Lower Your Gaze, Look Up
An Islamic reflection on lowering the gaze, algorithms, attention and awe, exploring what we look at, what shapes our sight, and why looking up matters.
Assalamu'alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.
Rabbi ishrah li sadri, wa yassir li amri, wahlul ‘uqdatan min lisani, yafqahu qawli.
(My Lord, expand for me my chest, ease for me my task, and untie the knot from my tongue so that they may understand my speech.)
On a random Thursday afternoon, I was walking back to the office from the mosque. Brimming with the peace and mental clarity only prayer can adorn, I was watching the pavement as I walked. Dead leaves on the ground and other people’s pant legs and shoes in my peripheral vision.
I thought about my posture as I walked. Am I walking upright, shoulders back? Am I standing tall? I reflected on things my ustadh had shared just a few weeks prior. I just recently learnt how Rasulullah صَلَّى ٱللَّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ would walk with his chest forward and a lowered gaze. It’s never been a conscious decision on my part to follow Rasulullah صَلَّى ٱللَّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ ‘s every mannerism, however on that walk back to the office, I was mindful of it. More than I’ve ever been before.
The brief three minutes it took for me to cross two junctions and arrive back at my seat, honestly got me thinking. It’s sort of strange how we walk now, Muslim or not. We all bow our heads with lowered gaze. A few moments of looking up, and you’ll quickly realise this is a reality everywhere: on trains, at crossings, in cafes, along pavements, and even beneath the open sky.
We’re so preoccupied, our posture almost resembles restraint. Except our gaze is never truly lowered at all. Inside the small rectangle in our hands, we are looking everywhere. Into strangers’ bedrooms, other people’s marriages, their holidays, bodies, meals, children, homes, achievements, grief, wealth, and beauty. We watch hundreds of lives unfold before us without ever lifting our heads.
Our gaze reaches every corner of the earth, from neighbouring cities to wartorn societies, the dense rainforests and distant corners of the world most of us will never visit. All the while, above the screen, another world continues without us noticing.
I’m guilty of it too, yet, guilt does not make the observation any less worth sitting with. In an age where looking down can expose us to almost everything, lowering our gaze sometimes begins by looking up.
The Gaze Is More Than Where We Look
Part of my moral responsibility when publishing my personal reflections for the world to see is to do my best not to mislead. Therefore, it’s important to distinguish that when Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ) instructs believing men and women to lower their gaze, the command is not merely about keeping our eyes pointed towards the ground.
An-Nur (24:30)
قُل لِّلْمُؤْمِنِينَ يَغُضُّوا۟ مِنْ أَبْصَـٰرِهِمْ وَيَحْفَظُوا۟ فُرُوجَهُمْ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ أَزْكَىٰ لَهُمْ ۗ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ خَبِيرٌۢ بِمَا يَصْنَعُونَ ٣٠
˹O Prophet!˺ Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity. That is purer for them. Surely Allah is All-Aware of what they do.
— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran
Note: Ayat 31 of Surah An-Nur gives the same instruction to believing women.
In Islam, it’s understood that lowering our gaze is an exercise of restraint over what we allow our eyes to linger upon. It’s a deliberate act of discipline, reminding us that just because something can be seen does not mean it needs to be watched, studied, revisited or consumed. This restraint sits naturally alongside many other forms of Islamic guidance: avoiding what does not concern us, protecting the privacy of others, and resisting the urge to pry into lives that were never ours to inspect.
For much of my youth, I took Qur’anic guidance at face value. What it says is probably what it means. Alhamdulillah, through the influence of those I love and respect, I’ve since become more conscious of the importance of deeper contemplation.
So I’d like to draw our attention to where this ayah appears in Surah An-Nur, because its placement made the idea of restraint feel much more profound to me than I had initially understood.
Just three ayat earlier, Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ) begins teaching believers how to enter somebody else’s home.
