By Iqra Farheen
Think of the last time you looked in the mirror and quietly graded yourself. Or the last time you achieved something and your first instinct was to check who noticed. Or the moment, and every woman has one, when you wanted to make a choice you believed was right, and paused because you already knew what people would say.
That pause is worth sitting with. Because underneath it is a question most of us never say out loud: whose approval am I actually living for?
Every generation answers that differently. Some cultures have measured a woman’s worth by her beauty, others by her achievements, and today’s world often ties her value to success, influence, or how she performs online. These standards shift with every season, yet none of them was ever built to hold a person’s whole worth. They were built to be chased, not to be rested in. Islam offers something most of us are never told to expect: a floor that doesn’t move. Instead of asking, “Who am I in the eyes of the world?” it asks something far steadier: “Who am I before Allah?”
This is not a nicer way of saying the same thing. It is a different foundation entirely. Before you are a daughter, sister, wife, mother, student, or professional, you are first and foremost a servant of Allah. And once that becomes real to you, not just something you know, but something you feel, it doesn’t only change where your worth comes from. It changes how you choose. What you prioritise. Who you’re really answering to when no one else is watching. And what you do in the moment your Lord’s pleasure and everyone else’s approval pull in opposite directions.
The Pressure Nobody Warns You About
It’s easy to say “seek Allah’s pleasure over the world’s approval.” It is much harder to live it, because the world you’re navigating is rarely one clean pressure you can name and resist. It’s several, all at once, all wearing different faces.
There’s the pull of what’s trending: what’s aesthetic, what earns validation the moment you post it. There’s the weight of culture: the inherited expectations dressed up as religion, about when you should marry, how you should look, how modest or how outspoken you’re allowed to be. There’s the love of family, parents, in-laws, a spouse, whose wishes are usually sincere but not always aligned with what you know, deep down, to be right for you. And underneath all of it is the one voice that actually matters most: what Allah has genuinely asked of you, which is sometimes quietly blurred into the other three, and sometimes standing in direct opposition to them.
You are rarely choosing between faith and the world in some abstract, easy way. You are choosing, in real, specific, sometimes lonely moments, which voice to obey when they collide: when your family wants a decision your conscience resists, when your community’s picture of a good Muslim woman doesn’t match what you know Allah has actually asked of you, when cultural pride gets dressed up in religious language and handed to you as if it were sacred. This is where “who am I before Allah?” stops being a nice reflection for a quiet moment and becomes the question you have to answer with your actual life.
And here is the mercy in it: Islam never asked you to become one fixed shape to prove you belong. Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) ran a business and carried the Prophet’s mission on her shoulders when he had almost no one else. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) became one of the greatest scholars in Islamic history, sharp, outspoken, and unafraid to correct men far senior to her. Fatimah (may Allah be pleased with her) lived a quieter life of endurance and devotion within her own home. Maryam (may Allah be pleased with her) carried an unimaginable trial mostly alone, with barely anyone to stand beside her. Asiya (may Allah be pleased with her) held onto her faith from inside the palace of a man who called himself a god. Different women. Different lives. Not one script between them, except this: they all measured themselves by the same thing. Not what the world made of them, but who they did it for.
What Actually Changes When Allah Comes First
If your deepest identity is servant of Allah rather than who the world has decided you are, something in you actually shifts, not just in sentiment, but in the small, real decisions of an ordinary day.
You stop renting out your sense of self. When your identity depends on approval, it is never truly yours; it belongs to whoever is watching, and it can be withdrawn the moment they stop clapping. When your identity is rooted in standing before Allah, it becomes something you carry with you into every room, unaffected by who is or isn’t impressed that day.
Your choices start passing through a different filter. Instead of asking, “Will this be accepted?” you begin asking, “Is this something I could stand behind on the Day I have to answer for it?” That question has a way of quieting a room full of opinions.
Your priorities loosen their grip on you. Success, image, even the approval of people you love, Islam never asks you to stop caring about these. But they stop being the ultimate thing. You start holding them with an open hand instead of a clenched fist, because you already know your worth was never resting on them in the first place.
You become accountable to Someone more honest than public opinion, and more merciful, too. Public opinion punishes your mistakes forever and rewards performance over sincerity. Allah is the opposite: He knows exactly what’s in your heart even when no one else does, and His door for return never actually closes. Being truly seen and never being beyond mercy, at the same time, nothing else offers you that.
And when Allah’s pleasure conflicts with everyone else’s approval, you finally have a way to decide. This is the part most people avoid saying out loud, because it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes doing what’s right, speaking a hard truth, setting a boundary, delaying or declining a marriage, pursuing knowledge or work your family doesn’t understand, simply refusing to perform the version of ‘good Muslim woman’ that culture demands, will cost you approval. Knowing your worth is already anchored somewhere unshakable is exactly what gives you the ground to make that choice and still recognise yourself afterward.
Rooted, Not Erased
Allah the Exalted says: “Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.” (Surah Al-Hujurat, 49:13) Read that again slowly. Not your beauty. Not your achievements. Not how many people are watching. Honour, in Allah’s eyes, is earned through taqwa, and taqwa is something every single woman, in every circumstance, has equal access to.
The Prophet ﷺ said: “Indeed, Allah does not look at your appearance or your wealth, but He looks at your hearts and your deeds.” (Sahih Muslim) And the Qur’an makes it unmistakably clear that closeness to Allah was never limited by gender: “Indeed, the Muslim men and Muslim women, the believing men and believing women, the obedient men and obedient women… Allah has prepared for all of them forgiveness and a magnificent reward.” (Surah Al-Ahzab, 33:35)
None of this asks you to disappear from the world: from ambition, from family, from community. Whether you are raising children, chasing a degree, building a career, leading in your field, or holding everything together quietly where no one sees, every one of those paths can be worship. But only once you know for whom you’re walking it. That is the real shift. Not what you do. The ground you’re standing on while you do it.
“Whoever does righteous deeds, whether male or female, while being a believer, We will surely grant them a good life, and We will reward them according to the best of what they used to do.” (Surah AnNahl, 16:97)
So ask yourself, honestly: if every mirror shattered, every comment section vanished, every person who ever judged you disappeared tomorrow, who would you be? What would still be standing? If the answer feels shaky, that is not a flaw in you. It is proof of where you have been building.
Because there is only one identity that survives the loss of everyone watching. Not ‘beautiful’. Not ‘successful’. Not ‘impressive’. Servant of Allah. That is the only title that was never handed to you by the world, and so it is the only one the world can never take back.
This is what it means to be a woman before Allah: not a woman defined by who witnesses her, but a woman who no longer needs to be witnessed to know exactly who she is. She does not perform for a mirror. She does not wait for applause. She lives, chooses, sacrifices, and stands firm as if Allah alone is watching, because He always was, and He is enough.
May every Muslim woman stop measuring herself against a reflection the world keeps redrawing, and instead come home to the one identity that was hers from the very beginning: servant of Allah, first and always. Ameen.
