Abaya

The abaya is an outer layer and nothing else. It is a loose full-length cloak, most often black, worn over ordinary clothing when leaving the house, and it regulates the outside while leaving the inside entirely unregulated. That is a substantial part of its appeal: what a woman wears underneath is her own business, and the same garment covers a suit, a dress, a uniform or jeans.

It should be distinguished from the items it is often confused with. A headscarf is a separate garment; a face veil is another; the abaya covers the body. The bisht, the fine cloak worn by men in the Gulf on formal occasions, is a different garment altogether despite the visual resemblance. Elsewhere in the Muslim world the same function is performed by garments with their own histories: the chador in Iran, the jilbab in Indonesia and Malaysia, the burqa and the chadari in Afghanistan and parts of South Asia, each with its own cut and its own regional meaning.

Scripture does not prescribe it. The Quranic passages on dress speak of drawing garments over oneself and of modesty without describing any particular item, and the abaya is the Arabian regional answer to that instruction rather than the instruction itself. Muslim women elsewhere satisfy the same requirement with entirely different clothes, which is the ordinary state of affairs in Islamic dress.

For several decades the abaya was enforced in public in Saudi Arabia by the religious police, and a woman in the street without one could expect to be stopped. The position was relaxed in recent years, and the public statement made by the crown prince in 2018 was that the requirement in Islamic law is for modest dress and that no particular garment is specified. In practice the change has been gradual and uneven, more visible in some cities and settings than others, and it is a change in enforcement rather than a change in the law of dress as understood by the religious establishment.

Alongside that runs a substantial fashion industry. Designers in the Gulf produce abayas in colours other than black, with embroidery, with cut and drape treated as design problems, and priced accordingly. The obvious objection, that a garment intended not to draw attention is being made to draw it, is raised regularly within the same societies, and there is no settled answer to it.

A separate set of arguments takes place where the garment is a minority one. France prohibited the wearing of abayas in state schools in 2023 under its rules on religious symbols in public education, which is a question of French constitutional practice rather than of Islamic law, and it is worth keeping the two kinds of dispute apart when reading about either.