Niqab, jilbāb, khimār, hijab — what the terms mean
They are not synonyms and they are not interchangeable. Niqab is made for the face, khimār for the head, jilbāb for the body — and hijab, the term most people reach for today, later came to cover all three. The early record shows jilbāb worn over the face, and casts doubt — without settling it — on whether khimār was too.
Arguments about niqab often turn out to be arguments about vocabulary. These four words overlap in ordinary speech without naming the same thing.
The four terms
Niqab (niqāb, pl. nuqub): a garment made for the face and worn against it. That is its defining feature: shaped for the face, not merely covering it.
Khimār — a head covering, for the hair, head and neck. The Malay tudung.
Jilbāb — a loose outer garment or wrap, covering the shape of the upper body. Modern Indonesian usage generally excludes the face.
Cadar: here translation misleads badly. Indonesian cadar means niqab. Malay cadar means a bedsheet. The Indonesian usage derives from Persian chādor, which itself means jilbāb, not niqab.
Purdah is the Malay word for niqab, but it carries a second meaning: the practice of keeping women from the sight of unrelated men, or the screen used for that. The word comes from Arabic burdah or Persian, Hindi and Urdu pardah, a broad cloth. (Outside this book, standard etymology traces the word to the Persian pardah alone.)
Later scholars (mutaʾakhkhirīn) call all of the garments above by a fifth name, hijab (ḥijāb): some narrowing it specifically to a face covering. That usage departs from the word's original sense: in the Qurʾan and in Arabic as such, hijab means a curtain or screen, with no inherent connection to a garment at all. Beyond the four terms set out here, other names recur in the sources for cloth used to cover the head, face or upper body — qināʿ, ridāʾ, milḥafah, naṣīf — without becoming as current as niqab, khimār, jilbāb or cadar.
Where the confusion starts
The neat definitions above describe modern usage. The early record is untidier, and it calls for care rather than a sweeping claim. Jilbāb was worn over the face, on the evidence set out elsewhere on this site. For khimār, the case conceded here is weaker: khimār was not necessarily a face covering, and khimār as such cannot be shown to mean covering the face; a woman must wear khimār in prayer, while covering the face in prayer is not legislated by consensus, and both cannot be true of the same garment in the same sense. What the records may instead reflect is khimār standing in for jilbāb or niqab in a given report, or a genuine but non-binding custom of wearing it that way.
So a report describing a woman going out in a khimār is not by itself proof that her face was uncovered: only the narrower claim is made here: such evidence casts doubt on the assumption rather than settling it. That under-determination is itself one of the more common errors in the modern argument to overlook, and it runs in both directions: head-covering vocabulary is routinely over-translated as face-covering, and asserting the reverse needs real support too.
Why it is called niqab
Two derivations are reported, and neither is presented as settled.
Ibnu al-Aʿrābī (d. 231 H) traces it to naqībah — colour — the cloth covering the wearer's own colouring with its own.
“So-and-so has a good naqībah and naqīmah” — meaning colour. From that a woman’s niqab is so named, because it covers her niqab, that is her colour, with the colour of the niqab.
Others trace it to naqb, meaning thaqb, an opening: the two apertures left at the eyes in the garment's original form. Ibnu Jinnī (d. 392 H) is cited in support.
Neither is presented as settled, and a summary that picked one would be inventing a certainty the sources do not carry.
Check your understanding
According to this note, what is the state of the evidence on whether khimār covered the face?