The present article concerns the overlap of two sub-discourses within a larger contemporary intra-Muslim discourse on “Islam and modernity”: the sub-discourse on “Islam and gender” and the sub-discourse on “Islam and HIV/AIDS”. For this purpose, the article focuses on two examples of divergent, even opposing, Muslim religious approaches to of HIV/AIDS – the influential book The AIDS crisis by Sudanese-born and Malaysia-based psychologist Malik Badri and two texts outlining a “theology of compassion” championed by the South African organisation Positive Muslims and produced by its chief ideologue, Farid Esack. The article highlights the way in which the authors in these two examples address the issue of gender but also the role that gender, particularly in the context of sexuality, plays in how they, in quite different ways, approach HIV/AIDS from a religious perspective, and as a consequence explicitly and implicitly outline the role of Islam, and the means of its interpretation, in the contemporary world.