The naked ṭawāf and the āyah of al-Aʿrāf

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

To grasp why the Prophet ﷺ made so firm a stand, we have to understand the pagan custom of circling the Kaʿbah with no clothes on, a practice the Qurʾān references but which he had only mentioned in passing before. Allāh speaks of it in Sūrat al-Aʿrāf, and the context is unmistakable. Just before the verse, Allāh recalls how Iblīs seduced Ādam and Ḥawwāʾ into stripping away their garments, and warns the children of Ādam not to let Shayṭān seduce them the same way; then He reminds them that clothing itself is a gift sent down from above: قَدْ أَنْزَلْنَا عَلَيْكُمْ لِبَاسًا يُوَارِي سَوْآتِكُمْ وَرِيشًا. We are the only creation in this world that covers itself beyond what it was born in, and Allāh says that covering came down to us, He sent it, so the very idea of clothing is, quite literally, heavenly.

❧"Allāh does not command indecency"

Then Allāh says, وَإِذَا فَعَلُوا فَاحِشَةً, "and when they commit an indecency," a fāḥishah, which is a lewd sin of a sexual nature, distinct from ẓulm (a sin of transgression) and ʿudwān. When they do it, they excuse themselves two ways: وَجَدْنَا عَلَيْهَا آبَاءَنَا وَاللَّهُ أَمَرَنَا بِهَا, "we found our forefathers doing it, and Allāh commanded it of us." And Allāh answers only the second: قُلْ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَأْمُرُ بِالْفَحْشَاءِ, "say: Allāh does not command indecency." He lets the first claim stand, not because it is a valid argument, but because it was factually true; their forefathers did do it. The Ṣaḥābah and the Tābiʿūn who interpreted the verse said this fāḥishah was precisely the naked ṭawāf, and the page and a half of context about clothing makes that certain.

❧Their two justifications

Why would anyone strip bare at the holiest of places? Ibn Kathīr and others record two justifications. The first the shaykh found striking: that one should circle the House "as our mothers gave birth to us," returning to the original state Allāh created us in, au naturel, the exact logic of the modern nudist movement, that God made us this way so why pervert nature; and Allāh's reply is simply, "no, I sent clothing down to you." The second: "how can we make ṭawāf in the very garments we have disobeyed Allāh in? Is it not shameful to circle the House in clothes we have sinned in?", so they cast them off. It shows, the shaykh says, how easily an intellect left without a Sharīʿah from Allāh will manufacture a justification for anything at all, you want to walk naked around the Kaʿbah, you will find your reasons; you want to torture the innocent, you will find your reasons, which is exactly why we need a law from Allāh to tell us right from wrong, for left to our own whims anyone can justify anything.

❧A "sign of piety," and the loopholes

It was not constant. Naked ṭawāf was actually treated as a mark of extra piety, "I will display my devotion by displaying my nakedness", perhaps one pilgrim in a hundred, and swelling during the Ḥajj season when the non-Qurashīs poured in; for the people of Mecca, in their elitism, held themselves exempt as "people of the Ḥaram" and did not do it. And there were ways out even for those who wanted to: buy brand-new clothes, so the "sinned-in garments" excuse fell away, or borrow a garment from a Qurashī, since anything used in Mecca was reckoned holy. This whole scheme, the shaykh jokes as his own "ridiculous theory," must have been invented by some Meccan cloth-merchant, for who else profits when everyone must either strip or buy from Mecca? Even the women did it, covering only the middle and shielding the rest with their hands, reciting a line, اَلْيَوْمَ يَبْدُو بَعْضُهُ أَوْ كُلُّهُ، وَمَا يَبْدُو مِنْهُ فَلَا أُحِلُّهُ, "today part of me or all of me shows, but whatever shows I permit no one to stare at", and often choosing the cover of night.

❧Being amid indecency is not itself ḥarām

Here the shaykh presses one fiqh point. For all fifty-three years before Islam this was happening in Mecca, and for his thirteen years of prophethood there as a persecuted minority the Prophet ﷺ lived amid it, lowering his gaze, never treating mere presence in such an environment as forbidding him to remain. Young men sometimes decide that living in the West is ḥarām because indecency surrounds them; but go East and you will find as much or worse, there is no utopia anywhere anymore, not with the internet and television and everything on the screen, even where the billboards are absent. As long as one guards oneself to the utmost, فَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ مَا اسْتَطَعْتُمْ, "so fear Allāh as much as you are able", there is no sin in being present in such a society while you fight your own battle with your gaze. The difference now, in the ninth year, is simply that the Prophet ﷺ was no longer a powerless minority but in charge and able to enforce the law, which is exactly why he would send Abū Bakr to end the practice for good.