HIJAB DOES NOT EXIST....OR DOES IT?

That thing is sooo ugly, I want to be fashionable. Islam is in my heart, it doesn’t matter how I’m dressed.”

If you haven’t realized it yet, this post is about the observance of external hijab. Being that this site is geared towards sisters, I will not be addressing the external hijab of men but please note, that before Allah told women to cover and lower their gaze, he first addressed men.

Honestly, this is not my favourite topic to discuss at all. I think people, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, have made the observance of hijab into such a big deal when at the end of the day, it’s just another instruction from Allah. Part of the reason why it’s been made into such a majour issue as well as why it’s so hard for people to observe it stems from the way that it is often taught. For those who are born into the deen, you’ll most likely remember being taught about the importance of salah, sawm, obeying your parents, not lying, etc but rarely about hijab. Many sisters decided to begin observing hijab after learning about it through friends or other sources while others remember their father handing them a scarf once they reached puberty without an explanation of what exactly hijab is. The observance of hijab has also been made hard due to the increasing emergence of “interpretations”. The one thing that I have learned from the Qur’an is that many things, especially those in regards to day-to-day life are expressly clear and leave absolutely no room for ambiguity. The ayat that commands hijab and the Ahadith that corroborate these ayat are also very clear. Alongside this, it is important to note, that prior to 50-60 years ago, before Muslims decided that the deen needed to be revamped to please the West, there was very little mention of things that were already clear in the Qur’an, hijab included, being able to be interpreted or manifested in different ways. Are we now saying, that those Muslims from the time of the prophet(SAW) till the 1950s, were not practicing Islam correctly? That they were observing hijab incorrectly? Of course not, these earlier generations of Muslims did not feel the need to put their deen aside for the sake of man. While not all  followed Islam correctly, they did not attempt to revamp religious obligations.

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