- Ibn Taymiyyah cites the report in al-Fatwā (15/371) in wording totally different from that already mentioned. He writes:
“ʿUbaydah al-Salmanī and others have related that the believing women used to draw their jalābīb (outer cloaks) down from over their heads so that only their eyes remained visible, enabling them to see the road.”
Al-Tuwayjirī (166), Ibn ʿUthaymīn (p. 13), and others reproduced this passage from him and endorsed it.
Now that this is clear, realise that, in the science of hadith, inconsistency (iḍṭirāb) is a flaw that removes a narration from the level of admissible proof, even when the inconsistency is merely formal, as here, because it shows that the narrator failed to transmit it with precision. Moreover, the version given by Ibn Taymiyyah is plainly more than a formal variant: it is not an exegesis of the verse at all, but a description of how women actually behaved in the earliest period. In that sense it is authentic, corroborated by many other reports, as will be shown later in this book under the heading “The Legitimacy of Covering the Face” (p. 104). Yet that practice does not establish an obligation to cover, for it is simply an act attributed to them and does not negate the presence of women who left their faces uncovered; this, too, is firmly established in
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