“And the manner of that …” Had the Shaykh applied this phrasing to the khimār he insists upon, he would have found the face left uncovered rather than concealed. The very passage he excised—whether knowingly or by mere imitation—confirms this, for in it Ibn Ḥajar likens a woman’s khimār to a man’s turban. Does the Shaykh, then, also imagine that a turban—like the khimār in his view—covers both head and face?

Ibn Ḥajar also says, “and that is al-taqannuʿ.” The linguistic works state: “taqannaʿat al-marʾah,” meaning she donned the qiʿnāʿ, the cloth with which a woman covers her head, as recorded in al-Muʿjam al-Wasīṭ and other lexicons. Ibn Ḥajar himself writes in Fatḥ al-Bārī (7/230; 10/274): “al-taqannuʿ: covering the head.”

I added “or by blind imitation” only because I cannot bring myself to accuse the Shaykh of intentionally relying on an omission that distorts the intended meaning. I found that a respected contemporary scholar had preceded him in this, but that scholar has now passed to Allah’s mercy and pardon, and I do not wish to discuss him. May Allah forgive us and him.

Accordingly, the phrase “their faces” is likely either a copyist’s slip or a lapse of the author’s pen—he meant to write “their chests,” but the pen outran him. It is also possible that he intended it figuratively, referring to what surrounds the face, by way of … ⦗20⦘