Hijab

Two different arguments run about the hijab simultaneously, and they are not the same argument. One is theological and internal to Islam. The other is legal and mostly conducted by states. Conflating them produces most of the bad writing on the subject.

Inside the tradition

The textual basis is Quran 24:31, instructing believing women to draw their coverings over their bosoms, and 33:59, on outer garments. Neither passage is self-interpreting, and the tradition's reading of them draws on hadith and on the practice of the early community.

• The great majority of classical jurists, across all four Sunni schools and in Shia jurisprudence, hold that covering the hair is obligatory for adult women. This is the mainstream position by a very wide margin and it has been for most of Islamic history.
• A minority of modern scholars, among them Muhammad Sa'id al-Ashmawi and Khaled Abou El Fadl, argue that the injunction responded to specific seventh-century conditions and does not carry the force of a perpetual requirement.
• Among Muslim women writing about it, positions run the full range and do not sort neatly. Some describe covering as a refusal of a market that appraises women by appearance, and wear it as an assertion rather than a submission. Some describe it as a patriarchal imposition dressed in scripture. Many wear it because their mother did, or because their community does, and find both framings foreign to their experience.

Outside it

The legal picture is a patchwork, and the two directions of compulsion should be distinguished because they have different victims and the same logic.

• France prohibited conspicuous religious symbols in state schools in 2004, and banned face coverings in public in 2010. Belgium followed on face covering in 2011, and Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Bulgaria have variants. The face-covering laws reach the niqab and burqa; the school law reaches the headscarf.
• The European Court of Human Rights upheld the French face-covering ban in S.A.S. v. France in 2014, accepting the government's argument about the minimum requirements of living together.
• The UN Human Rights Committee reached the opposite conclusion on the same kind of law in 2018, finding that it violated freedom of religion and disproportionately harmed the women it claimed to protect.
• Turkey enforced a headscarf ban in universities and public employment for decades and repealed it in stages from 2008.
• Iran compels covering by law. Enforcement has been violent, opposition has been sustained, and the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022 produced the largest protests in the country in years.
• India's Karnataka classroom dispute produced a split Supreme Court decision in 2022 and is unresolved.

The pattern is that states on both sides claim to be liberating women, and both are legislating what a woman may wear. Whether either is entitled to is the question the litigation keeps returning to, and it has not been answered the same way twice.

Three Quranic passages carry the discussion, and it helps to see what each one contains.

Sura 24, verse 31 instructs believing women to lower their gaze, guard their modesty, not display their adornment except what ordinarily appears, and draw their khimar over their bosoms, then lists the relatives before whom the restriction does not apply. The khimar is a head covering already in use; the instruction concerns where it is to be drawn, namely over the chest rather than thrown back. Classical exegesis reads the head covering as assumed by the verse and the command as extending it. A body of modern scholarship reads the same fact differently, arguing that if the head covering were the point the verse would have commanded it rather than presupposing a garment and legislating its arrangement.

Sura 33, verse 59 tells the Prophet's wives, daughters and the believing women to draw their jilbab about them, so that they may be recognised and not molested, which attaches a stated purpose to the instruction and has generated a long argument about whether the ruling travels with the purpose.

Sura 33, verse 53 uses the word hijab itself, and it means a curtain: visitors to the Prophet's house are to ask for what they need from behind it. The word that names the garment in modern usage does not, in the Quran, refer to a garment at all.

The classical schools converged on the position that a woman covers all but the face and hands before unrelated men, with disagreements at the margins. Contemporary scholars including Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas have argued for readings on which the covering is culturally located rather than universally binding. Both positions are held by people arguing from the same texts, which is the honest description.