An-Nur (24:27)
يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ لَا تَدْخُلُوا۟ بُيُوتًا غَيْرَ بُيُوتِكُمْ حَتَّىٰ تَسْتَأْنِسُوا۟ وَتُسَلِّمُوا۟ عَلَىٰٓ أَهْلِهَا ۚ ذَٰلِكُمْ خَيْرٌۭ لَّكُمْ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَكَّرُونَ ٢٧
O believers! Do not enter any house other than your own until you have asked for permission and greeted its occupants. This is best for you, so perhaps you will be mindful.
— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran
The following ayah goes even further.
An-Nur (24:28)
فَإِن لَّمْ تَجِدُوا۟ فِيهَآ أَحَدًۭا فَلَا تَدْخُلُوهَا حَتَّىٰ يُؤْذَنَ لَكُمْ ۖ وَإِن قِيلَ لَكُمُ ٱرْجِعُوا۟ فَٱرْجِعُوا۟ ۖ هُوَ أَزْكَىٰ لَكُمْ ۚ وَٱللَّهُ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ عَلِيمٌۭ ٢٨
If you find no one at home, do not enter it until you have been given permission. And if you are asked to leave, then leave. That is purer for you. And Allah has ˹perfect˺ knowledge of what you do.
— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran
Only after teaching us these boundaries is the instruction to lower our gaze introduced.
Ibn ʿAshur draws attention to this sequence in his tafsir. He explains that after laying down the rules of seeking permission, the Qur’an moves to the manners required once a person has already entered a home. Access, in other words, does not remove the responsibility to exercise restraint over what we look at.
Access is not the same as entitlement.
In the physical sense, we enter multiple doors throughout the course of our lives, and none of them grant us the right to discard our manners once we’re inside. Even a rage room has a code of conduct and set expectations for how participants should behave. Restraint does not end once access is granted, and the Arabic of ayat 30 reinforces this.
Allah says yaghuḍḍū min abṣārihim.
Let’s take this one part at a time. The verb ghaḍḍa (غَضَّ), from which ghaḍḍ al-baṣar derives, carries the sense of lowering or reducing. Ibn ʿAshur explains ghaḍḍ al-baṣar here as turning the sight away from staring or fixing the gaze upon something.
There is a hadith I found from Sahih Muslim 2159a, in The Book of Manners and Etiquette, chapter “An Accidental Glance” that frames this distinction in a beautifully practical manner. Jarir ibn ‘Abdullah رضي الله عنه asked Rasulullah صَلَّى ٱللَّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ about the sudden, unintentional glance. He was instructed to turn his sight away.
In our sincere desire to follow Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ)’s guidance, I think it is important not to confuse lowering the gaze with blindness.
Sight is part of how we move through the world. We need it to work, travel, learn, play, care for others and even worship with awareness of what is around us. To see something, therefore, is not in itself a wrongdoing.
But what happens next is often our choice. Do we let our eyes move on, or do we allow them to linger? Do we look because we need to, or simply because we can?
Now let’s transition to the easily overlooked min in min abṣārihim, which translates to “from their gazes”. I’m going to focus on one classical interpretation explained by Ibn Ashur, where min is understood as indicating partiality. In other words, the command is not calling for the suppression of our sight completely, because that would neither be possible nor necessary.
It is at this juncture I hope to draw a connection between the instruction to lower our gaze and the immediate next command:
“…and guard their chastity.”
When I was a young kid, I had a staring problem. I would say that maybe I was too young to notice it about myself, but it was certainly obvious enough for others to point out. In the very on-brand manner of learning everything “late”, it wasn’t till my adolescent years that I began to understand how often the eye is the beginning of something that eventually travels much further. Long before an action takes place, something may first be seen, revisited, entertained and desired.
Islamic restraint begins upstream. It does not concern itself only with the final action. It also asks us to pay attention to the paths that carry us towards it.
ذَٰلِكَ أَزْكَىٰ لَهُمْ
“That is azkā for them.”
