they suffer the delusion that they earned their wealth by dint of their talents and skills, they should not forget that those same talents and skills were granted by Allah.

Even if people sacrifice their lives for the sake of Allah, they should think more of their failings than of the sacrifice they are making.

This acknowledgement of our inability to do anything worthwhile in Allah’s cause and this repentance are the very essence of all acts of worship and obedience. The Quran identifies it as the spirit of humanness. The Quran reproaches some people for their mistaken belief that they did a favor for Allah and His Messenger by embracing Islam.

They are told that they have not made any favor. Rather, they should be grateful to Allah that He guided them to Islam.

 * Excerpted with slight modifications from ‘Tazkiyah: The Islamic Path of Self-Development.’ Courtesy of The Islamic Foundation.

Privacy Overview

The Importance of Modesty in the Islamic Worldview

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)

 M odesty has a vital role to play in character-building. It restrains a man from behaving in an undesirable manner and acts as a shield against lewdness and immorality. It holds the key to piety and good-doing. 

(1) It is related by Zaid bin Talha; he relates that the Apostle of God said: “Every religion has a distinctive quality, and the distinctive quality of Islam is modesty”

Mowatta , Ibn-i-Maja and Baihaqi

It shows that in every faith or canonic law, some particular aspect of moral behaviour receives paramount attention and an extraordinary emphasis is laid on it. Thus, compassion and forbearance form the cardinal point of the teachings of Jesus. In Islam, in the same way, modesty is of fundamental significance.

It needs, however, be emphasized that the word ‘modesty’ is used in a very wide sense in the special terminology of the Qur’an and the Traditions. In the common usage, what it signifies, simply, is that a man avoided lewdness and kept away from lustful and indecent acts. But, in Islam, it appears that it stands for a state of feeling which is intolerant of everything that is not desirable and produces a reaction of disgust and agony within anyone who, knowingly or unknowingly, falls into an error or behaves in a manner having a semblance of sinfulness.

We learn, further, from the Qur’an and the Traditions that modesty is not in relation merely to our own species, but the greatest claim, on it, is of the Supreme Being who created man and is sustaining him, from moment to moment, and from whom nothing is hidden. Or, let us take it this way: a modest man is, generally, inclined to feel shy in the presence of his parents and other elders and benefactors, and God being the King of Kings and the Benefactor of Benefactors, the: bondsman should, naturally, be modest and humble, in the highest degree, in respect of Him, the primary requirement of which will be that he felt pain and repugnance at everything that was displeasing to God, and, therefore, abstained from it.

  (2) It is narrated by Abdullah b. Umar that, (once) the Apostle of God passed by an Ansari who, [at that time], was talking to his brother about modesty and admonishing him in that regard. The Prophet, thereupon, said to him: “Leave him to his state, for modesty is a part (or fruit) of Faith.”

 –        Buhkari and Muslim

It tells that, among the Ansar s, there was a man whom God had, particularly, blessed with the virtue of modesty owing to which he was very mild and lenient in his dealings with others. He avoided severity in the realization of dues and did not like to be outspoken even when it seemed necessary. A brother of his who did not approve of it was, one day, reproaching him and telling him that it was not good to be so timid and diffident that the sacred Prophet happened to pass that way, and on hearing the conversation, told the Ansar to leave his brother alone. His was a highly blessed condition. Modesty was a branch, or fruit, of Faith, and even if it was not profitable from the point of view of worldly interests, it would, surely, lead to elevation in ranks in the Hereafter.

(3) It is related by Abdullah b. Umar that the Apostle of God said: “Modesty and Faith exist together, and when one of them goes out, the other, too, goes out.”

 – Baihaqi

It shows that Faith and modesty are so closely related to each other that either both will be present in an individual or community or not any of them.

(4) It is related by Imran b. Husain that the Apostle of God said: “Modesty brings nothing but good.”

 –        Bukhari and Muslim

On superficial view, modesty may appear to act to one’s disadvantage, but the above Tradition insists that it, invariably, does good and leads to beneficial results, and even when from a narrow, materialistic angle, if it seems to be a drawback, there is nothing but gain in it from the larger Islamic viewpoint.

(5) It is related by Abdullah b. Masud that the Apostle of God said: “A familiar saying that has reached us from the former Apostles is that ‘when there is no modesty in you, do as you like.’”

–        Bukhari

Though the complete teachings of the earlier Apostles could not remain intact, some of the sayings and precepts have withstood the ravages of time and become proverbial, one of which is what has been referred to by the holy Prophet in the above Tradition: “When there is no modesty in you, do as you like.” There is a similar proverb in Persian which says: “Be shameless, and do what you like.”

• Stupidity and Cleverness
• Time Management and Islam
• On Return of Khilafah
• The Virtue of Talking Less and Avoiding Vain Speech
• Ikrimah, the Great Scholar Successor to the Companions of Prophet Muhammad (saws)

Past Issues

• Connect with YMD:
• Twitter Follow us
• Facebook Become our fan
• Environment
• News Flashes
• Book Review
• Press Release
• Children’s Column
• Women’s Issue
• Contemporary Issue
• Human Rights
• Perspective
• Bits & Pieces
• Photo feature
• Story Essay

salatallayl

Modest clothing in Islam: Abaya, Hijab, Quranic Insights.

Arish Husain

September 8, 2023

Modest clothing in Islam is compulsory for both women and men. Modesty, also called Haya, holds great importance and is emphasized both in the Holy Quran and through the hadiths of our Prophet Muhammad ( ﷺ ). Muslims are encouraged to be humble, respectful, and dignified in their conduct.

Following the Islamic way of living will give a believer men and women rewards from Almighty Allah SWT both in this world and hereafter. Every Muslim believes it because it is the promise of the creator of heaven and earth.

Muslim women must cover their body except for permissible parts, covering their entire body (Face and hands being optional) modestly.

Quranic verses emphasizing modesty (Modest clothing):

Surah Al-Hijab (Chapter 33, Verse 33) : “And stay in your homes and do not show yourselves as [was] the display of the former times of ignorance…” This verse highlights the importance of modesty in attire and behavior, encouraging Muslims to maintain their dignity and not display themselves immodestly.

Surah Al-Nur (Chapter 24, Verse 30-31) : “Tell the believing men to reduce [some] of their eyesight and guard their private parts… And tell the believing women to lessen [some] of their vision and guard their private parts…” These verses emphasize that men and women should lower their gaze and maintain modesty in their interactions with the opposite gender.

Modessty in Islam hadith (Modest Clothing):

Hadith of Aisha ( ﷺ ): Aisha, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad ( ﷺ ), narrated, “Whenever the Prophet (ﷺ) was given the choice of one of two matters, he used to select the easier of the two as long as it was not sinful; but if it were sinful, he would remain far from it. The Prophet ( ﷺ ) never took revenge for his own sake, but when Allah’s legal bindings were outraged, he would take revenge for Allah’s sake.”

Key takeaways of Modest clothing in Islam.

• Modesty (Haya) is emphasized in both the Holy Quran and the hadiths of Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) for both men and women.
• First and foremost, men are required to step up in respecting women. They should not engage in any activity which demeans a woman . They must also cast down their gazes in humility and observe the general philosophy of modesty of the heart and dress.
• Hijab or abaya does not stop men and women from interacting for the purpose of study, work etc.
• The hijab is not a sign of inferiority for women, nor has it been imposed upon them by men. In front of Allah SWT, both men and women were distinguished from each other in terms of individual piety.
• Muslims are encouraged to be humble, respectful, and dignified in their conduct.
• Modesty in attire is considered a way to follow the Islamic way of living, leading to rewards from Allah in this world and the Hereafter.
• Muslim women are required to cover their bodies except for permissible parts, with face and hands being optional.
• Quranic verses (Surah Al-Hijab and Surah Al-Nur) emphasize the importance of modesty in clothing and behavior.
• Hadiths emphasize choosing the easier and more modest path, seeking Allah’s pleasure, and avoiding sinful clothing choices.
• Proper hijab etiquette includes covering the entire body, being non-flashy, thick and non-see-through, loose-fitting, not perfumed, distinct from men’s clothing, and not imitating the dress of non-Muslims.
• Modest clothing promotes dignity, self-respect, and a sense of honor and privacy.
• Wearing white clothing is recommended in Islam for its practical and symbolic benefits.
• The purpose of dressing modestly is to obey Allah’s commands, maintain dignity, and preserve self-respect.
• Haram clothing includes sheer or see-through clothing and tight, form-fitting clothing that may lead to temptations.
• The Quran instructs believers to lower their gaze and guard their private parts to promote modesty.
• The color of an abaya is not inherently haram; it should follow guidelines of modesty and non-flashiness.
• Some countries have laws restricting the wearing of hijabs in specific contexts, which can infringe upon individual religious freedoms.
• Modest clothing in Islam is important to maintain a sense of piety and respect for Allah.
• Muslim women can remove their hijabs in specific situations, such as being around family or for medical reasons.
• Modesty can be practiced without wearing the hijab, but the hijab is considered an important aspect of Islamic modesty.

What is considered haram cloth?

According to the verses of the Quran and the teachings of our beloved Prophet Muhammad ( ﷺ ), here are some principles that I would like to help define what is considered haram clothing in Islam for both Men and Women.

Sheer or See-Through Clothing : Those clothes are Haram to wear in Islam that are transparent, revealing what is beneath. They are considered Haram because it does not cover the body appropriately. Most of the time, Immodest clothing can lead to temptations and inappropriate thoughts, which cause discomfort or distractions to others.

Tight and Form-Fitting Clothing : Praise be to Allah. Tight clothes that display a woman’s charms and cause temptations are Haram. The Prophet (ﷺ) said, “I have not seen two kinds of people who will go to Hell: men who use whips to harm others, and women who wear clothes but don’t cover themselves properly, leading others away from the right path.” It is discouraged in Islam that clothing is tight and reveals the body’s shape, especially if they emphasize the private parts.

Why do Muslims wear all white?

The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: “Wear white clothes, for they have the best effect, and use them for shrouds.” [Abu Dawud and At- Tirmidhi].

There are many benefits of wearing white clothes, both scientifically and Psychologically. White clothes reflect sunlight and heat, which helps the body cooler in hot climates. That is why people wear white garments often in desert areas.

White color, especially fabrics, provide good protection from the ultraviolet radiation from the sun. White color is related with purity, cleanliness, and simplicity. This is why it is often worn during religious ceremonies in most cultures and religions.

When can you take off a Hijab?

Proper Hijab wearing etiquette :

Cover all the body:  The first and foremost requirement of the Hijab is that it should cover the entire body, including the hair and neck, except for the face and hands, which may remain visible.

Not be an adornment in and of itself:  The motive of the Hijab is to promote modesty and not to draw attention. It should not be designed to be flashy or attention-grabbing.

Be thick and not transparent or see-through:  The fabric of the Hijab should be opaque and not see-through to ensure that it conceals the body effectively.

Be loose:  The Hijab should be worn in a loose manner to avoid outlining the body’s shape. It should not be form-fitting.

Not be perfumed:  Hijab should not be scented or aromatic, as this may attract unnecessary attention.

Not resemble the clothing of men:  The style and design of the Hijab should be distinct from men’s clothing. It should maintain a feminine and modest appearance.

Not resemble the dress of disbelieving women:  The Hijab should not mimic the attire of non-Muslim women or those who do not adhere to modest dress codes.

Not be a garment of fame and vanity:  Hijab should not be worn to show off or seek fame. It should be worn with humility and as an act of obedience to Allah’s command.

What does Quran say about women modesty?

Surah Al-Ahzab (Chapter 33), Verse 59:

“O Prophet (ﷺ), convey to your wives, daughters, and the women of the believers that they should draw their outer garments around themselves. It is expected to promote modesty and prevent them from being harassed. And Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful .”

Modesty in Islam Hadith.

The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) advised : “Once a girl reaches the age of maturity, only her face and hands should be visible while wearing hijab.” (Abu Dawood)

The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) emphasized the importance of modesty in clothing for both men and women, stating: “The best clothes for men to wear are those which are thick and reach down to the ankles, and the best clothes for women to wear are those which conceal their bodies.” (Sunan Ibn Majah)

Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib (a.s.):

Imam Ali said (a.s.) : “The woman is clothed, but she is naked; when she walks, she entices and is enticed; and when she is seen, desires are aroused, and desires arouse desires.”

Imam Ali (a.s.) advised : “Wear modest clothing to please your husband, but refrain from adorning yourself for strangers.”

What is the purpose of dressing modestly?

A study published on  Redalyc.org   called Dress as a Marker of Identity Construction in this paper has explored that clothing choices go beyond simple fashion decisions.

This study has drawn upon insights from sociology, psychology, and cultural studies to provide a broad view of the importance of modest clothing. This research has highlighted the intricate link between clothing choices and identity construction by many different factors.

