over themselves some of their outer cloaks.”

This report is in fact unsound—indeed, extremely weak—for several reasons:

First: Ibn Kaʿb al-Quraẓī, whose name is Muḥammad, was a Successor who did not live in the Prophetic era; the chain is therefore mursal (missing a Companion).

Second: Ibn Abī Sabrah—Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. Abī Sabrah—is graded very weak. Al-Ḥāfiẓ states in al-Taqrīb, “He was accused of fabrication.”

Third: Muḥammad b. ʿUmar, that is, al-Wāqidī, is also weak; the hadith critics are famous for saying so, and some even charge him with forgery.

Narrations conveying the same meaning are found in al-Suyūṭī’s al-Durr al-Manthūr and in works by Ibn Jarīr and others. Every one of them, however, is mursal and therefore invalid, for they all stop with Abū Mālik, Abū Ṣāliḥ, al-Kalbī, Muʿāwiya b. Qurra, or al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, and none is musnad (fully connected). Hence they provide no proof—especially because their apparent sense clashes with the purified Sharīʿah and with sound reason: they imply that Allah left the Muslim slave girls—who certainly include believing women—without the command to cover themselves with a jilbāb, thereby exposing them to the harm of the hypocrites.

It is astonishing that some exegetes have been misled by these weak reports, restricting His words “and the women of the believers” (al-Aḥzāb 59) to free women only and building upon that the claim that a slave woman is not required to observe what a free woman must