This is exactly what I have put into practice with my own wife, and I ask Allah, Exalted be He, to grant me the same success with my daughters when they come of age—or even a little before that.

It is indeed strange what I found in the book by the gentleman to whom I referred earlier:

“Someone may observe—or hear of—your commendable keenness to see that your family observe the required covering, without allowing the face to be shown—Allah forbid! Then, once he reads what you have written, he will say, ‘His legal verdict contradicts his piety,’ and will charge you with what is unseemly!”

I had already sent him a reply to his letter dated 23/9/74 AH1, and among the things I wrote in response to this very passage were these words:

“If someone should wrongfully hurl at me an accusation that is ‘unseemly,’ I have a noble precedent in the prophets and the righteous—may Allah’s blessings be upon them all—whose enemies did not merely accuse them of what is unseemly, but of what is outright disgraceful. There is no doubt in my mind that anyone who levels at me the charge alluded to by the honorable writer is either a transgressing oppressor or an ignorant man who must be taught, and that for two reasons.

First: the most I have affirmed in the book is that a woman’s face is not an ʿawrah (a part of the body that must be covered) and that it is permissible for her to uncover it under the condition stated therein. This does not mean that whoever holds this view is obliged to have his own wife uncover her face, for such compulsion pertains to what is obligatory, not to what is merely permissible. Everyone knows that the permissible is something that may be done and may likewise be left undone. Therefore, whether I adopt the course of leaving it or the course of doing it, in either case I have not stepped