The primary reason to wear modest clothing in Islam is to obey the commands of Allah in the Quran. Modest clothing also preserves one’s dignity and self-respect by covering certain body parts, as Muslims maintain a sense of honor and privacy.

Quranic verse (24:30-31) that instructs believers to “lower their stare and guard their private parts” and not display their adornments except to specific individuals.

Is it haram to wear a colour abaya?

No, it isn’t haram to wear a colored abaya because the color of the Abaya doesn’t necessarily make the Abaya immodest in any way because modesty has no particular colors.

There are specific etiquettes that must be followed when it comes to wearing a color abaya as long as it is not flashy, is opaque, is not wrapped but is a screen, and is unadorned (which means not wearing perfume). For example, in Indonesia, women wear colorful abayas that are called “Jilbab” or “Mukena.”

Different countries have different fashion sense when it comes to modest clothing in Islam. In Islam, women are encouraged to wear modest clothing which covers their bodies except for their face and hands.

Talking about color and style of clothing may vary from one culture to another, and this is often a matter of personal preference as long as they adhere to the Modest clothing in Islam’s teachings.

Hence, following the commitment to Allah’s command to cover their bodies in front of non-mahram (non-relative) men. It promotes a sense of identity, piety, and submission to God’s will.

Where is it illegal to not wear a Hijab?

Hijab has been a topic of debate almost every year; there is always a new story concerning Hijab. However, some countries or regions, such as Quebec (Canada), have banned wearing hijabs for various reasons. They say banning the Hijab is to promote equality and neutrality in schools and institutions, which is the opposite of what I believe. 

Austria has banned headscarves for children up to 10 years of age to promote equality between men and women.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Yes, Bosnia and Herzegovina is a secular country, but wearing a hijab in a court or other judicial offices is not allowed for women.

All public servants in Quebec are prohibited from wearing Hijab in positions of authority.

France implemented a law in 2004 prohibiting wearing religious clothing and symbols in schools, although this regulation does not extend to universities.

In India, some schools restrict girls from wearing the Hijab in classrooms. Still, as a secular nation, the country permits individuals to wear headscarves, turbans, or other religious attire in public.

Kazakhstan saw some schools prohibit headscarves in 2017, followed by a government proposal to ban headscarves, niqabs, and similar clothing items in public a year later.

In Kosovo, wearing the Hijab has been banned in public schools, universities, and government buildings since 2009. However 2014, Kosovo witnessed its first female parliamentarian wearing a headscarf.

In Kyrgyzstan, certain schools prevented Muslim students from wearing headscarves and attending classes in 2011, 2012, and 2015.

Russia enforces a ban on the Hijab in schools and universities in two regions: the Republic of Mordovia and the Stavropol Territory.

Uzbekistan took measures 2012 to prohibit the sale of religious clothing like hijabs and face veils in the market. In 2018, the authorities dismissed an Uzbek imam after he called on the country’s President to lift the ban on religious symbols, including the Hijab.

The Hijab ban in various countries inflicts upon an individual’s right to freedom and religion and goes against values that uphold one’s freedom of expression and beliefs. Is the Hijab ban good or bad? The Hijab ban anywhere worldwide severely impacts Muslim women’s right to education and freedom.

Why is Modest clothing Important in Islam?

The benefits that I have realized in my life of being modest or wearing modest clothing in Islam are plenty, and I would like to share some advantages and disadvantages of both (Modest clothing in Islam and disadvantages of immodest clothing).

For example, there are certain places, such as business meetings, in which we dress up nicely in a suit because clothes are often seen as Identity construction. Imagine going out in public and wearing immodest clothing will create different ideas in individuals. Some of the benefits that I get from wearing modest clothing in Islam are.

When can a women take off her Hijab?

There are situations when it is allowed for a Muslim woman to remove her Hijab, such as being around one’s family. If there are mahram males (Siblings or father), a woman can take off her Hiijab. There are medical exceptions.

A woman can remove her Hijab for medical treatment. If your Hijab falls in a public place, you can put it back. There’s nothing wrong with that. While doing household chores, a woman is not compelled to wear a Hijab can remove it.

Can you be Modest without wearing Hijab?

In surah, Al-Baqara verse 256 of the Quran says there is no compulsion in Islam. This means nobody should be forced to do something in Islam against their will, including modest clothing in Islam. “Don’t make anyone become a Muslim if they don’t want to.

Islam is easy to understand, and its reasons for belief are clear. So, there’s no need to make anyone a Muslim by force. In the same way, the Hijab is compulsory for Muslim women, and there is no possibility in today’s world that a woman can be modest without wearing the Hijab.

Modest clothing in Islam and being modest is an essential step towards the “Akhirah” ( the Hereafter)   for both women and men. As Muslims, we are required to dress modestly and are expected to avoid any clothing or behavior that might draw attention to our bodies or be perceived as provocative.

From both religious and psychological points of view, modest clothing in Islam is an act of showing respect for Allah and maintaining a state of piety. 

Assalam Alaikum beautiful people! someone who loves Prophet Muhammad and his family a lot. I like finding new ways to teach important stuff, so everyone can understand what Allah wants from us and His plans. We learn to listen for whispers from Allah, understand big plans, get ready for whatever Allah has for us, and try our best. I hope Allah's blessings guide us on this special journey.Allah hu Akbar!

Salatallayl's Newsletter !

Stay connected with us for enriching and insightful information. Join our community today!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Thankyou for subscribing tour weekly newsletter! Please Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

 Yes, add me to your mailing list

Salatallayl

Write for us, zakat calculator, khums calculator, © 2024 salatallayl, privacy policy | terms and conditions.

Call Us Today! 877-WHY-ISLAM

Hijab in islam: modesty, humility and dignity 8 min read.

By: Saulat Pervez

Hijab In Islam

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Islam’s code of modesty extends to all aspects of one’s life, including attire. Hijab, the head-covering worn by Muslim women, is an outer manifestation of an inner commitment to worship God. This brochure explores the different dimensions hijab brings to the lives of women and the responsibility men and women share in upholding modesty in society. Along the way, it debunks common stereotypes and celebrates the voices of women who practice hijab with pride!

One of the questions often asked by people is, “Why do Muslim women cover their heads?” The answer lies in understanding the essence of one’s existence as explained in Islam.

The Meaning of Hijab in Islam

Muslims believe that their true purpose in life is to worship God according to His instructions, as revealed in the holy book of Quran and through the teachings of Muhammad p,  the final prophet of Islam. Worship in Islam is a holistic concept which encourages God-consciousness in every facet of daily life, from charity and neighborliness to prayer and honest dealings in business. Modest clothing is an integral aspect of worship in Islam as well.

In the Quran, God says,  “ And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms…”  (24:31). When God revealed this verse, the female companions of the Prophet Muhammad p  promptly adopted these guidelines. In a similar spirit of obedience, Muslim women have maintained modest covering (hijab) ever since.

Hence, the primary motivation for wearing the hijab is to obey God ( Allah  in Arabic).

A Personal Journey

Wearing hijab is a personal and independent decision that comes from a sincere yearning to please God while appreciating the wisdom underlying His command. Many people mistakenly believe that women are forced to wear the hijab. This concept is not based on Islamic teachings as God says in the Quran,  “ Let there be no compulsion in religion”  (2:256). Likewise, Prophet Muhammad p  never forced religion upon anyone. If a woman is being forced to cover, it is contrary to this clear Islamic principle and might be due to cultural or social pressure. According to Islam, a woman willfully chooses to commit to this act of worship.

Days of contemplation, an inevitable fear of consequences as well as reactions and, ultimately, plenty of courage weigh heavily in making the leap. Katherine Bullock, a Canadian convert to Islam, stated, “For me, the lead up to the decision to wear hijab was more difficult than actually wearing it. I found that, praise be to God, although I did receive negative comments from people, I appreciated the feeling of modesty that wearing the hijab gave me.”

Further, many people make the error of thinking that the hijab is a definitive statement of a woman’s religiosity, as if it is a clear indicator of her spiritual commitment. While veiling is a reflection of one’s beliefs, the hijab simultaneously becomes a tangible reminder to the woman herself: to embody the modesty and dignity it represents and to carry one’s self in a way that pleases God. In that sense, the hijab symbolizes a journey of devotion rather than the end-result of piety.

“After I started wearing hijab,” continued Bullock, “I noticed that people would often behave more cautiously with me, like apologizing if they swore. I appreciated that. I feel that wearing hijab has given me an insight into a decent and upright lifestyle.”

Another Muslim woman, Saba Baig, a graduate of Rutgers University who currently lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and children, reminisced, “Before I started covering, my self-perception was rooted in other people’s perceptions of me. I dressed to elicit compliments, keep up with the latest trend, wear the most desired brand name … very little of it had to do with me, and more importantly, what God thought of me. Pre-hijab, I was in bondage to the surrounding society; post-hijab, I became attached to God. With that connection to God came an enormous amount of freedom. Confidence and self-respect were just some of the benefits.”

Ambassadors of Faith

Generalizations and stereotypes about Islam and Muslims are rampant in today’s society and, by extension, in the minds of many people whose worldview is shaped by the media. Muslim women in hijab are frequently stigmatized; they are regarded on the one hand as oppressed and, on the other, as religious fanatics. Due to such misconceptions, unfortunately, the larger society fails to acknowledge and appreciate Muslim women’s courage in standing up to societal norms in their determination to preserve their modesty.

Hijab clearly identifies women as followers of Islam, which can have its disadvantages in a land where misinformation about the faith and its adherents abounds. For instance, some Muslim women are discriminated against in the workplace while others are emotionally abused through insensitive remarks. Yet, drawing on inner strength and resolve, Muslim women take these incidents in stride. Their love for God and commitment to modesty empower them in the face of challenges.

Indeed, Muslim women identify themselves with Mary who is commemorated for her piety and modesty. Aminah Assilmi, who converted to Islam in 1977, was once asked about going out in public without her hijab and she responded, “I cannot help but wonder if they would have ordered Mary, the mother of Jesus, to uncover her hair.”

“By focusing on what God wants from me, and thinks of me, I am no longer a prisoner of other people’s desires,” declared Baig. “Knowing that I am doing what God, my Creator, has ordained for me gives me a contentment and happiness like no other.”

Despite all the odds, Muslim women in hijab have managed to carve a niche for themselves while upholding their Islamic identities. They actively participate in their surroundings, be it as homemakers or professionals, on the sports field or in the artistic arena, in public service or in charitable activities. Conspicuous in their head-coverings, these women have become ambassadors of the Islamic faith.

Mutuality in Modesty

More than a dress code, the hijab encompasses modest behaviors, manners and speech. The inner humility as exhibited through etiquettes and morals completes the significance of the physical veil. However, contrary to popular belief, these characteristics are not limited to women alone.

God also commands men to maintain their modesty in the Quran:  “Tell believing men to lower their glances and guard their private parts: that is purer for them. God is well aware of everything they do”  (24:30).

In Islam, the responsibility falls on each gender to protect their own modesty and to control their own desires. Whether a woman dresses modestly or not, it is the obligation of each man to guard his own chastity. While many people may think that hijab is worn primarily to restrain men’s illicit desires, this is another misconception. Indeed, it is not women’s duty to regulate the behavior of men. Men are accountable for their own conduct; they are equally required to be modest and to handle themselves responsibly in every sphere of their lives.

In reality, Muslim women wear the hijab to seek the pleasure of God and to uphold Islam’s code of modesty. The majority of women who wear hijab consider it a constant reminder that they do not adorn their bodies for men. “Hijab forces someone to look past the external and focus on the internal. How many women do we know that feel they have to sexualize themselves to gain attention; why don’t we see as many men wearing short bottoms and tighter tops? Because we have always given men a pass on their looks, demanding from them success and intellect instead,” reflected Baig.

“Women however, are valued for their looks, their beauty. We have entire industries built upon making a woman feel that she isn’t pretty enough, or thin enough,” she added. “Hijab, on the other hand, takes one beyond the superficial. It elevates her in society by desexualizing her, and individuating her instead.”

Modesty in Islam: A Guide for Men and Women

Islam is a religion of moderation and balance; it does not expect women alone to uphold society’s morality and dignity. Rather, Islam asks men and women to strive mutually to create a healthy social environment of practical values and morality. In short, the concept of modesty in Islam is holistic, and applies to both men and women. The ultimate goal is to please God and to maintain a wholesome and stable society.

In the Quran, God declares, “ … In God’s eyes, the most honored of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware” (49:13).

Islam clearly establishes that men and women are equal in front of God. At the same time, it does recognize that they are not identical. God created men and women with unique physiological and psychological attributes. In Islam, these differences are embraced as vital components to a healthy family and community structure with each individual contributing their own distinctive talents to society.

