Thereafter, when I resolved to issue a new printing of my book ḥijāb al-marʾah al-muslimah (The Muslim Woman’s Hijab)—after a number of years had passed and several offset reproductions had appeared—I realized that I must review it once more. I hoped that by doing so I might be inspired to add fresh points of benefit, over and above those I had already gathered with the passage of time, each of which I had placed in its appropriate spot in my personal copy as the days went by. I also had to correct the unavoidable typographical or conceptual slips from which scarcely any book is free.

I devoted particular attention to reading the many books and pamphlets on women that I had collected in recent years—now numbering in the dozens. I found that most of them had taken turns refuting me: some directly, citing the title of my book and my name, and others by addressing the issue itself without mentioning me. The issue in question is the one about which a certain doctorate-holder claimed I had voiced a unique opinion, unprecedented among the scholars of both early and later times—namely, that a woman’s face is not ʿawrah (a part of the body that must be covered) and that she is therefore not obliged to conceal it.

By Allah, I witnessed something truly astonishing: their unanimous insistence on obligation, their blind imitation of one another, and their reliance upon proofs that are unsound—whether from the perspective of transmission or of comprehension. They twist the texts that run contrary to their view—narrations from the early generations and well-known statements of certain imams whom people customarily follow—and they ignore them as though they had never existed. All of this has led me to feel that, regrettably, they have written what they wrote under the sway of human emotion, personal impulse, and local custom, not in submission to the proofs of the Sharīʿah, for the evidences they cited ⦗6⦘