The veil

The next question is whether women are commanded to veil themselves when they have to go out for their needs. These needs may be either religious or secular. Two prominent instances of the former are taking part in public prayers, and the performance of pilgrimage. If it had been necessary for women to wear veils, an injunction should have been given to wear them on these two sacred occasions, since these are the occasions on which men’s sentiments should be purest, and when, therefore, all those things that excite the passions must be avoided. There is, however, not only no such injunction but it was a recognized practice that women came into the congregation of men in mosques unveiled (IJ-C. XVIII, p. 84). It is even admitted by the jurists that women should not veil themselves at prayers, and on pilgrimage. In the conditions of prayers it is laid down that the body of the women must be covered entirely except her face and her hands (H.I, p. 88, Shurūṭ al-Ṣalāṭ). The exception of these two parts, it is added, is due to the fact that they must of necessity be left exposed. As regards pilgrimage, there is an express injunction in Ḥadīth that no woman shall put on a veil during the pilgrimage (Bu. 25:23). It is also a well-established fact that the mosques in the Holy Prophet’s time contained no screens to keep the two sexes separate. The only separation between the men and the women was that women stood in separate rows behind the men. Otherwise they were in the same room or in the same yard, and the two sexes had to intermingle. In the pilgrimage there was a much greater intermingling of the sexes, women performing circumambulations of the Ka‘bah, running between Ṣafā and Marwah, staying in the plain of ‘Arafāt and going from place to place, along with men, and yet they were enjoined not to wear a veil.

If then, as admitted on all hands, women did not wear a veil when the two sexes intermingled on religious occasions, when the very sacredness of the occasion called for a veil, if ever the veil was a necessity, it is a foregone conclusion that they could not be required to veil themselves when going out for their secular needs whose very performance would be hampered by the veil. And there is no such