Hijab: Between Revelation and Regulation

When Bahá’u’lláh wrote that every word of the Qur’ān bears meaning and intention, he was reminding us that revelation, properly read, resists reduction.  Scripture, like language itself, is alive; it breathes, it hesitates, it renews.  Yet somewhere between the living word and the legislated code, the hijab became a symbol, of modesty, of defiance, of cultural siege, of theological purity, until its nuance was lost to politics.

My friend is in Kashan, a city of gardens and scholars, and perhaps among the most traditional pockets of Iran.  She forgot her hijab back in her home city and now cannot step out of her hotel.  The irony is sharp: the veil that once signified spiritual privacy has become an enclosure of space.  Kashan’s cobbled lanes whisper poetry, but they also enforce silence.

Meanwhile, the liberal axis of Iran, Shiraz, Tehran, Gilan, Mazandaran, Semnan, walks the tightrope between revelation and rebellion.  The North dresses as Europe, the Centre prays as Qom.  Mahsa Amini’s martyrdom was Kurdish, and therefore doubly liminal: ethnically marginal, religiously symbolic (the Kurds are very secular as a rule of thumb; more Zoroastrian than the Persians).  Her death reopened a question the Qur’ān itself leaves open — what, after all, does ḥijāb mean?

1. The Qur’ānic Vocabulary of Modesty

Contrary to centuries of clerical condensation, the Qur’ān never commands a specific garment called “hijab” for ordinary women.

The term ḥijāb (حجاب) appears seven times; always meaning “barrier,” “curtain,” or “partition,” never a headscarf.

For instance:

“And when you ask [the Prophet’s wives] for something, ask them from behind a ḥijāb; that is purer for your hearts and theirs.”

— Surah al-Aḥzāb 33:53

Here, hijab refers to the physical screen separating the Prophet’s private quarters from visitors — a protocol of privacy in the Prophet’s house, not a general mandate.

When the Qur’ān addresses clothing and modesty, it uses different words:

• Khimār (خمار) — a cloth that covers the head or bosom

  “Tell the believing women to draw their khimār over their bosoms…”

  — Surah an-Nūr 24:31

  This verse focuses on concealing the chest, not mandating a head covering; it presupposes existing cultural attire and redirects its use toward modesty.

• Jilbāb (جلابيب) — an outer wrap or cloak

  “O Prophet, tell your wives, daughters, and the women of the believers to draw their jilbāb around themselves; that is better so that they may be recognized and not harassed.”

  — Surah al-Aḥzāb 33:59

  The context is protection from street harassment; a social precaution, not a metaphysical uniform. In every instance, modesty is relational, moral, situational; not textile.

2. From Verse to Veil

By the early Abbasid period, the ḥijāb evolved from a spatial divider (marking the Prophet’s household) into a status marker for elite women.  Byzantine, Persian, and Arab court cultures fused to produce the “seclusion aesthetic”; veils, curtains, courtyards.  What had been moral counsel became social choreography.

Centuries later, jurists re-codified these norms as fiqh, freezing fluid guidance into permanent injunctions.  Thus, by the time modernity arrived, colonialism, nationalism, and theocratic reform, the veil was already burdened with multiple pasts: Arab, Persian, Hellenic, clerical.

3. The Paradox of Modern Piety

Today, the hijab stands at an impossible intersection:

• For Muslim feminists, it can signify agency — I choose to define my boundaries.

• For state clerics, it is obligation — You must display obedience.

• For liberal societies, it oscillates between tolerance and unease — Is it freedom, or refusal of assimilation?

The result is a garment both sacred and politicized.  A symbol that must simultaneously express faith, resist Western voyeurism, and survive patriarchal enforcement. The Qur’ān, however, places the emphasis elsewhere:

“O children of Adam, We have sent down to you clothing to cover your nakedness and as adornment; but the clothing of piety — that is best.”

— Surah al-A‘rāf 7:26

Here lies the heart of revelation: piety as the true veil. Outer coverings are contingent; inner modesty is the essence.

4. Between Kashan and Cambridge

The question of hijab is not simply East versus West, faith versus freedom.  It is how intellectual rigor meets inherited form.

The niqab and hijab, like the habits of Catholic nuns or the Ghoonghat of Marwari women, presumably began as devotional practices; acts of humility before God.  Yet when repeated without reflection, they risk becoming cultural artefacts detached from their moral origin.

Standing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, debating rent control, oligarchy, and social justice, I often notice the same tension: the difference between principle and performance.  One woman wears hijab, another niqab; both perhaps seek dignity.  But when ritual outpaces reason, meaning falters. Bahá’u’lláh’s reminder returns: every word has intention. The word ḥijāb intended separation of sacred space from worldly intrusion; not gender apartheid.

5. The Future of Modesty

In a post-oligarchic world, one I still dream of, liberation will not mean the erasure of faith, but its deep reading.  The challenge for Islamic civilization is not to discard the veil, but to recover its first intention: moral consciousness, not enforced costume.

A woman stepping into Kashan without a scarf should not feel trapped; she should feel contextualized, a guest in a culture still learning to separate faith from fear.  Likewise, the West must learn that unveiling a woman by law is perhaps as coercive as veiling her by decree.

6. Qurratu’l-ʿAyn: The Woman Who Removed the Veil

No discussion of the veil’s meanings can end without Qurratu’l-ʿAyn, also known as Ṭáhirih — the 19th-century Persian Bábí poetess, scholar, and revolutionary who stood at the threshold between Islam and the new Bahá’í revelation.  In 1848, at the Conference of Badasht, she did the unthinkable: she unveiled herself before an assembly of men, declaring the dawn of a new spiritual age.

Those who witnessed it were stunned.  Some fled the gathering in horror, others wept; yet for her followers it was a moment of apocalypse in the truest sense; a revelation, an unveiling.  Ṭáhirih was not rejecting the Qur’ān; she was reading it forward; insisting that the ḥijāb of the age was now to be lifted, that the curtain between the seen and unseen, between woman and man, between scripture and interpretation, had been torn away by history itself.

Her act was theological, not theatrical.  She embodied Bahá’u’lláh’s insight that every word of the Qur’ān carries intention and that when intention matures, form must yield.  The unveiling was not a rebellion against Islam but the fulfillment of its inner symmetry: the shift from law to spirit, from partition to presence.

In Bahá’í memory, Ṭáhirih became a martyr of consciousness — strangled in Tehran in 1852, her final words recorded as:

“You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.”

Her life still radiates through Persian and global feminist thought; many later of the literati, from Allama Iqbal to Qurratulain Hyder, drew upon her courage.  Ṭáhirih stands as the curtain-breaker of her age: unveiling not just her face, but the intellect of the divine feminine long veiled by fear.

Conclusion

The Qur’an offers a theology of modesty, not a uniform code. The hijab began as a metaphor, a veil between the sacred and the profane, and only later descended into fabric.  Its resurrection lies not in cloth or compulsion, but in conscience.

“The clothing of piety — that is best.” (7:26)

Between Kashan’s walls and Cambridge Mass’s freedoms, that remains the hardest garment to wear.