Shame Cultures and Guilt Cultures

This idea of being checked from the outside is related to what anthropologists term shame cultures. Anthropologists divide cultures into shame cultures and guilt cultures, and they have an idea that guilt cultures are higher. Western culture would be seen as a guilt culture; many African cultures would be considered shame cultures. A guilt culture is a culture where there is an internal mechanism going on: one feels bad if one is doing wrong. A shame culture is a culture where — oh my God, so-and-so is seeing me; he is going to tell so-and-so. In other words, there is an external mechanism that is checking one's actions.

From the Islamic viewpoint, Islam is a shame religion, but it is not the society that one wants to check one's action. It is the fact that one is being watched by God. And this is why iḥsān is related to seeing. In other words, one feels the presence of God and feels ashamed before God to be doing an action that would be displeasing to God. This is the idea of shame. And the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: every tradition has a characteristic, and the characteristic of my tradition is shame. But it is not shame before the society; it is shame before God. And one of the things the Prophet said is: feel shame before the angels. That there are angels; there is an angelic presence when we do things.

And it is interesting, but many people are ashamed. They do things. There is the account of a man who worked in a video store, who described how the people who came in for pornographic films would always use euphemisms when they asked where the section was, if they could not find it, or whether the shop had such things. He could see that a lot of the time they would walk around, and they would be embarrassed to come up and just say it, because there is a sense of shame. There are still, within our culture, certain mechanisms in the culture by which people feel shame about certain things, and one of them would be that. There are many examples of that. And we are a culture that in many ways is also throwing off the garments of shame. We are losing that sense too, as the Christian influence in this culture, the Judaeo-Christian influence in this culture, diminishes.