Hence, God’s rules apply to both genders, but in diverse ways. For example, men are also required to cover parts of their body out of modesty, but not in the same way as women. Similarly, men are prohibited from wearing silk clothing and gold ornaments whereas women have no such restrictions. Therefore, God has ordained different commands for men and women while encouraging both to be modest.

Hijab: A Symbol of Faith, Modesty, and Diversity

As more and more Muslim women embrace hijab, they renew their commitment to God through their appearance as they continue their lifelong spiritual journey. Unfortunately, such women often seem mysterious to those not acquainted with the religious significance of hijab. Understanding the beliefs and lifestyle choices of Muslims, and the emphasis Islam places on modesty, eliminates the stereotypes associated with hijab. People of many different faiths and beliefs make up this patchwork world of ours. Muslims are an integral part of this diversity. It’s time we overcome our fears and bridge our distances. So, the next time you see a Muslim, stop and chat with them – and decide for yourself!

Note : The subscript  p  next to Prophet Muhammad p  represents the invocation Muslims say with his name: May God’s peace and blessings be upon him.

Who is Allah

Christianity and Islam

Got Questions?

We have Answers. Get in touch now.

Share This Article!

Related posts.

11th Anniversary of World Hijab Day

Creating an Inclusive Environment for Muslim Employees

Hijab Infographic

Answers to Common Questions Hijabis Are Asked

FAQ’s about Ramadan

Infectious Diseases: Guidelines from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)

• Albalagh.net
• AnswersToFatawa
• Arij Canada
• Askimam.org
• Askmufti.co.za
• AskOurImam.com
• CouncilofUlama.co.za
• Darulfiqh.com
• Darulifta Azaadville
• Darulifta Deoband Waqf
• Darulifta-Deoband.com
• Daruliftaa.com
• DaruliftaaMW.com
• DaruliftaaZambia.com
• DarulIftaBirmingham
• Darulihsan.com
• DarulUloomTT.net
• Fatwa-TT.com
• Fatwa.org.au
• FatwaCentre.org
• HadithAnswers.com
• IslamicPortal.co.uk
• IslamicSolutions.org
• Jamia Binoria
• Mahmoodiyah
• Mathabah.org
• Muftionline.co.za
• Muftisays.com
• MuslimaCoaching.com
• Seekersguidance.org
• ShariahBoard.org
• Tafseer Raheemi
• TheMufti.com
• ZamzamAcademy.com
• BinBayyah.net
• Darul Iftaa Jordan
• Shafiifiqh.com
• HanbaliDisciples.com
• TheHanbaliMadhhab.com
• Ask Question
• Lailatul Qadr

Home » Hanafi Fiqh » HadithAnswers.com » Modesty; Islam’s distinct feature

Related Q&A

• Salah should prevent one from evil and immorailty
• The reward for the four rak’ahs after ‘Isha
• ‘Ammar ibn Yasir (radiyallahu ‘anhuma), the pure
• Virtue of Zam Zam water
• Sayyiduna Ibrahim, the son of Nabi (sallallahu'alayhi wasallam)
• Placing the fingertips in the ears while calling the adhan

Modesty; Islam’s distinct feature

What is the reference for the narration which states the distinguishing characteristic of Islam is modesty?

Rasulullah (sallallahu’alayhi wasallam) is reported to have said:

‘Indeed every religion has a special feature, and Islam’s distinct feature is modesty.’

This Hadith is reliable and   is reported by several Sahabah (radiyallahu’anhum).

Among them are:

Sayyiduna ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Abbas (radiyallahu’anhuma) in Sunan Ibn Majah, (Hadith: 4182), Sayyiduna Anas (radiyallahu’anhu) in Sunan Ibn Majah, (Hadith 4181) and Musnad ‘Umar ibn ‘Abdil ‘Aziz of Imam Baghandy (rahimahullah), (Hadith: 92).

See footnotes of my Esteemed Shaykh, Al-Muhaddith Muhammad ‘Awwamah (may Allah protect him) on  Musnad ‘Umar ibn ‘Abdil ‘Aziz, (Hadith: 92) for details on the narrations of the other Sahabah (radiyallahu’anhum) and comments on its authenticity.

And Allah Ta’ala Knows best,

Answered by: Moulana Muhammad Abasoomar

Checked by: Moulana Haroon Abasoomar

This answer was collected from HadithAnswers.com . The answers were either answered or checked by Moulana Haroon Abasoomar (rahimahullah) who was a Shaykhul Hadith in South Africa, or by his son, Moulana Muhammad Abasoomer (hafizahullah), who is a Hadith specialist. 

Read answers with similar topics:

Random Q&A

Method of performing aqeeqah, a person performed fard salaah 4 many years & was unaware at that time of this mistake-surahs were read in 3rd & 4th rakaats of the fard salaah.does the salaah have 2 be performed again, learning from a teacher & the importance of isnad, can bribe money be invested in halal business & profits donated to charity for sawab, qualities of the abdal which will grant them entry into jannah, wife standing in front of her husband when performing salaah in the same room, more answers….

• The heart does not find sweetness in worship when it is affected by sin
• A Hadith regarding the inheritance of a hermaphrodite
• The Authenticity of Sahih Bukhari
• Explanation of the narration regarding giving charity without delay
• Explanation of the narration on the level of Din weakening
• Nabi’s (sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) advice on how to treat one’s wife

Latest Q&A

• Is Makeup Allowed During Iḥrām?
• Do These Actions Formulate Disbelief?
• The Status of a Job Acquired with False Certification
• Can a Ḥanafī Resident Pray Behind a Shāfi’īe Traveller?
• Is it Permissible to Allow Wheelchairs in a Masjid?
• Is an Entry Fee at a Charity Event Considered Charity?

Indexed Websites

Privacy overview.

Hijab: Spotlighting Servitude to God

Published: March 25, 2021 • Updated: March 22, 2023

Author : Roohi Tahir

بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

Introduction

The image of the  hijab  as the symbol of oppression and violence against women by the hands of the uncivilized Muslim man became the rallying point not only for American politicians, but for contemporary Western feminists as well. The body of the veiled, Muslim woman became the entity on which Western liberal neo-Orientalists superimposed their values, and it was the exposed female body, active in the public sphere, which became the marketable image of women in free market capitalism. Although feminist efforts have long been used as a method to deconstruct patriarchal control over women, including their physical selves, many argue that such movements have found a strange bedfellow with capitalism that is reinforcing unfair expectations for women’s bodies. Feminist movements have evolved from “state feminism,” which advocated for policy change within the state, to “market feminism,” in which the same goals are achieved in the private sector in concert with market trends. 3

collectively show that contemporary Muslim femininities are increasingly mediated through the market forces of consumer capitalism, impacting Muslim women’s identities, lifestyles, and belonging in complex ways. What is meant to be a Muslim woman is constantly negotiated, defined and redefined through or in reaction to the images, narratives, and knowledges about Muslim womanhood constructed in the marketplace. As Muslim women stake out their own positions, they actively engage with given Islamic practice and knowledge as well as with modalities of capitalism… representations of self-determined, independent, and professional Muslim women conform to images of the ideal consumer. While the veiled images re-inscribe Islamic norms and identifications by emphasizing particular ways of being Muslim for women, they also transform the very content and contours of Islamic piety and femininity. 4  

Seek beneficial knowledge. Sign-up and never miss a new paper!

Explore similar papers

Islamophobia

Hijab, Gendered Islamophobia, and the Lived Experiences of Muslim Women

Methodology (usul)

Is Hijab Religious or Cultural? How Islamic Rulings Are Formed

Know your purpose.

O mankind, worship your Lord, who created you and those before you, that you may become righteous. [2:21]

One who submits to someone with hatred is not worshipping him. And one who loves someone without submitting is likewise not worshipping him; this is like a man who loves his son and friends. Therefore, neither love nor submission alone are sufficient in worshipping Allah. Allah must be loved most by  al-ʿabd  and He must be the greatest of all in his sight. Nothing deserves complete love and submission except Allah. And whatever has been highly regarded without it being by the command of Allah, its glorification is rejected. 10  

And We sent not before you any messenger except We revealed to him that, “There is no deity except Me, so worship Me [alone].” [21:25]

Editor's Picks

The Qur’an’s Engagement with Christian and Jewish Literature

Belief in Divine Love: Discovering Spiritual Attachment Styles

Contemporary Ideologies

Islam and the LGBT Question: Reframing the Narrative

Seek the most noble status.

The [true] servants of the Most Compassionate are those who walk on the earth humbly, and when the foolish address them [improperly], they only respond with peace. [25:63]

The practical role of the   Qur’an and Sunnah

You [alone] we worship and You [alone] we ask for help. Guide us along the Straight Path [1:5-6]

Say, [O Muhammad], “If you should love Allah, then follow me, [so] Allah will love you and forgive you your sins. And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” [3:31]

Trending papers

Parenting Style and Our Relationship With God: The Influence of Parental Love on Our Perception of God

Whose interpretation to follow.

And We have not revealed to you the Book, [O Muḥammad], except for you to make clear to them that wherein they have differed and as guidance and mercy for a people who believe. [16:64]

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “I have left two matters with you. As long as you hold to them, you will not go the wrong way. They are the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Prophet.” 43

The only saying of the faithful believers, when they are called to Allah (His Words, the Qur’an) and His Messenger ﷺ, to judge between them, is that they say: “We hear and we obey.” And such are the prosperous ones (who will live forever in Paradise). And whosoever obeys Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, fears Allah, and keeps his duty [to Him], such are the successful ones. [24:51-52]

These are nothing but names you have invented yourselves, you and your forefathers. God has sent no authority for them. These people merely follow guesswork and the whims of their souls, even though guidance has come to them from their Lord. [53:23]

O Prophet, sufficient for you is Allah and for whoever follows you of the believers. [8:64]

Hijab  as a means of liberation and empowerment

As for those who struggle in Our cause, We will surely guide them along Our Way. And Allah is certainly with the good-doers. [29:69]

So We have sent you [Prophet] to a community—other communities passed away long before them—to recite to them what We reveal to you. Yet they disbelieve in the Lord of Mercy. Say, “He is my Lord: there is no god but Him. I put my trust in Him and to Him is my return.” [13:30]

…Indeed, he who is mindful of Allah and patient, then indeed, Allah does not allow to be lost the reward of those who do good. [12:90]

Disclaimer: The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in these papers and articles are strictly those of the authors. Furthermore, Yaqeen does not endorse any of the personal views of the authors on any platform. Our team is diverse on all fronts, allowing for constant, enriching dialogue that helps us produce high-quality research.

Acts of Worship

How Does Ramadan Work? A Beginner’s Guide

On The Timing and Virtues of the Night of Power: The Heart's Joy in Remembering Laylat al-Qadr by Ibn al-ʿIrāqī

Ḥayāʾ: More Than Just Modesty in Islam

The Art of Worship: How to Make the Most of Ramadan Nights

Tahajjud: Fuel for the Self and Society

Need help organizing for summer? We tapped 'The Home Edit' stars for their recommendations

• TODAY Plaza
• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Concert Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show

The day I returned home after being kidnapped by Islamic terrorists

Beth Rodden is a professional rock climber who, along with three other climbers, was kidnapped and held hostage by Islamic militants in 2000 while on a climbing trip in Kyrgyzstan. The following is excerpted from her new memoir, “A Light Through the Cracks,” about the day she returned home to the U.S. 

Amsterdam, August 2000

By the time my boyfriend, Tommy Caldwell, and I made it to Amsterdam’s gleaming, sterile airport, we had been passed along a half dozen times, like an important but increasingly well-worn package. Military helicopters had brought us and our other two climbing partners from base to base. We’d endured a surreal ride on a private jet from the last military base to the capital, Bishkek, traveling alongside the tipsy and jovial president of Kyrgyzstan. He’d patted us on the shoulders like a grandfather and claimed us long enough for a photo op and a speech to local media in a language we couldn’t understand. Then he handed the four of us off to the American embassy, which scrambled to find us flights home. A few days later, Tommy and I drove across the Kazakhstan border, in a hired car with a diplomatic escort, to the international airport in Almaty, and finally a commercial jet took us from Central Asia to the edge of the Atlantic. Now we had just one more flight to go.

Our tickets were a last-minute mess, and we needed to check on our connection. As we crossed the terminal, I carried a brown paper gift bag from the airport candy shop — despite what we’d been through, I still wanted to bring my older brother a present from this trip. I watched the families clustered around the gates, the lone business travelers perched at the bars, scanning each face around me. I’d been on edge through practically every step of the journey: The embassy in Bishkek had felt almost safe, but at the hotel where they’d sent us to get some sleep, I’d felt vulnerable and stayed vigilant.

In the airport, I was hungry again. When we’d made it to the second army base, the one that felt like a cluster of portable classrooms set down on a vast brown plain, we’d stuffed ourselves with barley and warm buttered bread, but I could not stay full. I had just eaten two chocolate croissants. Still, my stomach felt like a cavern. My brother didn’t really need a present, did he?

