Two kinds of Shame

In a widely read lecture on a saying of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, the Iranian scholar Ayatollah Nāṣir Makārim Shīrāzī describes modesty as a "shield" God has placed in the human being, and reports a Prophetic tradition that divides it in two: a modesty that comes from reason and a modesty that comes from folly. This article reconstructs the lecture and tests it three ways: against itself, for what it claims and for the practical cases it offers; against the Arabic lexicon as documented in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, for what the word ḥayāʾ actually denotes and how it relates to the near-synonyms for shame and shamelessness; and against the ḥadīth corpus and the Qurʾān, for whether the two-fold division is attested, how it is graded, what the collections around it say about misplaced modesty, and where the Qurʾān itself draws the line. The distinction turns out to be genuinely rooted in the tradition, though not quite in the way the lecture suggests. The Prophet's saying states the criterion (the modesty of reason is knowledge, the modesty of folly is ignorance), and the Qurʾān supplies the outer limit of all modesty in a single clause: God is not ashamed of the truth.