Hijab : Compulsion Or Choice?

Ok "we" are certainly not alone.   A friend drew my attention to this most interesting Blog here. It is written by a 19 year old girl, born in Singapore and raised in Malaysia.  She writes about the Quran. 

You can click here to read Syafiqah Othman's Blog 'Forever Young"

Here is her latest post (long and extremely well researched) -  Hijab: Compulsion or choice?  Here is a snippet :

One of the most common and heated debates between Muslims: Do Muslim women really need to wear hijab? Is it in the Qur’an?

Where I come from, wearing a hijab represents your piety. Most non-hijabi women in my country are referred to as religion-iliterate and have no right to speak of Islam if they had their hair showing, and those who do wear hijab are considered religious. Modesty to them only means what you wear, not how you act.

Non-hijabi women like myself have received countless condescending comparisons, like associating us with unwrapped candies, giving non-hijabis the perception that we’re dirty. Being an avid student of the Qur’an, I have found myself engaging in many anonymous hate mails telling me I have no right to speak of Islam, or how “disturbed” they are at the fact that I am brave enough to speak of my religion even though I do not wear a hijab. There are too many people that I have encountered who have the “I am more Muslim than you” syndrome. They act like they know Islam much better than I do only because my appearance does not “represent” Islam.

Back to the topic, the wearing of the hijab has been a famous topic of discussion for a long time in the Islamic world. And today I just thought I’d share my views on this certain topic the way I have been raised and also the things that I have learnt studying the Qur’an. This article is a result of genuine curiosity towards why my father had never enforced the hijab onto the women and girls in my family even though he is a religious man, and not meant to ridicule the hijab in any way.

What is a hijab? The hijab (ﺣﺠﺎﺏ) is a veil which covers the head, usually worn by a Muslim female. Most often, it is worn as a symbol of modesty, privacy, and morality. Although the Qur’an stresses modesty, it does not specifically require women to keep their heads or faces covered. In fact, the Qur’an never explicitly uses the term hijab in reference to body veiling in any context, instead using the words khimār (ﺧﻤﺎﺭ ) andjilbāb (ﺟﻠﺒﺎﺏ ), not hijab. It never references the specific item or items of clothing used to cover up. The word hijab in Arabic literally means “a screen or curtain” and is used in the Qur’an to refer to a partition. The Qur’an tells male Muslims to talk to the wives of the Prophet (PBUH) behind a hijab. However, in later Muslim societies, this instruction, specifically to the wives of the Prophet (PBUH) was generalized, leading to the commonly understood belief that hijab is a requirement in Islamic tradition for all Muslim women. But is it?

While many Muslims call the hijab an Islamic dress code, they completely ignore the fact that the Qur’an has never emphasized on the wearing of a hijab. The term has been used by many Muslims to describe their head cover that may or may not include covering their face except their eyes, however that is not how the term is used in the Qur’an.