I ate half the chocolate in the bag before we got to our gate.

The line at the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines counter felt so orderly. The whole airport did. Just existing there felt like getting a big, soothing hug. When we’d boarded the flight in Kazakhstan, the passengers had formed no line. Everybody just pushed in a scrum toward the plane. Tommy and I stood frozen, like the good, shocked scouts that we were, and got lost in the flood. I felt so fragile, so extremely fragile, and so resigned to that fragile state.

We weren’t safe. That was obvious to me. No line, no order, no rule of law. I loved rules. People smoked openly on that first plane.

“Next,” the flight attendant said as we arrived at the counter. Her voice was as professionally cheerful as her uniform: light blue skirt, light blue jacket, white blouse underneath.

“We’re here to check in for our flight,” I said.

“Wonderful. May I please have your boarding passes?”

I mumbled something apologetic and handed her a few crumpled, dirty sheets of paper. “I think we have to get our seats and stuff from you.”

She pinched her brow as she read our mess of documents. She typed vigorously. I was sure this meant we weren’t going to make it home.

“Can you wait one second?” she asked, flashing a strained smile. She disappeared behind a wall.

I looked at Tommy. He stared into the blank space where the woman had just been. I couldn’t tell if he was as scared as I was, if he was also monitoring the people pooling and flowing around us for any threat. I felt like I had grown an invisible antenna that vibrated continually, never at rest. Never letting me rest. A memory tried to surface inside me: a body in silhouette, sailing off a dark cliff. A crunch, and an exhale. I forced it back down.

Two blond attendants now appeared where there had been one.

“Can you tell me: Was it something KLM did?” the new flight attendant asked.

I looked back at Tommy. Did he know what she was talking about? Did she know what had happened? Tommy shrugged.

“Wait, what?” I said. “What was something . . . ?”

“Well, um, how to say this,” the flight attendant said. “It says on your tickets, ‘Emotionally distressed passengers, please take care.’ So, we are just wondering if it’s something KLM did.” She looked concerned and defensive in her caring, like a hospital billing manager. She didn’t want to know the answer, but she had to ask.

I didn’t want a stranger to try to comfort me, but I did feel the need to comfort her. So I said, “Oh no, definitely not. We were just kidnapped and we want to go home.”

I couldn’t believe how easily the sentence came out. We were just kidnapped . . . I’d never said it so plainly before.

The flight attendant exhaled all her breath at once, stunned and relieved. “Well, good,” she said.

Well, good?

“KLM does our best. How about business-class seats for you two?” She printed our fresh, flat boarding passes. Tommy and I boarded the plane.

We ate every meal and every snack that was offered to us on the long ride home. My hunger was like a portal opened into a galaxy — infinite, absolute. When I was in middle school, I used to watch my older brother, David, eat, stunned by the mountain of food he could consume. Now, it felt strangely freeing to eat with that type of abandon. I hadn’t done that since ninth grade, when I became obsessed with climbing.

I could eat, but I still couldn’t sleep. My anxiety kept me wide awake, and my wakefulness in turn meant I had nothing but space and time for the anxiety to spin itself tighter in my body. I kept wondering if the plane would crash. That seemed possible, maybe even probable, given how the rest of our trip had gone. An appropriate ending, in a way. I wondered if I’d be scared. What would Tommy say to me before impact? Would it hurt? Our backpack, stuffed at our feet, was filled with souvenirs purchased in a blur during our strange interlude in Bishkek, between our flight with the president and our diplomatic drive across the border. I had stuffed the paltry remains of the airport chocolate into our bag alongside the rest of the things we’d acquired: a hand-carved wooden chess set, a wool hanging. Proof that we’d done something major and been somewhere cool. What were we thinking?

The backpack that sat at our feet had been lost in transit when we’d first landed in Kyrgyzstan, full of hope for our climbing adventure, and was waiting for us, perversely intact, at the hotel in Bishkek after our escape. We’d left San Francisco with 20 expedition duffels, and all I had left was this backpack filled with trinkets from a country to which I’d never return. Maybe that was why we’d bought them, with the money Tommy had wadded up in his sock just before we were marched away from our camp at gunpoint. Maybe it was some attempt to fabricate a decent memory of the place.

My hands trembled the whole 12 hours to San Francisco. I knew I needed sleep, but if the plane did crash, wasn’t I supposed to be awake for that? I had no idea how to act, what to do or say or who to be when we saw our parents. I’d left as a 20-year-old girl full of herself, ready for the world, sure I was doing something extraordinary. I was living out the dream I’d stared at in the posters I hung on my bedroom wall: climbing to incredible heights in far-off places. My mother had hardly traveled, certainly not by my age. I’d felt so awfully superior as I’d walked down the jetway when we left. I didn’t even turn back to wave.

My parents had given me everything — pride, freedom, confidence. They trusted me. They trusted my decisions. They trusted the world. Now I was returning home a broken mess. I’d spoken to them a few times from the embassy in Bishkek, the words mainly drowned in my tears. I wanted to be small again, so small I could crawl through the phone into their arms, where they’d hold me and shush me and stroke my head. I wanted my mother to say, “Mama’s here, Mama’s here,” just like she always did when I was a girl. I wanted to shrink back into that little-girl body and lay my head in her lap and cry.

How was I supposed to carry myself getting off the jetway? Was the idea to act strong, like I was fine? I was weirdly good at that. Or should I literally run into their arms?

Now — how to do this? How was I supposed to carry myself getting off the jetway? Was the idea to act strong, like I was fine? I was weirdly good at that. Or should I literally run into their arms, like I had been dreaming of doing for the past eight days? I’d never spoken easily with my parents about feelings. They were so kind, so present, and gently but firmly on my team. But inside, I always felt nervous, like there was a line I was afraid to cross, like I needed to be tougher, solid, unbreakable. And even if I could lay my head in my mother’s lap and have her say, “Mama’s here,” would that still work to soothe me? I was not the same person I had been when I left. My thoughts flapped like the loose end of a film in an old-fashioned movie projector, the front reel spinning empty.

I looked over at Tommy. Maybe he’d know what to do. His head was slumped at a 45-degree angle to his chest, his mouth dropped open, snoring. He was sick. His brain was more lucid and less spastic than mine, but his body was breaking down. He had a fever. I envied Tommy’s oblivion. I felt so alone.

We landed. My palms were sweating, but Tommy’s hands felt strong. That felt like a plan: I’d hold his strong hand and we’d present a united front, though I hadn’t told him about my looping, flapping mind. I was trying to stay composed — for him, for me, maybe for my parents too. We collected our bag of souvenirs from under the airplane seats. The souvenirs promised our trip was normal. We were normal. I grabbed a free chocolate bar and a package of cookies from the plane’s galley as we exited. I never did anything like that, but now instead of saying, “Don’t eat that, Rodden,” I thought, “Just in case we don’t have any other food.”

I didn’t race off the plane like I had seen people do in movies, straight into their loved ones’ arms. Instead I walked so slowly that other passengers started passing us. I was desperate to return home, to the narrow twin bed in my parents’ house, on our quiet block filled with minivans and white Honda sedans, to replant myself in the flat farmland around Davis, California, to recommit to the safe wide sidewalks. I just didn’t know how. I wondered if people could tell we’d changed: if we walked differently or stood slightly less straight, if we’d absorbed so much fear and terror that we now emitted it.

Excerpted from “A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story,” by Beth Rodden. © 2024 Published by Little A Books, May 1, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Beth Rodden is the author of “A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story,” out May 2024. 

I ran away from a troubled teen program and escaped for good. This is my story

No one wants the family spinning wheel. So why is it so hard to get rid of?

How my (many) wedding superstitions saved my marriage

Can you get better at small talk? Here's what happened when I tried to

I did my own makeup on my wedding day. Here’s how it went

Why I’m happy to be my husband’s second wife

I got a psychic reading 3 months after losing my dad. How it helped me heal

I was 1 of millions who traveled for the eclipse. Here's how it went

My fiancé is 17 years older than me and I’m sick of the age-gap conversation

Author Jo Piazza: How a 100-year-old family murder mystery inspired my new novel

The Netherlands veers sharply to the right with a new government dominated by party of Geert Wilders

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders and three other party leaders agreed on a coalition deal early Thursday that veers the Netherlands toward the hard right, capping a half year of tumultuous negotiations that still left it unclear who would become prime minister.

The “Hope, courage and pride” agreement introduces strict measures on asylum seekers, scraps family reunification for refugees and seeks to reduce the number of international students studying in the country.

“Deport people without a valid residence permit as much as possible, even forcibly,” the 26-page document says.

“We are writing history today,” Wilders proclaimed, saying he had made sure the three other coalition parties, including the one of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, had accepted the core of his program.

“The sun will shine again in the Netherlands,” Wilders said. “It is the strongest asylum policy ever.”

With hard-right and populist parties now part of or leading a half dozen governments in the 27-nation European Union, they appear positioned to make gains in the bloc’s June 6-9 election. Wilders has been a political ally of radical right and populist leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and French opposition leader Marine Le Pen.

“My party will be at the center of power. It makes us enormously proud,” Wilders said.

He had to make personal compromises, though. Wilders has already reluctantly acknowledged that he will not succeed Rutte at the country’s helm. The parties still have to agree on a prime minister, who is expected to be a technocrat from outside the party structures.

Speculation has centered on Ronald Plasterk from the Labor Party, who shot back to prominence this year when he became the first “scout” to hold talks with political leaders about possible coalitions.

The deal said the next government will continue with existing plans to combat climate change, including continuing to pay for a climate change fund established last year. But the Farmers Citizens Movement is part of the coalition, and the deal includes soothing language and concessions to farmers who have blocked cities with tractors during disruptive protests.

Other points in the agreement include increasing social housing, stricter sentences for serious crimes and capping property taxes.

The group intends to continue supporting Ukraine and wants to enshrine the NATO standard of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense into law.

EU headquarters may not welcome a line in the coalition deal that says “the Netherlands is very critical against further enlargement of the European Union,” at a time when many other member nations want to add Ukraine and some other eastern nations. The EU needs unanimity among its current nations before it can add more.

The parties will explain the program to parliament on Thursday, though a debate will not be held on the agreement until next week.

Top headlines by email, weekday mornings

Get top headlines from the Union-Tribune in your inbox weekday mornings, including top news, local, sports, business, entertainment and opinion.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

More in this section

Nation-World

West Virginia candidate hospitalized after being bitten by snakes while removing campaign signs

A candidate for West Virginia secretary of state is hospitalized for copperhead snake bites sustained while he was removing election campaign signs

Chad’s military leader is confirmed as election winner in the final tally despite opposition protest

Chad’s constitutional council has confirmed that President Mahamat Deby Itno, who seized power in 2021, won the May 6 presidential election and rejected an appeal by his main opponent

A look at high-profile political assassinations and attempts this century

Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was gravely injured in an apparent assassination attempt that rocked the small country and the rest of Europe just weeks before an election

Disability rights advocate says state senator with violent history shoved him at New York Capitol

A disability rights advocate made a complaint to New York State Police saying was shoved twice by state Senator Kevin Parker

Belarus targets opposition activists with raids and property seizures

Authorities in Belarus have announced raids and the seizure of property of 104 opposition activists who have fled the country

Texas judge orders new election after GOP lawsuit challenged 2022 election result in Houston area

A Texas judge has ruled in favor of a Republican candidate challenging the results in a 2022 judicial race in the nation’s third-most populous county

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.

Supported by

• Share full article

By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti

• May 16, 2024 Updated 5:53 a.m. ET

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

Listen to this article, read by Jonathan Davis

Who bulldozed the village after that is a matter of dispute. The Israeli Army says it was the settlers; a senior Israeli police officer says it was the army. Either way, soon after the villagers left, little remained of Khirbet Zanuta besides the ruins of a clinic and an elementary school. One wall of the clinic, leaning sideways, bore a sign saying that it had been funded by an agency of the European Union providing “humanitarian support for Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank.” Near the school, someone had planted the flag of Israel as another kind of announcement: This is Jewish land now.

Such violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

Many of the people we interviewed, some speaking anonymously, some speaking publicly for the first time, offered an account not only of Jewish violence against Palestinians dating back decades but also of an Israeli state that has systematically and increasingly ignored that violence. It is an account of a sometimes criminal nationalistic movement that has been allowed to operate with impunity and gradually move from the fringes to the mainstream of Israeli society. It is an account of how voices within the government that objected to the condoning of settler violence were silenced and discredited. And it is a blunt account, told for the first time by Israeli officials themselves, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of their country’s democracy.

