A hadith describes the Prophet as more modest than a veiled virgin girl in her private chamber, an image chosen deliberately, commentators note, for its cultural association at the time with an extreme of protected reticence, and the report continues that when he disliked something, it could be read on his face rather than stated directly, using his own conduct as the standard against which the virtue is illustrated rather than defining it only in the abstract. This framing matters because it extends haya beyond sexual modesty into general bearing, restraint in speech, and a reluctance to give direct offense even in legitimate disagreement or correction, qualities the hadith literature treats as continuous with, rather than separate from, modesty in dress and conduct narrowly construed.
Akhlaq scholarship pairs haya with a specific warning against its collapse, citing a hadith instructing that if one feels no haya, one may do as one wishes, a saying read across the commentarial tradition not as licence but as an ironic diagnostic, since a person who has genuinely lost all sense of haya has also lost the internal restraint that would otherwise stop them from wrongdoing, making the presence or absence of the quality itself a rough measure of a person's remaining moral sensitivity.