A hadith recorded in Sahih Muslim enumerates faith as consisting of over seventy branches, ranging from the highest, the declaration that there is no god but God, to the lowest, removing a harmful object from the road, and places haya among them specifically, describing it as itself a branch of faith, a classification that gives the quality a theological weight beyond ordinary social propriety.
The Study Quran's broader treatment of modesty related terms notes that classical scholarship distinguishes haya from mere shyness or timidity, a temperamental trait some people have more of than others regardless of piety, defining it instead as a cultivated sensitivity that restrains a person from wrongdoing specifically because of an awareness of being seen, whether by other people or, in its deepest form, by God regardless of human witnesses, which is why akhlaq literature treats haya before God as a higher and more demanding degree than haya before people alone. The Quran's instructions on modest dress and lowered gaze, addressed to believing men and women in parallel verses of Surat al Nur, are read by most classical commentators as one visible expression of haya rather than as the whole of the virtue, a point akhlaq scholars stress against a common narrowing of the term to clothing alone.