The interviews, along with classified documents written in recent months, reveal a government at war with itself. One document describes a meeting in March, when Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, gave a withering account of the efforts by Bezalel Smotrich — an ultraright leader and the official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank — to undermine law enforcement in the occupied territory. Since Smotrich took office, Fox wrote, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.” Moreover, Fox said, Smotrich and his allies were thwarting the very measures to enforce the law that the government had promised Israeli courts it would take.

This is a story, pieced together and told in full for the first time, that leads to the heart of Israel. But it begins in the West Bank, in places like Khirbet Zanuta. From within the village’s empty ruins, there is a clear view across the valley to a tiny Jewish outpost called Meitarim Farm. Built in 2021, the farm has become a base of operations for settler attacks led by Yinon Levi, the farm’s owner. Like so many of the Israeli outposts that have been set up throughout the West Bank in recent years, Meitarim Farm is illegal. It is illegal under international law, which most experts say doesn’t recognize Israeli settlements in occupied land. It is illegal under Israeli law, like most settlements built since the 1990s.

Few efforts are made to stop the building of these outposts or the violence emanating from them. Indeed, one of Levi’s day jobs was running an earthworks company, and he has worked with the Israel Defense Forces to bulldoze at least one Palestinian village in the West Bank. As for the victims of that violence, they face a confounding and defeating system when trying to get relief. Villagers seeking help from the police typically have to file a report in person at an Israeli police station, which in the West Bank are almost exclusively located inside the settlements themselves. After getting through security and to the station, they sometimes wait for hours for an Arabic translator, only to be told they don’t have the right paperwork or sufficient evidence to submit a report. As one senior Israeli military official told us, the police “exhaust Palestinians so they won’t file complaints.”

And yet in November, with no protection from the police or the military, the former residents of Khirbet Zanuta and five nearby villages chose to test whether justice was still possible by appealing directly to Israel’s Supreme Court. In a petition, lawyers for the villagers, from Haqel, an Israeli human rights organization, argued that days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a raiding party that included settlers and Israeli soldiers assaulted village residents, threatened murder and destroyed property throughout the village. They stated that the raid was part of “a mass transfer of ancient Palestinian communities,” one in which settlers working hand in hand with soldiers are taking advantage of the current war in Gaza to achieve the longer-standing goal of “cleansing” parts of the West Bank, aided by the “sweeping and unprecedented disregard” of the state and its “de facto consent to the massive acts of deportation.”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the relief the villagers are seeking — that the law be enforced — might seem modest. But our reporting reveals the degree to which decades of history are stacked against them: After 50 years of crime without punishment, in many ways the violent settlers and the state have become one.

Separate and Unequal

The devastating Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the ongoing crisis of Israeli hostages and the grinding Israeli invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip that followed may have refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s ongoing inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank where the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law and democracy are most apparent.

A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings.

The violence and impunity that these cases demonstrate existed long before Oct. 7. In nearly every month before October, the rate of violent incidents was higher than during the same month in the previous year. And Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, looking at more than 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000 — speaking out now because of his concern about Israel’s systemic failure to enforce the law — says this singular lack of consequences reflects the indifference of the Israeli leadership going back years. “The cabinet, the prime minister,” he says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Ayalon’s assessment was echoed by many other officials we interviewed. Mark Schwartz, a retired American three-star general, was the top military official working at the United States Embassy in Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, overseeing international support efforts for the partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There’s no accountability,” he says now of the long history of settler crimes and heavy-handed Israeli operations in the West Bank. “These things eat away at trust and ultimately the stability and security of Israel and the Palestinian territories. It’s undeniable.”

How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultraright, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.

Many Israelis who moved to the West Bank did so for reasons other than ideology, and among the settlers, there is a large majority who aren’t involved in violence or other illegal acts against Palestinians. And many within the Israeli government fought to expand the rule of law into the territories, with some success. But they also faced harsh pushback, with sometimes grave personal consequences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s efforts in the 1990s, on the heels of the First Intifada, to make peace with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, gave rise to a new generation of Jewish terrorists, and they ultimately cost him his life.

The disagreement over how to handle the occupied territories and their residents has bred a complex and sometimes opaque system of law enforcement. At its heart are two separate and unequal systems of justice: one for Jews and another for Palestinians.

The West Bank is under the command of the I.D.F., which means that Palestinians are subject to a military law that gives the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet considerable authority. They can hold suspects for extended periods without trial or access to either a lawyer or the evidence against them. They can wiretap, conduct secret surveillance, hack into databases and gather intelligence on any Arab living in the occupied territory with few restrictions. Palestinians are subject to military — not civilian — courts, which are far more punitive when it comes to accusations of terrorism and less transparent to outside scrutiny. (In a statement, the I.D.F. said, “The use of administrative detention measures is only carried out in situations where the security authorities have reliable and credible information indicating a real danger posed by the detainee to the region’s security, and in the absence of other alternatives to remove the risk.” It declined to respond to multiple specific queries, in some cases saying “the events are too old to address.”)

According to a senior Israeli defense official, since Oct. 7, some 7,000 settler reservists were called back by the I.D.F., put in uniform, armed and ordered to protect the settlements. They were given specific orders: Do not leave the settlements, do not cover your faces, do not initiate unauthorized roadblocks. But in reality many of them have left the settlements in uniform, wearing masks, setting up roadblocks and harassing Palestinians.

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

In this system, even the question of what behavior is being investigated as an act of terror is different for Jews and Arabs. For a Palestinian, the simple admission of identifying with Hamas counts as an act of terrorism that permits Israeli authorities to use severe interrogation methods and long detention. Moreover, most acts of violence by Arabs against Jews are categorized as a “terror” attack — giving Shin Bet and other services license to use the harshest methods at their disposal.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet called the Department for Counterintelligence and Prevention of Subversion in the Jewish Sector, known more commonly as the Jewish Department. It is dwarfed both in size and prestige by Shin Bet’s Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism. And in the event, most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause. This system, with its gaps and obstructions, allowed the founders of groups advocating extreme violence during the 1970s and 1980s to act without consequences, and today it has built a protective cocoon around their ideological descendants.

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands . Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

Two months after that, two Israeli settlers were murdered in an attack by Hamas gunmen near Huwara, a village in the West Bank. The widespread calls for revenge, common after Palestinian terror attacks, were now coming from within Netanyahu’s new government. Smotrich declared that “the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

And, he added, “I think the State of Israel needs to do it.”

Birth of a Movement

With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

The legality of that agenda was an open question. The Geneva Conventions, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade occupying powers to deport or transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But the status of the territory was, in the view of many within and outside the Israeli government, more complex. The settlers sought to create what some of them called “facts on the ground.” This put them into conflict with both the Palestinians and, at least putatively, the Israeli authorities responsible for preventing the spread of illegal settlements.

Whether or not the government would prove flexible on these matters became clear in April 1975 at Ein Yabrud, an abandoned Jordanian military base near Ofra, in the West Bank. A group of workers had been making the short commute from Israel most days for months to work on rebuilding the base, and one evening they decided to stay. They were aiming to establish a Jewish foothold in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli designation for the territories that make up the West Bank, and they had found a back door that required only the slightest push. Their leader met that same night with Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, who told the I.D.F. to stand down. Peres would treat the nascent settlement not as a community but as a “work camp” — and the I.D.F. would do nothing to hinder their work.

Peres’s maneuver was partly a sign of the weakness of Israel’s ruling Labor party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the country’s founding. The residual trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — when Israel was caught completely by surprise by Egyptian and Syrian forces before eventually beating back the invading armies — had shaken citizens’ belief in their leaders, and movements like Gush Emunim, directly challenging the authority of the Israeli state, had gained momentum amid Labor’s decline. This, in turn, energized Israel’s political right.

By the late 1970s, the settlers, bolstered in part by growing political support, were expanding in number. Carmi Gillon, who joined Shin Bet in 1972 and rose by the mid-1990s to become its director, recalls the evolving internal debates. Whose responsibility was it to deal with settlers? Should Israel’s vaunted domestic security service enforce the law in the face of clearly illegal acts of settlement? “When we realized that Gush Emunim had the backing of so many politicians, we knew we shouldn’t touch them,” he said in his first interview for this article in 2016.

One leader of the ultraright movement would prove hard to ignore, however. Meir Kahane, an ultraright rabbi from Flatbush, Brooklyn, had founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 in New York. He made no secret of his belief that violence was sometimes necessary to fulfill his dream of Greater Israel, and he even spoke of plans to buy .22 caliber rifles for Jews to defend themselves. “Our campaign motto will be, ‘Every Jew a .22,’” he declared. In 1971, he received a suspended sentence on bomb-making charges, and at the age of 39 he moved to Israel to start a new life. From a hotel on Zion Square in Jerusalem, he started a school and a political party, what would become Kach, and drew followers with his fiery rhetoric.

Kahane said he wanted to rewrite the stereotype of Jews as victims, and he argued, in often vivid terms, that Zionism and democracy are in fundamental tension. “Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.”

A Buried Report

In 1977, the Likud party led a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, secured a right-wing majority in the country’s Parliament, the Knesset. The party was headed by Menachem Begin, a veteran of the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that carried out attacks against Arabs and British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, the British colonial entity that preceded the creation of Israel. Likud — Hebrew for “the alliance” — was itself an amalgam of several political parties. Kach itself was still on the outside and would always remain so. But its radical ideas and ambitions were moving closer to the mainstream.

Likud’s victory came 10 years after the war that brought Israel vast amounts of new land, but the issue of what to do with the occupied territories had yet to be resolved. As the new prime minister, Begin knew that addressing that question would mean addressing the settlements. Could there be a legal basis for taking the land? Something that would allow the settlements to expand with the full support of the state?

It was Plia Albeck, then a largely unknown bureaucrat in the Israeli Justice Ministry, who found Begin’s answer. Searching through the regulations of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine in the years preceding the British Mandate, she lit upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, a major effort at land reform. Among other provisions, the law enabled the sultan to seize any land that had not been cultivated by its owners for a number of years and that was not “within shouting distance” of the last house in the village. It did little to address the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but it was, for her department, precedent enough. Soon Albeck was riding in an army helicopter, mapping the West Bank and identifying plots of land that might meet the criteria of the Ottoman law. The Israeli state had replaced the sultan, but the effect was the same. Albeck’s creative legal interpretation led to the creation of more than 100 new Jewish settlements, which she referred to as “my children.”

At the same time, Begin was quietly brokering a peace deal with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the United States at Camp David. The pact they eventually negotiated gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and promised greater autonomy to Palestinians in the occupied territories in return for normalized relations with Israel. It would eventually win the two leaders a joint Nobel Peace Prize. But Gush Emunim and other right-wing groups saw the accords as a shocking reversal. From this well of anger sprang a new campaign of intimidation. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and the founder of the settlement in the heart of Hebron, declared the movement’s purposes on Israeli television. The Arabs, he said, “must not be allowed to raise their heads.”

Leading this effort would be a militarized offshoot of Gush Emunim called the Jewish Underground. The first taste of what was to come arrived on June 2, 1980. Car bombs exploded as part of a complex assassination plot against prominent Palestinian political figures in the West Bank. The attack blew the legs off Bassam Shaka, the mayor of Nablus; Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah, was forced to have his foot amputated. Kahane, who in the days before the attack said at a news conference that the Israeli government should form a “Jewish terrorist group” that would “throw bombs and grenades to kill Arabs,” applauded the attacks, as did Rabbi Haim Druckman, a leader of Gush Emunim then serving in the Knesset, and many others within and outside the movement. Brig. Gen. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, then the top I.D.F. commander in the West Bank, noting the injuries suffered by the Palestinian mayors under his watch, said simply, “It’s a shame they didn’t hit them a bit higher.” An investigation began, but it would be years before it achieved any results. Ben-Eliezer went on to become a leader of the Labor party and defense minister.

The threat that the unchecked attacks posed to the institutions and guardrails of Jewish democracy wasn’t lost on some members of the Israeli elite. As the violence spread, a group of professors at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent a letter to Yitzhak Zamir, Israel’s attorney general. They were concerned, they wrote, that illegal “private policing activity” against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories presented a “threat to the rule of law in the country.” The professors saw possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities. “There is a suspicion that similar crimes are not being handled in the same manner and some criminals are receiving preferential treatment over others,” the signatories to the letter said. “This suspicion requires fundamental examination.”

The letter shook Zamir, who knew some of the professors well. He was also well aware that evidence of selective law enforcement — one law for the Palestinians and another for the settlers — would rebut the Israeli government’s claim that the law was enforced equally and could become both a domestic scandal and an international one. Zamir asked Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, to lead a committee looking into the issue. Karp was responsible for handling the most delicate issues facing the Justice Ministry, but this would require even greater discretion than usual.

As her team investigated, Karp says, “it very quickly became clear to me that what was described in the letter was nothing compared to the actual reality on the ground.” She and her investigative committee found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere. “The police and the I.D.F. in both action and inaction were really cooperating with the settler vandals,” Karp says. “They operated as if they had no interest in investigating when there were complaints, and generally did everything they could to deter the Palestinians from even submitting them.”

