on any specific matter—and then we would hold fast to it.” He went on to say:
“Some people have fallen into error regarding the words of Allah, ‘Let them draw their cloaks over themselves; that is more conducive to their being recognized and not harassed’ (Al-Aḥzāb 59). They claimed that Allah only commanded this because licentious men used to accost women for immoral purposes, so He ordered the free women to wear the cloaks so that the evildoers would recognize them as free and therefore refrain from molesting them.1
We repudiate this corrupt interpretation, which can only be a scholar’s lapse, a momentary slip by an intelligent person, or a deliberate fabrication by a lying reprobate. For it ascribes to Allah—exalted be He—permission for those profligates to violate the honor of the Muslim community’s slave women, and that is a calamity without end. No two Muslims differ over the fact that fornication with a free woman is just as forbidden as fornication with a slave woman, that the prescribed punishment for the man who fornicates with a free woman is identical to that for the man who fornicates with a slave woman; there is no distinction whatsoever, and to accost a free woman is just as prohibited
(1) One consequence of this view is that women are not required to wear the jilbab (outer cloak) at all whenever licentious men are not likely to harass them, or whenever there are no slave-women—as is the case in our own age—because, it is claimed, the underlying legal cause is absent. And when the cause disappears, the ruling that depends on it likewise falls away. A contemporary writer on the subject of women states this explicitly in his booklet “The Qur’an and Woman,” p. 59:
“We should point out that the reports connected with the verse in Surah al-Ahzab say that free women and slave women originally dressed alike, and that immoral men used to molest women without distinction. The verse therefore instituted a distinctive dress for free women so that they might be recognized and not harmed by such men. In other words, the command responded to a specific, time-bound necessity.”
In effect, he wishes to say that the jilbab is no longer necessary because—so he claims—its rationale vanished with the disappearance of slavery and the fact that all women today are free. Notice how ignorance of the weakness of certain reports can lead to suspending a Qur’anic injunction and a Prophetic directive, just as we showed above (p. 74) in the discussion of the hadith of Umm Atiyya.