Muhammad ﷺ revealed that the day would come when sexual immorality would become so normalised that it would be carried out in public: “The Hour will not be established until people fornicate with each other in the road just as donkeys fornicate”
Ref: Ibn Hibban, Hadith 6767
Today we live in a world where we are bombarded with explicit sexual imagery in TV, film, and advertising. With the advent of the internet, pornography is readily available at any time and any place.
In fact, people have been arrested for having sex in public places. What is amazing is that we’ve already seen that Muhammad ﷺ foretold that Islam is going to spread far and wide, so this situation of public sexual immorality is the exact opposite of what one would expect because Islam as a religion places great emphasis on modesty.
For example, Islam teaches that both men and women should lower their gaze from strangers in order to safeguard from falling into temptation and sin. The reality of today, where Islam is widespread and public sexual immorality is rampant, is in fact paradoxical and therefore not the most rational prediction to make if one is guessing.
We must also take into account that at the time of Muhammad ﷺ, people were generally modest; this was the case with both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Jews and Christians. With the conversion of the pagan Roman empire to Christianity in the fourth century, the subsequent spread of Christianity throughout Europe, and the Catholic Church enforcing strict standards of public morality and decency, much of the Western world had become conservative before Muhammad was born.
During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church regulated all matters relating to sex very carefully. Many influential members of the Church even saw sex and other pleasurable experiences within the confines of marriage as evil and a source of sin, unless marital relations were undertaken expressly and consciously to conceive a child
Ref: James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, p. 182
A big transformation also took place in seventh century Arabia. In pre-Islamic Arabia, public indecency was not uncommon, for example we know that the pagan Arabs used to perform religious pilgrimages while in a completely naked state. This all ended with the coming of Islam which forbade such practices. With both the East and the West being largely conservative as a result of the spread of Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam, this prediction of widespread sexual immorality by Muhammad ﷺ went completely against the tide of morality that was sweeping the world during his time. The current situation in the world is unprecedented, never in the history of mankind has sexual immorality been on such a large scale. It is now the norm, just as Muhammad ﷺ predicted.
An interesting side point is that Muhammad ﷺ described the consequences of widespread sexual immorality: “Never does sexual perversion become widespread and publicly known in certain people without them being overtaken by disease that never happened to their ancestors who came before them.” [145]
Ref: Ibn Majah, Hadith 4019.
The increase of sexual immorality has seen the emergence of previously unheard of diseases such as AIDS, just as Muhammad ﷺ warned.
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