In May 1982, Karp and her committee submitted a 33-page report, determining that dozens of offenses were investigated insufficiently. The committee also noted that, in their research, the police had provided them with information that was incomplete, contradictory and in part false. They concluded that nearly half the investigations opened against settlers were closed without the police conducting even a rudimentary investigation. In the few cases in which they did investigate, the committee found “profound flaws.” In some cases, the police witnessed the crimes and did nothing. In others, soldiers were willing to testify against the settlers, but their testimonies and other evidence were buried.

It soon became clear to Karp that the government was going to bury the report. “We were very naïve,” she now recalls. Zamir had been assured, she says, that the cabinet would discuss the grave findings and had in fact demanded total confidentiality. The minister of the interior at the time, Yosef Burg, invited Karp to his home for what she recalls him describing as “a personal conversation.” Burg, a leader of the pro-settler National Religious Party, had by then served as a government minister in one office or another for more than 30 years. Karp assumed he wanted to learn more about her work, which could in theory have important repercussions for the religious right. “But, to my astonishment,” she says, “he simply began to scold me in harsh language about what we were doing. I understood that he wanted us to drop it.”

Karp announced she was quitting the investigative committee. “The situation we discovered was one of complete helplessness,” she says. When the existence of the report (but not its contents) leaked to the public, Burg denied having ever seen such an investigation. When the full contents of the report were finally made public in 1984, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said only that the committee had been dissolved and that the ministry was no longer monitoring the problem.

A Wave of Violence

On April 11, 1982, a uniformed I.D.F. soldier named Alan Harry Goodman shot his way into the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred sites for Muslims around the world. Carrying an M16 rifle, standard issue in the Israeli Army, he killed two Arabs and wounded many more. When investigators searched Goodman’s apartment, they found fliers for Kach, but a spokesman for the group said that it did not condone the attack. Prime Minister Begin condemned the attack, but he also chastised Islamic leaders calling for a general strike in response, which he saw as an attempt to “exploit the tragedy.”

The next year, masked Jewish Underground terrorists opened fire on students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three people and injuring 33 more. Israeli authorities condemned the massacre but were less clear about who would be held to account. Gen. Ori Orr, commander of Israeli forces in the region, said on the radio that all avenues would be pursued. But, he added, “we don’t have any description, and we don’t know who we are looking for.”

The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

Carmi Gillon, who was head of Shin Bet’s Jewish Department at the time, says the fact that Shin Bet hadn’t learned about a plot involving so many people and such ambitious planning earlier was an “egregious intelligence failure.” And it was not the Shin Bet, he notes, who prevented the plot from coming to fruition. It was the Jewish Underground itself. “Fortunately for all of us, they decided to forgo the plan because they felt the Jewish people were not yet ready.”

“You have to understand why all this is important now,” Ami Ayalon said, leaning in for emphasis. The sun shining into the backyard of the former Shin Bet director was gleaming off his bald scalp, illuminating a face that looked as if it were sculpted by a dull kitchen knife. “We are not discussing Jewish terrorism. We are discussing the failure of Israel.”

Ayalon was protective of his former service, insisting that Shin Bet, despite some failures, usually has the intelligence and resources to deter and prosecute right-wing terrorism in Israel. And, he said, they usually have the will. “The question is why they are not doing anything about it,” he said. “And the answer is very simple. They cannot confront our courts. And the legal community finds it almost impossible to face the political community, which is supported by the street. So everything starts with the street.”

By the early 1980s, the settler movement had begun to gain some traction within the Knesset, but it remained far from the mainstream. When Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset in 1984, the members of the other parties, including Likud, would turn and leave the room when he stood up to deliver speeches. One issue was that the continual expansion of the settlements was becoming an irritant in U.S.-Israel relations. During a 1982 trip by Begin to Washington, the prime minister had a closed-door meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to discuss Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year, an effort to force out the P.L.O. that had been heavy with civilian casualties. According to The Times’s coverage of the session, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, then in his second term, had an angry exchange with Begin about the West Bank, telling him that Israel was losing support in this country because of the settlements policy.

But Israeli officials came to understand that the Americans were generally content to vent their anger about the issue without taking more forceful action — like restricting military aid to Israel, which was then, as now, central to the country’s security arrangements. After the Jewish Underground plotters of the bombings targeting the West Bank mayors and other attacks were finally brought to trial in 1984, they were found guilty and given sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. The plotters showed little remorse, though, and a public campaign swelled to have them pardoned. Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir also made the case for pardoning them, saying they were “excellent, good people who have erred in their path and actions.” Clemency, Shamir suggested, would prevent a recurrence of Jewish terrorism.

In the end, President Chaim Herzog, against the recommendations of Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry, signed an extraordinary series of pardons and commutations for the plotters. They were released and greeted as heroes by the settler community, and some rose to prominent positions in government and the Israeli media. One of them, Uzi Sharbav, now a leader in the settlement movement, was a speaker at a recent conference promoting the return of settlers to Gaza.

In fact, nearly all the Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial reductions in prison time. Gillon, the head of the Jewish Department when some of these people were arrested, recalls the “profound sense of injustice” that he felt when they were released. But even more important, he says, was “the question of what message the pardons convey to the public and to anyone who ever thinks about carrying out acts of terror against Arabs.”

Operational Failures

In 1987, a series of conflicts in Gaza led to a sustained Palestinian uprising throughout the occupied territories and Israel. The First Intifada, as it became known, was driven by anger over the occupation, which was then entering its third decade. It would simmer for the next six years, as Palestinians attacked Israelis with stones and Molotov cocktails and launched a series of strikes and boycotts. Israel deployed thousands of soldiers to quell the uprising.

In the occupied territories, reprisal attacks between settlers and Palestinians were an increasing problem. The Gush Emunim movement had spread and fractured into different groups, making it difficult for Shin Bet to embed enough informants with the settlers. But the service had one key informant — a man given the code name Shaul. He was a trusted figure among the settlers and rose to become a close assistant to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader who founded the settlement in Hebron.

Levinger had been questioned many times under suspicion of having a role in multiple violent attacks, but Shaul told Shin Bet operatives that they were seeing only a fraction of the whole picture. He told them about raids past and planned; about the settlers tearing through Arab villages, vandalizing homes, burning dozens of cars. The operatives ordered him to participate in these raids to strengthen his cover. One newspaper photographer in Hebron in 1985 captured Shaul smashing the wall of an Arab marketplace with a sledgehammer. As was standard policy, Shin Bet had ordered him to participate in any activity that didn’t involve harm to human life, but figuring out which of the activities wouldn’t cross that line became increasingly difficult. “The majority of the activists were lunatics, riffraff, and it was very difficult to be sure they wouldn’t hurt people and would harm only property,” Shaul said. (Shaul, whose true identity remains secret, provided these quotes in a 2015 interview with Bergman for the Israeli Hebrew-language paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Some of his account is published here for the first time.)

In September 1988, Rabbi Levinger, Shaul’s patron, was driving through Hebron when, he later said in court, Palestinians began throwing stones at his car and surrounding him. Levinger flashed a pistol and began firing wildly at nearby shops. Investigators said he killed a 42-year-old shopkeeper, Khayed Salah, who had been closing the steel shutter of his shoe store, and injured a second man. Levinger claimed self-defense, but he was hardly remorseful. “I know that I am innocent,” he said at the trial, “and that I didn’t have the honor of killing the Arab.”

Prosecutors cut a deal with Levinger. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide, sentenced to five months in prison and released after only three.

Shin Bet faced the classic intelligence agency’s dilemma: how and when to let its informants participate in the very violent acts the service was supposed to be stopping. There was some logic in Shin Bet’s approach with Shaul, but it certainly didn’t help deter acts of terror in the West Bank, especially with little police presence in the occupied territories and a powerful interest group ensuring that whoever was charged for the violence was released with a light sentence.

Over his many years as a Shin Bet mole, Shaul said, he saw numerous intelligence and operational failures by the agency. One of the worst, he said, was the December 1993 murder of three Palestinians in an act of vengeance after the murder of a settler leader and his son. Driving home from a day of work in Israel, the three Palestinians, who had no connection to the deaths of the settlers, were pulled from their car and killed near the West Bank town Tarqumiyah.

Shaul recalled how one settler activist proudly told him that he and two friends committed the murders. He contacted his Shin Bet handlers to tell them what he had heard. “And suddenly I saw they were losing interest,” Shaul said. It was only later that he learned why: Two of the shooters were Shin Bet informants. The service didn’t want to blow their cover, or worse, to suffer the scandal that two of its operatives were involved in a murder and a cover-up.

In a statement, Shin Bet said that Shaul’s version of events is “rife with incorrect details” but refused to specify which details were incorrect. Neither the state prosecutor nor the attorney general responded to requests for comment, which included Shaul’s full version of events and additional evidence gathered over the years.

Shaul said he also gave numerous reports to his handlers about the activities of yet another Brooklyn-born follower of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League: Dr. Baruch Goldstein. He earned his medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and in 1983 immigrated to Israel, where he worked first as a physician in the I.D.F., then as an emergency doctor at Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron.

In the years that passed, he gained the attention of Shin Bet with his eliminationist views, calling Arabs “latter-day Nazis” and making a point to visit the Jewish terrorist Ami Popper in prison, where he was serving a sentence for the 1990 murder of seven Palestinians in the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon LeZion. Shaul said he regarded Goldstein at the time as a “charismatic and highly dangerous figure” and repeatedly urged the Shin Bet to monitor him. “They told me it was none of my business,” he said.

‘Clean Hands’

On Feb. 24, 1994, Goldstein abruptly fired his personal driver. According to Shaul, Goldstein told the driver that he knew he was a Shin Bet informer. Terrified at having been found out, the driver fled the West Bank immediately. Now Goldstein was moving unobserved.

That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting , firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

Following the massacre, a state commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by Judge Meir Shamgar, the president of the Supreme Court. The commission’s report, made public in June 1994, strongly criticized the security arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs and examined law-enforcement practices regarding settlers and the extreme right in general. A secret appendix to the report, containing material deemed too sensitive for public consumption, included a December 1992 letter from the Israeli commissioner of police, essentially admitting that the police could not enforce the law. “The situation in the districts is extremely bleak,” he wrote, using the administrative nomenclature for the occupied territories. “The ability of the police to function is far from the required minimum. This is as a result of the lack of essential resources.”

In its conclusions, the commission, tracing the lines of the previous decade’s Karp report, confirmed claims that human rights organizations had made for years but that had been ignored by the Israeli establishment. The commission found that Israeli law enforcement was “ineffective in handling complaints,” that it delayed the filing of indictments and that restraining orders against “chronic” criminals among the “hard core” of the settlers were rarely issued.

The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

A Curse of Death

One ultranationalist settler who went regularly to Goldstein’s grave was a teenage radical named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who would sometimes gather other followers there on Purim to celebrate the slain killer. Purim revelers often dress in costume, and on one such occasion, caught on video, Ben-Gvir even wore a Goldstein costume, complete with a fake beard and a stethoscope. By then, Ben-Gvir had already come to the attention of the Jewish Department, and investigators interrogated him several times. The military declined to enlist him into the service expected of most Israeli citizens.

After the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a new generation of Kahanists directed their anger squarely at Rabin for his signing of the Oslo agreement and for depriving them, in their view, of their birthright. “From my standpoint, Goldstein’s action was a wake-up call,” says Hezi Kalo, a longtime senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division that included the Jewish Department at that time. “I realized that this was going to be a very big story, that the diplomatic moves by the Rabin government would simply not pass by without the shedding of blood.”

The government of Israel was finally paying attention to the threat, and parts of the government acted to deal with it. Shin Bet increased the size of the Jewish Department, and it began to issue a new kind of warning: Jewish terrorists no longer threatened only Arabs. They threatened Jews.

The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura , and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef .

Carmi Gillon by then had moved on from running the Jewish Department and now had the top job at Shin Bet. “Discussing and acknowledging such halakhic laws was tantamount to a license to kill,” he says now, looking back. He was particularly concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who were stoking the fury of the right-wing rabbis and settler leaders in their battles with Rabin.

Shin Bet wanted to prosecute rabbis who approved the religiously motivated death sentences against Rabin, but the state attorney’s office refused. “They didn’t give enough importance back then to the link between incitement and legitimacy for terrorism,” says one former prosecutor who worked in the state attorney’s office in the mid-1990s.

Shin Bet issued warning after warning in 1995. “This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Kalo now recalls. In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. “We got to his car,” he said, “and we’ll get to him, too.” The following month, Rabin was dead.

