The Covering and Adorning of Women's Faces According to Early Islamic Sources

Abstract

What people use to clothe and adorn themselves with (dress, ornaments, tattooing, hairdressing and the like) reflects the cultural norms, moral values and family structures of a given society. This paper examines the dress codes of Muslim women, past and present, drawing on the authoritative-normative sources of the Qur'an and the Hadith. The study first introduces Qur'anic statements concerning women's head-covering and face adornment, which are then analyzed against the background of the social reality which prevailed in the first centuries of Islam. The strictest Qur'anic rules presumably concerned the prophet's wives and only later all Muslim women. They supplied the ideologicalnormative basis for the more comprehensive and detailed discussions we find in the Hadith literature and Qur'an exegeses which, so we assume, mirror common practices within and among early Muslim societies. It was, of course, men, not women, who formulated these rules. Restraining what men regarded as women's "unbridled" sexuality, they served to establish men's predominant status within the patriarchal-patrilineal family structure.