Dr. Mustafa Khattab translates azkā here as “purer”. But the Arabic root ز ك و carries a little more weight than that. It is associated not only with purity, but also with growth and increase. It is the same root family we find in words like zakāh and tazkiyah.
I, personally, feel that this clarity changes the way I read the command. Lowering the gaze is not framed only as something we give up. There is also something being cultivated in us through that restraint.
This is conceptually consistent when we consider how azkā also appeared just two ayat earlier. When Allah instructs believers to leave if they are denied entry into somebody’s home, He says:
هُوَ أَزْكَىٰ لَكُمْ
“That is purer for you.”
The word appears once when we are told to respect another person’s door, and again when we are told to restrain our eyes. Read together, the sequence begins to reveal a much larger ethic of privacy and restraint.
Just because access has been given, what are we entitled to do with our gaze?
When the Gaze Is Chosen for Us
The responsibility of the gaze lies with us. But I also think it would be dishonest to pretend we are exercising that responsibility in the same visual environment of our ancestors.
I can be sitting completely still at my desk in Singapore while my eyes move between a wedding in Istanbul, somebody’s bedroom in New York, a bombing in Gaza, a rainforest in Brazil, a Qur’an recitation, someone’s skincare routine, and a stranger crying into their front-facing camera.
The transition is not just quick, it’s seamless, and I’m not always the one deciding what comes next. Recommendation systems increasingly sit between us and the enormous amount of content available online, ranking what they predict we are most likely to find relevant or interesting.
TikTok, for example, openly explains that its For You feed considers signals including the videos we watch, like and share, the comments we post, the accounts we follow and even our searches. It even attaches different weightage to each signal. Completing a longer video might indicate stronger interest than something comparatively weak such as the creator happening to live in the same country.
So if the act of “looking” translates into data, the few extra seconds I spend on a video, either watching for the first time or replaying it, is communicating something to a system that observes my sight without context.
I’ve stayed on videos because I loved what I was seeing, but I’ve also lingered when I felt horrified. Sometimes it’s because I disagree and am appalled, or because I am nosy, occasionally jealous, or because I know I probably should have moved on, but I didn’t.
Studying my online behaviour can’t tell you much about my intentions, yet it often dictates what appears next. Researchers who study recommender systems describe this relationship as a feedback loop. A system makes recommendations based partly on what it understands about our preferences. We respond to those recommendations, and those responses become new information that can then influence future recommendations.
Researchers Gediminas Adomavicius and colleagues use the term “preference pollution” to describe situations where recommendations do not merely respond to a person’s preferences, but can themselves influence the preferences that person later reports. Their review discusses experiments in which changing the recommendation shown before people consumed something shifted their later ratings in the direction of that recommendation. This effect has been observed across different media, including films, television programmes, music and other digital content.
Let me reel myself back in: this does not mean an algorithm can simply manufacture our personalities or dictate what we love. But it does challenge a very comfortable assumption.
I’ve spent most of my digital life assuming my preferences already existed independently of technology, and that technology’s role was simply to learn what I liked and serve more of it back to me.
But an algorithmic relationship can be much more circular than that. What I like influences what I am shown. What I am shown influences what I encounter. And what I repeatedly encounter may, at least in some circumstances, influence what I eventually come to like, expect or consider normal.
That last part feels like one of the clearest reminders that the gaze has never stopped at the eye. Something can become familiar simply because we have seen enough of it. As standards and expectations shift, what once looked excessive can eventually look ordinary. Worse, what once seemed luxurious can begin to look like the bare minimum.
A face, body, relationship, home or lifestyle can become a reference point without us ever consciously deciding that it should. And before we can truly process any of that, there is always something else waiting underneath it.
It is tempting to believe that this constant movement protects us from boredom, but experimental research suggests quite the opposite. In a 2024 series of seven experiments involving more than 1,200 participants, psychologists Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht studied what they called digital switching – the act of moving between videos or skipping around within them.
