The concept of modest clothing has undoubtedly changed over time.As such, the shifts in clothing practices can be studied in order to understand thesociety of that time.As issues such as women’s rights and equality have become more andmore mainstream throughout the years, the question of the hijab has suddenlyfound itself being thrust into the spotlight, used as proof of the lack of emancipation of women in non-western and normally Islamic countries.
According to some of them, women should only leave the protection of their houses when necessary and should never be seen by another man without covering herself with loose garments.While Muslims believe that the Qur’an is divine, constant and free from error, laws contained in the Qur’an are open to interpretation and as a result, may vary according to the country it is studied in. The insidious nature of social attitudes is such that those interpreting the Qur’an and the Shariah will most definitely be influenced by the norms and attitudes of the time. Hence, the egalitarian rules and laws for and about women as laid down in the Qur’an and Shariah can be twisted and manipulated in order to maintain the hierarchy of the sexes.In truth, Muslim women are not required to cover themselves up from head to toe. All that Islam requires is for both men and women to “lower their gaze and guard their modesty…” For many outsiders, these perceived restraints on the individual are a form of repression and oppression. Quite oppositely,many Muslim women look at the hijab or any type of veiling as a form of (feminist) statement.
The practice of veiling predates Islam by hundreds of years and can be traced as far back as ancient Greece. Clearly, this proves that veiling is not an Islamic ideology, rather, a cultural one. When the niece of the Prophet’s wife
Aishah Binti Abu Bakr was asked by her husband Musab to veil her face, sheanswered, "Since the Almighty hath put on me the stamp of beauty, it is my wishthat the public should view the beauty and thereby recognized His grace unto them. On no account, therefore, will I veil myself.”During the second Islamic century, the veil and the forced seclusion at home of women came to signify high status. If a woman was able to stay at home, this meant that her family had enough means for her not to have to go out and find work. However, this does not apply to everywhere in the Islamic world. As Anatolia (in present day Turkey) was conquered by the Muslim Turks in the fourteenth century, Ibn Batutta expressed his fascination upon observingun veiled women, “Not only royal ladies but also wives of merchants and common people…”.
Nonetheless, by end of the twenty first century, the veiling of women suddenly came to represent repression, oppression and misogyny. The roots of which were probably planted by the first interactions between Western culture and the Other. The West took it upon themselves to advance the status of the Other women and the only way of achieving this was to make them abandon their native customs. This misconception was further aggravated by the misguided idea that the only true model of women’s liberation is the Western form of feminism