Bersama Niqab

What it contains

Four chapters. Understanding niqab — the terms, the etymology, and the history from pre-Islamic Arabia through Islamic civilisation to the Malay world. The case for it — the jilbāb verse, how the earliest Muslims understood it, and the reading of the exegetes. The scholars — roughly a hundred positions across the four schools and beyond. Practice — prayer, iḥrām, ṭawāf, identification, health, family, and the rest.

Its position

The author suspends judgement on whether niqab is obligatory. He argues that it is legislated and commended, and declines to enter the obligatory-versus-recommended dispute — which is unusual for a book arguing in this direction, and is the reason this site can summarise it without taking that side either.

He also states in his preface that he stands ready to retract anything in it that contradicts the truth, in his lifetime or after it.

What the site leaves out

Nearly all of the apparatus. The 483 footnotes, the full chains and gradings, the poetry analysis, the lexicography, and the complete catalogue of scholarly positions are in the book and not here — this site summarises, and a summary that reproduced the apparatus would not be one.

The section on idnāʾ in particular, which Wan Muhammad Izzat presents as his own contribution, runs to some 1,800 words, over twenty poems, and two dozen quotations. The summary here gives its shape; the argument itself is in the book.

What the book adds that wasn’t there before

The preface calls one finding “yang paling disyukuri” — the most gratifying of all: a set of Arabic poems, the earliest from the first Islamic century, using the same construction as the Qur’anic verse on the jilbāb. He calls it “bukti yang hilang dan dicari-cari oleh alim-ulama selama ini” — the evidence scholars had been searching for without finding.

The claim is specific enough to check, which is why this site has checked it. Al-Qattāl al-Kilābī, a Umayyad-era poet who disguised himself as a woman to escape a blood feud, wrote that he “drew my jilbāb down over where my beard grows.” The verb, the noun, and the preposition are the same three words as al-Aḥzāb 33:59. Wan Muhammad Izzat then adds nine more poems — spanning the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid periods, plus two that argue against his own reading, which he addresses rather than omits — to build the case out from a single striking match into a pattern. The argument is summarised here.

The poetry is the headline claim, but not the only original contribution. He also states plainly, in the same preface, that he deliberately excluded two of the most popular proof-texts for niqab — a well-known athar from Ibnu ʿAbbās on the jilbāb verse, and the report of Asmāʾ bt. Abū Bakr on face-covering during iḥrām — because neither meets the evidentiary standard he set for the book, even though both sides of the debate have historically leaned on them. Elsewhere, in the footnotes rather than the body, he catches and corrects specific errors in earlier scholarship: a case of Ibnu Ḥajar al-Haytami conflating two different classical authorities, a mistranslation in a published Malay translation of a classical text, and a modern work that misquoted a classical source in a way that reversed its legal meaning. None of this is presented as the book’s general apparatus — each is flagged, in his own words, as something he found and is correcting.

Foreword

By Dato’ Dr. Abdul Basit bin Haji Abdul Rahman, known as Abu Anas Madani — doctorate in Sharīʿah from the Islamic University of Madīnah, lecturer in the Department of Sharīʿah at Kolej Islam Antarabangsa Sultan Ismail Petra, and chairman of the Pondok Sungai Durian foundation.

What readers have said

The book carries a 4.83-out-of-5 average on Goodreads — a small sample, six ratings, so it is reported here for what it is rather than as proof of anything. One reviewer highlights the foreword’s own description of the book as “cukup ilmiah, sarat dengan fakta dan kaya dengan rujukan” — properly scholarly, dense with fact and rich in reference. A second praises the footnoting specifically.

The fuller review is from Konfess Buku, a Malaysian book-review site, which calls it one of the stronger works available on the subject for a Muslim woman to read, and singles out the density of sourcing as the reason.

A second review on the same site makes a specific comparison: having read al-Albānī’s earlier work on the subject, the reviewer found this one fuller and more thoroughly footnoted — and singles out the chapter on nineteenth-century Malay women’s face-covering practice as new to her.

Worth noting alongside the praise: in July 2019 the author publicly corrected a misattributed quotation in the first printing — a report wrongly credited to Imam al-Bājī that was actually Qāḍī Abū Isḥāq’s. It is a small thing to include on a page like this, but it is the kind of small thing this site cares about: a public, dated, specific correction is worth more than a claim of infallibility.

Getting a copy