Participants generally expected switching to make their viewing experience more engaging. Instead, switching between or within videos increased boredom and reduced attention, satisfaction, and the sense that what they were watching was meaningful. The researchers were careful to note that some of their findings did not generalise as clearly to every form of online content, so this is not evidence that every swipe is somehow cognitively harmful. But for video consumption, the pattern was notable.
I can’t speak for others, but I personally, spend quite a bit of time “doomscrolling”. I engage with content that I like, and switch quickly when the thing in front of me can’t grasp my attention. On a regular night, I’d probably pay this cycle no mind. But upon reflecting through this article, I find this cycle deeply unsettling. After all, contemplation requires the opposite conditions. For a start, we’d have to remain with it, notice details, ask questions, and allow one thought enough time to become another.
Even the research surrounding media multitasking deserves some nuance here. Scientists have debated how strongly heavy media multitasking is related to poorer attention, partly because studies have used different definitions, measurements, and populations. But a 2023 study involving 924 participants across three samples still found a moderate negative association between media multitasking and sustained attention. Association does not prove that one caused the other, but it gives us good reason not to dismiss the relationship either.
Perhaps the problem is not simply that there is too much to see. It is that very little asks us to stay. And when I place that beside everything I have just learnt about ghaḍḍ al-baṣar, I find the modern problem of the gaze much harder to reduce to a list of forbidden images.
Islam asks me to exercise judgement over where my eyes remain. My phone places me inside an environment that is continuously learning what can keep them captivated. Those two realities now meet every time I open a feed.
The algorithm cannot force my eyes open. It cannot remove my responsibility. I can scroll away. I can unfollow. I can tell a platform I am not interested. I can close the application altogether. But it would also be naive to pretend the landscape before my eyes is neutral. It has been ranked, selected, predicted, and is increasingly personalised around traces of what I have looked at before.
Which leaves me with a question I did not have to ask when I first began thinking about lowering my gaze: If what I repeatedly look at can help determine what is placed before me next, then what am I training my eyes to be surrounded by?
Because maybe we’re not only teaching algorithms about what captures our attention.
Do Not Extend Your Eyes
Through repetition, we might also be teaching our attention what deserves to capture us.
Which brings me to another ayah about the eyes that feels almost painfully relevant to the way we live now.
Taha (20:131)
وَلَا تَمُدَّنَّ عَيْنَيْكَ إِلَىٰ مَا مَتَّعْنَا بِهِۦٓ أَزْوَٰجًۭا مِّنْهُمْ زَهْرَةَ ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنْيَا لِنَفْتِنَهُمْ فِيهِ ۚ وَرِزْقُ رَبِّكَ خَيْرٌۭ وَأَبْقَىٰ ١٣١
Do not let your eyes crave what We have allowed some of the disbelievers to enjoy; the ˹fleeting˺ splendour of this worldly life, which We test them with. But your Lord’s provision ˹in the Hereafter˺ is far better and more lasting.
— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran
Here, Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ) warns against extending our eyes towards the worldly enjoyment given to others, describing it as the splendour of this life and, importantly, something through which they themselves are being tested. Al-Tabari explains the verse as a warning against looking towards these worldly enjoyments, which he describes as passing and ultimately disappearing.
If you’re wondering why “do not extend your eyes” is phrased as such, one way of looking at it is to consider how wanting does not always begin with a conscious thought. Sometimes it begins much more quietly. We look once, and then, we look again, and again, and again.
Psychology calls one version of this upward social comparison, comparing ourselves with someone we perceive to be better off in some way. Research around social media and comparison is not as simple as saying that comparison always makes people miserable. A major review found the effects can vary considerably between people and situations, and comparison can sometimes even inspire. But it also found that social comparison and envy are common on social media and are often associated with poorer wellbeing. More recent meta-analytic evidence similarly finds that online upward comparison is, on average, associated with lower wellbeing and self-esteem, while stressing that these findings do not prove the same causal effect for everyone.
