When did Muslim women start wearing the hijab?

The short version: Muslim women did not start veiling at a single moment, and veiling did not start with Islam. The practice was already a sign of status in the societies Islam emerged among and conquered. The Qur’an addresses women’s dress in a few verses; the detailed rules were the work of later jurists; and the headscarf most people now call “the hijab” is, in its present form and meaning, largely a development of the 1970s (Islam §11). Majority

The word ḥijāb

In the Qur’an, ḥijāb does not mean a garment. It means a screen or curtain, and the verse that uses it in this sense concerns the Prophet’s household:

wa-idhā saʾaltumūhunna matāʿan fa-sʾalūhunna min warāʾi ḥijāb

“When you ask his wives for something, do so from behind a screen.” (Q 33:53, trans. Abdel Haleem)^[1]​^[2]

The word came to mean a woman’s head covering only later, and in modern English it is used above all for the headscarf. Majority

What the Qur’an says about dress

Two verses address women’s clothing directly. One tells believing women to guard their modesty and to draw their head-coverings (khumur, singular khimār) over their necklines:

wa-l-yaḍribna bi-khumurihinna ʿalā juyūbihinna

“They should let their headscarves fall to cover their necklines.” (Q 24:31)^[3]

The other tells the Prophet’s wives, daughters and the believing women to draw their outer garments (jalābīb) close around them, “so as to be recognized and not insulted”:

yudnīna ʿalayhinna min jalābībihinna

“To make their outer garments hang low over them.” (Q 33:59)^[4]

Consensus on what the verses say. They do not specify which parts of the body must be covered, and the first presupposes that women already wore a head-covering, telling them how to wear it. What exactly the verses require has been debated by Muslim scholars from the beginning, and still is. Contested

Veiling before Islam

The verses addressed a society in which head coverings were already worn. Leila Ahmed, in Women and Gender in Islam (1992), traced veiling and seclusion as marks of rank across the ancient Near East: an Assyrian law code laid down which women must veil and which, such as enslaved women and prostitutes, must not; and in the Byzantine and Sasanian empires that the Arabs conquered, veiling marked women of the upper classes.^[5] Majority Ahmed argued that Muslims adopted much of the later practice from these conquered societies rather than from the Qur’an alone.^[5] Majority Reza Aslan similarly argues that the veil “was neither compulsory nor widely adopted until generations after Muhammad’s death”.^[6] Contested on how quickly it spread.

From verse to law

The law of dress, like most of Islamic law, was worked out by the jurists of the eighth to tenth centuries, who turned the Qur’an and the hadith into rules (Islam §6). The four Sunni schools came to require a free woman to cover everything except her face and hands in front of men outside her family, with differences between and within the schools over the face, the hands and the feet. Majority In practice dress varied by class, region and period: the face veil and the enveloping outer garment marked urban women of status, while rural and working women dressed differently. Majority

The great unveiling, 1920s–1950s

Between the 1920s and the 1950s many urban, educated women across the Middle East abandoned the face veil and often the head covering, sometimes by choice and sometimes under compulsion.^[5] Consensus

• Egypt, by choice. In 1923 Hudā Shaʿrāwī, returning from an international women’s suffrage congress in Rome, removed her face veil on the platform of Cairo railway station; the women who met her applauded, and some did the same. She founded the Egyptian Feminist Union that year.^[5] Consensus
• Iran, by force. On 8 January 1936 Reza Shah banned the veil: police were ordered to remove the chador and headscarf from women in public, and many women stayed at home rather than go out unveiled. The ban lapsed when he abdicated in 1941.^[7] Consensus Houchang Chehabi argues that the coercion made the veil, for many Iranians, a symbol of resistance to the state.^[7] Majority
• Turkey, by campaign. The republic changed men’s dress by law and discouraged the veil by example and campaign. Majority A 1982 regulation required female civil servants to work bareheaded, and the ban was extended to universities; it was eased in universities from 2008, lifted in most government posts in October 2013 and in schools in 2014. Consensus

Ahmed argued that the colonial argument for unveiling, which linked women’s liberation to adopting European dress, had made the veil a symbol of cultural resistance long before it became a symbol of piety again.^[5] Majority

The new veiling, from the 1970s

From the 1970s a new style of covering, the headscarf with modest, long dress, spread among university students and professional women in Egypt, closely linked to the Islamic revival, and from there to much of the Muslim world and its diasporas.^[8] Majority This is the garment most people now call “the hijab”. It was new in style. In A Quiet Revolution (2011), Ahmed, who grew up in an unveiled Cairo, traced that return and found that for many women in the United States the veil had come to mean activism and identity rather than subordination.^[8] Majority

Compulsion and prohibition today

Since 1979 states have both required and forbidden it.

• Iran. In March 1979 Khomeini said women should observe Islamic dress; thousands of women protested from 8 March, International Women’s Day, and the order was briefly withdrawn. From July 1980 unveiled women were refused entry to government offices and workplaces, and a law of 1983 made improper veiling punishable by flogging.^[9] Consensus See Islam §12 for the revolution.
• Afghanistan. The Taliban, in power from 1996, enforced dress rules through a religious police (Islam §12).^[10] Consensus
• France. A law of 15 March 2004 banned conspicuous religious signs in state schools, widely understood as aimed at the headscarf; a law of 2010 banned face coverings in public places, upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2014 (Islam §13).^[11]​^[12]​^[13] Consensus on the laws.

Supporters of each kind of law present it as protecting religion, secularism or women; opponents present it as coercion. Political

Debates

Does the Qur’an require women to cover their hair?

Most classical and modern jurists hold that it does, reading khimār as a head covering. Some modern Muslim scholars and reformers argue that the verses require modesty, not a particular garment. Contested

What did the veil’s return mean?

A symbol imposed by Islamist movements, a chosen identity, or both in different places: Ahmed’s two books chart her own change of view.^[5]​^[8] Contested; Political

Common misconceptions

• “The Qur’an uses the word hijab for women’s clothing.” It uses it for a screen; its words for garments are khimār and jilbāb. Consensus
• “Veiling began with Islam.” It was already a mark of status in the ancient Near East and in the empires Islam conquered.^[5] Majority
• “Muslim women have always worn the headscarf in the same way.” Practice varied by class, region and century; many urban women went unveiled for much of the twentieth century, and today’s headscarf is a modern style. Consensus