Beauty Perceptions in the Islamic Culture

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Beauty in Islamic culture
Picture yourself running into a Muslim woman in her Burqa. (A Burqa is usually black and it covers everything but their eyes.) Scary right? You always wondered what they are. Maybe even thinking they were Islamic KKKs or something. As a child I was raised Muslim and even then I was terrified at the women wearing Burqa’s. I asked my father how a man knows if the woman is beautiful if you can’t see her face. His response was “today in the world many people mistake beauty for the way a woman looks. Beauty should not be defined as the way her body curves or the features of their face. It is deeper than that. Beauty is about the soul and when you get to truly know a person is when their beauty shows” (Hamidullah). I as a teen thought that was complete crap because I knew that beauty is about how you look. I took it upon myself to research how beauty is perceived in the Islamic culture.
What comes to mind when someone says “What is a beautiful Muslim woman?” many of us think about a woman who is modest in what she is wearing and a Hijab (head scarf). Wouldn’t this be basing her beauty off of looks? The one thing Muslims are not supposed to base beauty on. According to the Muslim scholar Yu Sra Owais the Islamic religion teaches us to take care of our bodies and to maintain a pleasant physical appearance. It also emphasizes the need for every individual to develop a beauty within. The Muslim culture perceives an inward beauty as the beauty of knowing Allah and obeying his demands as shown in the Quran. The Quran is their holy book. Once you get to a certain balance within filled with confidence upon yourself and following your religion righteously it begins to shine though and show on the outside. Many of the...

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...ace your outer beauty. It is about the beauty of the person as a whole. The way you look at life, the things you do in life, your relationship with God. All of that contributes to being beautiful. Though people may view the concept of being beautiful differently based on their cultures I believe that there is some universal truth to what beauty is. Whether we hate to admit it or not being beautiful is a woman with a pretty face and an incredible body. Having a great personality and the good deeds we do are just a bonus in being beautiful. Don’t we call someone beautiful based on their looks before we get to know them. That goes for any culture whether you’re Muslim, from some tribe in Africa, from the Caribbean it doesn’t matter. The inner beauty within us does contribute to our outer beauty but what we look like on the outside is what people refer to as beautiful.

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