I’m not saying that every beautiful home, happy marriage, or successful person we see online is somehow bad for us. But, there is benefit in noticing when ‘looking’ has quietly become ‘measuring’.
Subhanallah, Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ) already knew that human beings would struggle with this, long before social media. And so, after directing our eyes away from the splendour placed in somebody else’s hands, Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ) redirects our attention back to Him:
But your Lord’s provision ˹in the Hereafter˺ is far better and more lasting.
You didn’t need an article to tell you that prolonged comparison is so dangerous. The longer our eyes remain fixed on what Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ) has written for somebody else, the easier it becomes to lose sight of what He has written for us.
Why Looking Up Changes the Scale of the Self
I remember my first experience looking out off the peak of a mountain. Feeling the chill in my bones, and hardly recognising the traffic down below. I remember looking out into the fog and thinking how we’re all just like ants. And if that were the sight at 1,800 to 1,865 meters (5,900 to 6,118 feet) above sea level, just imagine how much smaller we truly are in the vast universe.
Much of this article has contemplated what happens when our gaze narrows, but when I think of scale, I think of the nights spent on that mountain. And I think about Surah Qaf and Surah Al-Ghashiyah.
Qaf (50:6)
أَفَلَمْ يَنظُرُوٓا۟ إِلَى ٱلسَّمَآءِ فَوْقَهُمْ كَيْفَ بَنَيْنَـٰهَا وَزَيَّنَّـٰهَا وَمَا لَهَا مِن فُرُوجٍۢ ٦
Have they not then looked at the sky above them: how We built it and adorned it ˹with stars˺, leaving it flawless?
— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran
Al-Ghashiyah (88:18-20)
88:18
وَإِلَى ٱلسَّمَآءِ كَيْفَ رُفِعَتْ ١٨
and the sky—how it was raised ˹high˺;
88:19
وَإِلَى ٱلْجِبَالِ كَيْفَ نُصِبَتْ ١٩
and the mountains—how they were firmly set up;
88:20
وَإِلَى ٱلْأَرْضِ كَيْفَ سُطِحَتْ ٢٠
and the earth—how it was levelled out?
— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran
It feels silly to compare our meaningless scrolling to the gaze Allah (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ) has prescribed for us. One continually brings the human world closer, the other reminds us how much exists beyond it.
Psychologists studying the emotion of awe have spent years investigating what happens to our perception of ourselves when we encounter something vast. In psychological research, awe is commonly associated with two things: a perception of vastness, and a feeling that whatever we have encountered exceeds our existing way of understanding the world, forcing the mind to adjust. Nature is one of its most frequently studied triggers.
One consequence researchers have repeatedly explored is something they rather charmingly call the “small self”, which is not to be confused with low self-esteem or self-hatred. The “small self” simply refers to the temporary realisation that I am not quite as enormous as I normally feel.
In a series of five studies involving more than 2,000 participants, Paul Piff and his colleagues found that experiences of awe were associated with a diminished sense of the individual self and greater prosocial behaviour. In one experiment, participants stood among towering eucalyptus trees. Compared with a control group, they subsequently reported less entitlement and demonstrated more helpful behaviour.
More recent reviews have complicated the idea somewhat, suggesting that awe may not simply make the self “smaller”, but can shift us towards a broader, less self-centred way of locating ourselves within the world. And I think they’re right! Islam does not teach us that human beings are meaningless specks floating through an indifferent universe. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
The One who created what makes us feel small is also the One who knows us completely.
For much of the day, my screen brings the human world unbearably close. Other people’s faces, possessions, opinions, achievements, and lives can fill my entire field of vision until they begin to feel like the measure of everything.
Then I look up.
The mountain is still there. The sky stretches far beyond anything I can comprehend. The clouds move without my permission. Birds cross distances I will never see. And suddenly, the things that felt enormous a few moments ago return to their proper size.
Sometimes, lowering our gaze requires us to look up.
Wallahu a'lam,
Jazakallah Khair.
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