Conspiracies

Yigal Amir, the man who shot and killed Rabin in Tel Aviv after a rally in support of the Oslo Accords on Nov. 4, 1995, was not unknown to the Jewish Department. A 25-year-old studying law, computer science and the Torah at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, he had been radicalized by Rabin’s efforts to make peace with Palestinian leaders and had connections to Avishai Raviv, the leader of Eyal, a new far-right group loosely affiliated with the Kach movement. In fact, Raviv was a Shin Bet informant, code-named Champagne. He had heard Amir talking about the justice of the din rodef judgments, but he did not identify him to his handlers as an immediate danger. “No one took Yigal seriously,” he said later in a court proceeding. “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.”

Lior Akerman was the first Shin Bet investigator to interrogate Amir at the detention center where he was being held after the assassination. There was of course no question about his guilt. But there was the broader question of conspiracy. Did Amir have accomplices? Did they have further plans? Akerman now recalls asking Amir how he could reconcile his belief in God with his decision to murder the prime minister of Israel. Amir, he says, told him that rabbis had justified harming the prime minister in order to protect Israel.

Amir was smug, Akerman recalls, and he did not respond directly to the question of accomplices. “‘Listen,” he said, according to Akerman, “I succeeded . I was able to do something that many people wanted but no one dared to do. I fired a gun that many Jews held, but I squeezed the trigger because no one else had the courage to do it.”

The Shin Bet investigators demanded to know the identities of the rabbis. Amir was coy at first, but eventually the interrogators drew enough out of him to identify at least two of them. Kalo, the head of the division that oversaw the Jewish Department, went to the attorney general to argue that the rabbis should be detained immediately and prosecuted for incitement to murder. But the attorney general disagreed, saying the rabbis’ encouragement was protected speech and couldn’t be directly linked to the murder. No rabbis were arrested.

Days later, however, the police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.

Gillon, the head of the service at the time, resigned, and ongoing inquiries, charges and countercharges would continue for years. Until Oct. 7, 2023, the killing of the prime minister was considered the greatest failure in the history of Shin Bet. Kalo tried to sum up what went wrong with Israeli security. “The only answer my friends and I could give for the failure was complacency,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir. “They simply couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen, definitely not at the hands of another Jew.”

The Sasson Report

In 2001, as the Second Intifada unleashed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, Ariel Sharon took office as prime minister. The struggling peace process had come to a complete halt amid the violence, and Sharon’s rise at first appeared to mark another victory for the settlers. But in 2003, in one of the more surprising reversals in Israeli political history, Sharon announced what he called Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza, with a plan to remove settlers — forcibly if necessary — over the next two years.

The motivations were complex and the subject of considerable debate. For Sharon, at least, it appeared to be a tactical move. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” his senior adviser Dov Weisglass told Haaretz at the time. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” But Sharon was also facing considerable pressure from President George W. Bush to do something about the ever-expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, which were a growing impediment to any regional security deals. In July 2004, he asked Talia Sasson, who had recently retired as the head of the special tasks division in the state attorney’s office, to draw up a legal opinion on the subject of “unauthorized outposts” in the West Bank. His instructions were clear: Investigate which Israeli government agencies and authorities were secretly involved in building the outposts. “Sharon never interfered in my work, and neither was he surprised by the conclusions,” Sasson said in an interview two decades later. “After all, he knew better than anyone what the situation was on the ground, and he was expecting only grave conclusions.”

It was a simple enough question: Just how had it happened that hundreds of outposts had been built in the decade since Yitzhak Rabin ordered a halt in most new settlements? But Sasson’s effort to find an answer was met with delays, avoidance and outright lies. Her final report used careful but pointed language: “Not everyone I turned to agreed to talk with me. One claimed he was too busy to meet, while another came to the meeting but refused to meaningfully engage with most of my questions.”

Sasson found that between January 2000 and June 2003, a division of Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry issued 77 contracts for the establishment of 33 sites in the West Bank, all of which were illegal. In some cases, the ministry even paid for the paving of roads and the construction of buildings at settlements for which the Defense Ministry had issued demolition orders.

Several government ministries concealed the fact that funds were being diverted to the West Bank, reporting them under budgetary clauses such as “miscellaneous general development.” Just as in the case of the Karp Report two decades earlier, Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues discovered that the West Bank was being administered under completely separate laws, and those laws, she says, “appeared to me utterly insane.”

Sasson’s report took special note of Avi Maoz, who ran the Construction and Housing Ministry during most of this period. A political activist who early in his career spoke openly of pushing all Arabs out of the West Bank, Maoz helped found a settlement south of Jerusalem during the 1990s and began building a professional alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and would soon go on to his first term as prime minister. Years later, Maoz would be instrumental in ensuring Netanyahu’s political survival.

“The picture that emerges in the eye of the beholder is severe,” Sasson wrote in her report. “Instead of the government of Israel deciding on the establishment of settlements in the territories of Judea and Samaria, its place has been taken, from the mid-1990s and onward, by others.” The settlers, she wrote, were “the moving force,” but they could not have succeeded without the assistance of “various ministers of construction and housing in the relevant periods, some of them with a blind eye, and some of them with support and encouragement.”

This clandestine network was operating, Sasson wrote, “with massive funding from the State of Israel, without appropriate public transparency, without obligatory criteria. The erection of the unauthorized outposts is being done with violation of the proper procedures and general administrative rules, and in particular, flagrant and ongoing violation of the law.” These violations, Sasson warned, were coming from the government: “It was state and public agencies that broke the law, the rules, the procedures that the state itself had determined.” It was a conflict, she argued, that effectively neutered Israel’s internal checks and balances and posed a grave threat to the nation’s integrity. “The law-enforcement agencies are unable to act against government departments that are themselves breaking the law.”

But, in an echo of Judith Karp’s secret report decades earlier, the Sasson Report, made publicly available in March 2005, had almost no impact. Because she had a mandate directly from the prime minister, Sasson could have believed that her investigation might lead to the dismantling of the illegal outposts that had metastasized throughout the Palestinian territories. But even Sharon, with his high office, found himself powerless against the machine now in place to protect and expand the settlements in the West Bank — the very machine he had helped to build.

All of this was against the backdrop of the Gaza pullout. Sharon, who began overseeing the removal of settlements from Gaza in August 2005, was the third Israeli prime minister to threaten the settler dream of a Greater Israel, and the effort drew bitter opposition not only from the settlers but also from a growing part of the political establishment. Netanyahu, who had served his first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, and who previously voted in favor of a pullout, resigned his position as finance minister in Sharon’s cabinet in protest — and in anticipation of another run for the top job.

The settlers themselves took more active measures. In 2005, the Jewish Department of Shin Bet received intelligence about a plot to slow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza by using 700 liters of gasoline to blow up vehicles on a major highway. Acting on the tip, officers arrested six men in central Israel. One of them was Bezalel Smotrich, the future minister overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank.

Smotrich, then 25, was detained and questioned for weeks. Yitzhak Ilan, one of the Shin Bet officers present at the interrogation, says he remained “silent as a fish” throughout — “like an experienced criminal.” He was released without charges, Ilan says, in part because Shin Bet knew putting him on trial might expose the service’s agents inside Jewish extremist groups, and in part because they believed Smotrich was likely to receive little punishment in any case. Shin Bet was very comfortable with the courts when we fought Palestinian terrorism and we got the heavy punishments we wanted, he says. With the Jewish terrorists it was exactly the opposite.

When Netanyahu made his triumphant return as prime minister in 2009, he set out to undermine Talia Sasson’s report, which he and his allies saw as an obstacle to accelerating the settlement campaign. He appointed his own investigative committee, led by Judge Edmond Levy of the Supreme Court, who was known to support the settler cause. But the Levy report, completed in 2012, did not undermine the findings in the Sasson Report — in some ways, it reinforced them. Senior Israeli officials, the committee found, were fully aware of what was happening in the territories, and they were simply denying it for the sake of political expediency. The behavior, they wrote, was not befitting of “a country that has proclaimed the rule of law as a goal.” Netanyahu moved on.

A NEW GENERATION

The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

A former member of Hilltop Youth, who has asked to remain anonymous because she fears speaking out could endanger her, recalls how she and her friends used an illegal outpost on a hilltop in the West Bank as a base to lob stones at Palestinian cars. “The Palestinians would call the police, and we would know that we have at least 30 minutes before they arrive, if they arrive. And if they do arrive, they won’t arrest anyone. We did this tens of times.” The West Bank police, she says, couldn’t have been less interested in investigating the violence. “When I was young, I thought that I was outsmarting the police because I was clever. Later, I found out that they are either not trying or very stupid.”

The former Hilltop Youth member says she began pulling away from the group as their tactics became more extreme and once Ettinger began speaking openly about murdering Palestinians. She offered to become a police informant, and during a meeting with police intelligence officers in 2015, she described the group’s plans to commit murder — and to harm any Jews that stood in their way. By her account, she told the police about efforts to scout the homes of Palestinians before settling on a target. The police could have begun an investigation, she says, but they weren’t even curious enough to ask her the names of the people plotting the attack.

In 2013, Ettinger and other members of Hilltop Youth formed a secret cell calling itself the Revolt, designed to instigate an insurrection against a government that “prevents us from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”

During a search of one of the group’s safe houses, Shin Bet investigators discovered the Revolt’s founding documents. “The State of Israel has no right to exist, and therefore we are not bound by the rules of the game,” one declared. The documents called for an end to the State of Israel and made it clear that in the new state that would rise in its place, there would be absolutely no room for non-Jews and for Arabs in particular: “If those non-Jews don’t leave, it will be permissible to kill them, without distinguishing between women, men and children.”

This wasn’t just idle talk. Ettinger and his comrades organized a plan that included timetables and steps to be taken at each stage. One member even composed a training manual with instructions on how to form terror cells and burn down houses. “In order to prevent the residents from escaping,” the manual advised, “you can leave burning tires in the entrance to the house.”

The Revolt carried out an early attack in February 2014, firebombing an uninhabited home in a small Arab village in the West Bank called Silwad, and followed with more arson attacks, the uprooting of olive groves and the destruction of Palestinian granaries. Members of the group torched mosques, monasteries and churches, including the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. A police officer spotted Ettinger himself attacking a herd of sheep belonging to an Arab shepherd. He stoned a sheep and then slaughtered it in front of the shepherd, the officer later testified. “It was shocking,” he said. “There was a sort of insanity in it.”

Shin Bet defined the Revolt as an organization that aimed “to undermine the stability of the State of Israel through terror and violence, including bodily harm and bloodshed,” according to an internal Shin Bet memo, and sought to place several of its members, including Ettinger, under administrative detention — a measure applied frequently against Arabs.

The state attorney, however, did not approve the request. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 323 incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians in 2014; Palestinians were injured in 107 of these incidents. By the following year, the Revolt escalated the violence by openly advocating the murder of Arabs.

The Shin Bet and the police identified one of the prominent members of the Revolt, Amiram Ben-Uliel, making him a target of surveillance. But the service failed to prevent the wave of violence that he unleashed. On the night of July 31, 2015, Ben-Uliel set out on a killing spree in a central West Bank village called Duma. Ben-Uliel prepared a bag with two bottles of incendiary liquid, rags, a lighter, a box of matches, gloves and black spray paint. According to the indictment against him, Ben-Uliel sought a home with clear signs of life to ensure that the house he torched was not abandoned. He eventually found the home of Reham and Sa’ad Dawabsheh, a young mother and father. He opened a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into the home. He fled, and in the blaze that followed, the parents suffered injuries that eventually killed them. Their older son, Ahmad, survived the attack, but their 18-month-old toddler, Ali, was burned to death.

It was always clear, says Akerman, the former Shin Bet official, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.” He is still furious about how the service has handled Jewish terrorism. “Shin Bet knows how to deal with such groups, using emergency orders, administrative detention and special methods in interrogation until they break,” he says. But although it was perfectly willing to apply those methods to investigating Arab terrorism, the service was more restrained when it came to Jews. “It allowed them to incite, and then they moved on to the next stage and began to torch mosques and churches. Still undeterred, they entered Duma and burned a family.”

Shin Bet at first claimed to have difficulty locating the killers, even though they were all supposed to be under constant surveillance. When Ben-Uliel and other perpetrators were finally arrested, right-wing politicians gave fiery speeches against Shin Bet and met with the families of the perpetrators to show their support. Ben-Uliel was sentenced to life in prison, and Ettinger was finally put in administrative detention, but a fracture was spreading. In December 2015, Hilltop Youth members circulated a video clip showing members of the Revolt ecstatically dancing with rifles and pistols, belting out songs of hatred for Arabs, with one of them stabbing and burning a photograph of the murdered toddler, Ali Dawabsheh. Netanyahu, for his part, denounced the video, which, he said, exposed “the real face of a group that poses danger to Israeli society and security.”

