- Among the hadith authorities are Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456 AH) and al-Bāji al-Andalusi (d. 474 AH)—and the latter made the point even clearer, replying to people like the Shaykh and his rashness, saying: “Nothing of her may be seen except the oval of her face.” Also to be counted are Ibn al-Athīr (d. 606 AH) and the hadith master Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852 AH), whose exact words are: “The khimār for a woman is like the turban for a man.”
At this juncture I must pause—though it will lengthen the discussion beyond what I wished—to expose an unflattering stance taken by Shaykh al-Tuwayjirī. He exploited a slip that crept into Ibn Ḥajar’s commentary on the ḥadith of ʿĀʾishah, cited later in the book (p. 78) concerning the revelation of the verse on the khimār, and he deliberately excised from Ibn Ḥajar’s commentary the very wording that refutes his own claim. Ibn Ḥajar, explaining ʿĀʾishah’s statement at the end of her report, “fa-ikhtamarn bih” (“so they wrapped themselves with it”) (8/490), said:
“That is, they covered their faces. The method is that a woman places the khimār on her head and lets it fall over from the left side; this is what is called al-taqannuʿ. Al-Farrāʾ said: In the pre-Islamic period a woman would let her khimār hang behind her and expose what was in front of her, so they were commanded to cover themselves, and the khimār …” to the end of the passage.
I say: In his book (p. 221) the Shaykh rejected my view—which, as you have seen, is in line with the scholars—concerning Ibn Ḥajar’s explanation, “they covered their faces,” and he ignored the remainder of Ibn Ḥajar’s explicit words, because they contradict his own position. ⦗19⦘