American Friends

The expansion of the settlements had long been an irritant in Israel’s relationship with the United States, with American officials spending years dutifully warning Netanyahu both in public and in private meetings about his support for the enterprise. But the election of Donald Trump in 2016 ended all that. His new administration’s Israel policy was led mostly by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had a long personal relationship with Netanyahu, a friend of his father’s who had stayed at their family home in New Jersey. Trump, in a broader regional agenda that lined up perfectly with Netanyahu’s own plans, also hoped to scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran that Barack Obama had negotiated and broker diplomatic pacts between Israel and Arab nations that left the matter of a Palestinian state unresolved and off the table.

If there were any questions about the new administration’s position on settlements, they were answered once Trump picked his ambassador to Israel. His choice, David Friedman, was a bankruptcy lawyer who for years had helped run an American nonprofit that raised millions of dollars for Beit El, one of the early Gush Emunim settlements in the West Bank and the place where Bezalel Smotrich was raised and educated. The organization, which was also supported by the Trump family, had helped fund schools and other institutions inside Beit El. On the heels of the Trump transition, Friedman referred to Israel’s “alleged occupation” of Palestinian territories and broke with longstanding U.S. policy by saying “the settlements are part of Israel.”

This didn’t make Friedman a particularly friendly recipient of the warnings regularly delivered by Lt. Gen. Mark Schwartz, the three-star general who in 2019 arrived at the embassy in Jerusalem to coordinate security between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. A career Green Beret who had combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and served as deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the military task force with authority over U.S. counterterrorism special missions units, Schwartz wasn’t short on Middle East experience.

But he was immediately shocked by the landscape of the West Bank: settlers acting with impunity, a police force that was essentially nonexistent outside the settlements and the Israeli Army fanning the tensions with its own operations. Schwartz recalls how angry he was about what he called the army’s “collective punishment” tactics, including the razing of Palestinian homes, which he viewed as gratuitous and counterproductive. “I said, ‘Guys, this isn’t how professional militaries act.’” As Schwartz saw it, the West Bank was in some ways the American South of the 1960s. But at any moment the situation could become even more volatile, resulting in the next intifada.

Schwartz is diplomatic when recalling his interactions with Friedman, his former boss. He was a “good listener,” Schwartz says, but when he raised concerns about the settlements, Friedman would often deflect by noting “the lack of appreciation by the Palestinian people about what the Americans are doing for them.” Schwartz also discussed his concerns about settler violence directly with Shin Bet and I.D.F. officials, he says, but as far as he could tell, Friedman didn’t follow up with the political leadership. “I never got the sense he went to Netanyahu to discuss it.”

Friedman sees things differently. “I think I had a far broader perspective on acts of violence in Judea and Samaria” than Schwartz, he says now. “And it was clear that the violence coming from Palestinians against Israelis overwhelmingly was more prevalent.” He says he “wasn’t concerned about ‘appreciation’ from the Palestinians; I was concerned by their leadership’s embrace of terror and unwillingness to control violence.” He declined to discuss any conversations he had with Israeli officials.

Weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Israel for a trip that delivered a number of gifts to Netanyahu and the settler cause. He announced new guidelines requiring that goods imported to the United States from parts of the West Bank be labeled “Made in Israel.” And he flew by helicopter to Psagot, a winery in the West Bank, making him the first American secretary of state to visit a settlement. One of the winery’s large shareholders, the Florida-based Falic family, have donated millions to various projects in the settlements.

During his lunchtime visit, Pompeo paused to write a note in the winery’s guest book. “May I not be the last secretary of state to visit this beautiful land,” he wrote.

A Settler Coalition

Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to become prime minister for an unprecedented sixth term came with a price: an alliance with a movement that he once shunned, but that had been brought into the political mainstream by Israel’s steady drift to the right. Netanyahu, who is now on trial for bribery and other corruption charges, repeatedly failed in his attempts to form a coalition after most of the parties announced that they were no longer willing to join him. He personally involved himself in negotiations to ally Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, making them kingmakers for anyone trying to form a coalition government. In November 2022, the bet paid off: With the now-critical support of the extreme right, Netanyahu returned to office.

The two men ushered into power by this arrangement were some of the most extreme figures ever to hold such high positions in an Israeli cabinet. Shin Bet had monitored Ben-Gvir in the years after Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, and he was arrested on multiple charges including inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He won acquittals or dismissals in some of the cases, but he was also convicted several times and served time in prison. During the Second Intifada, he led protests calling for extreme measures against Arabs and harassed Israeli politicians he believed were insufficiently hawkish.

Then Ben-Gvir made a radical change: He went to law school. He also took a job as an aide to Michael Ben-Ari, a Knesset member from the National Union party, which had picked up many followers of the Kach movement. In 2011, after considerable legal wrangling around his criminal record, he was admitted to the bar. He changed his hairstyle and clothing to appear more mainstream and began working from the inside, once saying he represented the “soldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to the security situation in Israel.” Netanyahu made him minister of national security, with authority over the police.

Smotrich also moved into public life after his 2005 arrest by Shin Bet for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He made Shin Bet’s Jewish Department a frequent target of criticism, complaining that it was wasting time and money investigating crimes carried out by Jews, when the real terrorists were Palestinians. His ultraright allies sometimes referred to the Jewish Department as Hamakhlaka Hayehudit — the Hebrew phrase for the Gestapo unit that executed Hitler’s Final Solution.

In 2015, while campaigning for a seat in the Knesset, Smotrich said that “every shekel invested in this department is one less shekel invested in real terrorism and saving lives.” Seven years later, Netanyahu made him both minister of finance and a minister in the Ministry of Defense, in charge of overseeing civilian affairs in the West Bank, and he has steadily pushed to seize authority over the territory from the military. As part of the coalition deal with Netanyahu, Smotrich now has the authority to appoint one of the senior administrative figures in the West Bank, who helps oversee the building of roads and the enforcement of construction laws. The 2022 election also brought Avi Maoz to the Knesset — the former housing-ministry official whom Talia Sasson once marked as a hidden hand of Israeli government support for illegal settlements. Since then, Maoz had joined the far-right Noam party, using it as a platform to advance racist and homophobic policies. And he never forgot, or forgave, Sasson. On “International Anti-Corruption Day” in 2022, Maoz took to the lectern of the Knesset and denounced Sasson’s report of nearly two decades earlier, saying it was written “with a hatred of the settlements and a desire to harm them.” This, he said, was “public corruption of the highest order, for which people like Talia Sasson should be prosecuted.”

Days after assuming his own new position, Ben-Gvir ordered the police to remove Palestinian flags from public spaces in Israel, saying they “incite and encourage terrorism.” Smotrich, for his part, ordered drastic cuts in payments to the Palestinian Authority — a move that led the Shin Bet and the I.D.F. intelligence division to raise concerns that the cuts would interfere with the Palestinian Authority’s own efforts to police and prevent Palestinian terrorism.

Weeks after the new cabinet was sworn in, the Judea and Samaria division of the I.D.F. distributed an instructional video to the soldiers of a ground unit about to be deployed in the West Bank. Titled “Operational Challenge: The Farms,” the video depicts settlers as peaceful farmers living pastoral lives, feeding goats and herding sheep and cows, in dangerous circumstances. The illegal outposts multiplying around the West Bank are “small and isolated places of settlement, each with a handful of residents, a few of them — or none at all — bearing arms, the means of defense meager or nonexistent.”

It is the settlers, according to the video, who are under constant threat of attack, whether it be “penetration of the farm by a terrorist, an attack against a shepherd in the pastures, arson” or “destruction of property” — threats from which the soldiers of the I.D.F. must protect them. The commander of each army company guarding each farm must, the video says, “link up with the person in charge of security and to maintain communications”; soldiers and officers are encouraged to cultivate a close and intimate relationship with the settlers. “The informal,” viewers are told, “is much more important than the formal.”

The video addresses many matters of security, but it never addresses the question of law. When we asked the commander of the division that produced the video, Brig. Gen. Avi Bluth, why the I.D.F. was promoting the military support of settlements that are illegal under Israeli law, he directly asserted that the farms were indeed legal and offered to arrange for us to tour some of them. Later, a spokesman for the army apologized for the general’s remarks, acknowledged that the farms were illegal and announced that the I.D.F. would no longer be promoting the video. This May, Bluth was nonetheless subsequently promoted to head Israel’s Central Command, responsible for all Israeli troops in central Israel and the West Bank.

In August, Bluth will replace Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, who during his final months in charge of the West Bank has seen a near-total breakdown of law enforcement in his area of command. In late October, Fox wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.” The I.D.F. is the highest security authority in the West Bank, but the military’s top commander put the blame squarely on the police — who ultimately answer to Ben-Gvir. Fox said he had established a special task force to deal with Jewish terrorism, but investigating and arresting the perpetrators is “entirely in the hands of the Israeli police.”

And, he wrote, they aren’t doing their jobs.

‘Only One Way Forward’

When the day came early this January for the Supreme Court to hear the case brought by the people of Khirbet Zanuta, the displaced villagers arrived an hour late. They had received entry permits from the District Coordination Office to attend the hearing but were delayed by security forces before reaching the checkpoint separating Israel from the West Bank. Their lawyer, Quamar Mishirqi-Assad, noting that their struggle to attend their own hearing spoke to the essence of their petition, insisted that the hearing couldn’t proceed without them. The judges agreed to wait.

The villagers finally were led into the courtroom, and Mishirqi-Assad began presenting the case. The proceedings were in Hebrew, so most of the villagers were unable to follow the arguments that described the daily terrors inflicted by settlers and the glaring absence of any law-enforcement efforts to stop them.

The lawyers representing the military and the police denied the claims of abuse and failure to enforce the law. When a judge asked what operational steps would be in place if villagers wanted to return, one of the lawyers for the state said they could already — there was no order preventing them from doing so.

The next to speak was Col. Roi Zweig-Lavi, the Central Command’s Operations Directorate officer. He said that many of these incidents involved false claims. In fact, he said, some of the villagers had probably destroyed their own homes, because of an “internal issue.” Now they were blaming the settlers to escape the consequences of their own actions.

Colonel Zweig-Lavi’s own views about the settlements, and his role in protecting them, were well known. In a 2022 speech, he told a group of yeshiva students in the West Bank that “the army and the settlements are one and the same.”

In early May, the court ordered the state to explain why the police failed to stop the attacks and declared that the villagers have a right to return to their homes. The court also ordered the state to provide details for how they would ensure the safe return of the villagers. It is now the state’s turn to decide how it will comply. Or if it will comply.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its rulings, the United States had finally taken action to directly pressure the Netanyahu government about the violent settlers. On Feb. 1, the White House issued an executive order imposing sanctions on four settlers for “engaging in terrorist activity,” among other things, in the West Bank. One of the four was Yinon Levi, the owner of Meitarim Farm near Hebron and the man American and Israeli officials believe orchestrated the campaign of violence and intimidation against the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. The British government issued its own sanctions shortly after, saying in a statement that Israel’s government had created “an environment of near-total impunity for settler extremists in the West Bank.”

The White House’s move against individual settlers, a first by an American administration, was met with a combination of anger and ridicule by ministers in Netanyahu’s government. Smotrich called the Biden administration’s allegations against Levi and others “utterly specious” and said he would work with Israeli banks to resist complying with the sanctions. One message that circulated in an open Hilltop Youth WhatsApp channel said that Levi and his family would not be abandoned. “The people of Israel are mobilizing for them,” it said.

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government’s actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy. They won’t end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.

But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel “want war.” They “want intifada,” he says, “because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them.”

Additional reporting by Natan Odenheimer.

Top photograph: A member of a group known as Hilltop Youth, which seeks to tear down Israel’s institutions and establish ‘‘Jewish rule.’’ Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times.

Read by Jonathan Davis

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by David Mason

Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer who has been covering Israel and Palestinian territories since 2012. He is a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

The United Nations’ top court is scheduled to hear arguments from South Africa  after the country recently requested that the court issue further constraints on Israel, saying “the very survival” of Palestinians in Gaza was under threat.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that recent gains in getting desperately needed humanitarian aid  to people in the Gaza Strip risked being undone by the fighting in southern Gaza.

The Biden administration has told Congress that it intends to move forward with a plan for the United States to sell more than $1 billion in new weapons to Israel .

PEN America’s Boiling Point: As it cancels events amid criticism of its response to the Israel-Hamas war, PEN America faces questions  about when an organization devoted to free speech for all should take sides.

A Key Weapon: When President Biden threatened to pause some weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded Rafah, the devastating effects of the 2,000-pound Mark 84 bomb  were of particular concern to him.

A Presidential Move: Ronald Reagan also used the power of American arms to influence  Israeli war policy. The comparison underscores how much the politics of Israel have changed in the United States since the 1980s.

Netanyahu’s Concerns: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, under pressure from all sides, is trying to reassure his many domestic, military and diplomatic critics. Here’s a look at what he is confronting .

Advertisement