“Niqab is just inherited pre-Islamic custom”
The premise is accepted here — most pre-Islamic Arab women did not cover their faces — and the opposite conclusion is argued to follow. If the practice spread after Islam, it was not carried over from before it.
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Most rebuttals deny the claim. This one accepts it.
What is conceded
The majority of pre-Islamic Arab women did not cover their faces: attested by al-Ṭabarī, Abū Ḥayyān al-Andalusī and Ibnu Juzayy al-Kalbī, with support from ʿAbd Allāh ʿAfīfī.
That is the objector's premise, granted in full.
Why it does not follow
Face covering before Islam is not in dispute here: it is recorded as a long-standing Arab custom, attested as early as Tertullian in the third Christian century, and described as normal in that society even though not all, or even most, women practised it.
What is disputed is narrower: that the general spread of the practice after Islam, becoming, by the generation after the Companions, the majority practice rather than the minority one, is explained merely as inherited tradition. A minority custom becoming a majority one needs its own explanation, and that shift is read as evidence of religious motivation rather than as unbroken cultural continuity.
The condition attached
The argument is explicitly conditional, and the condition itself is stated: "if the claim of al-Ṭabarī and others is correct."
The whole inference rests on that premise being accurate. Reproducing the conclusion without the condition would be presenting a contingent argument as a settled one.
The harder question, also faced
Many reports and poems from the first centuries of Islam do describe women seen by unrelated men with faces uncovered. This too is acknowledged, not concealed.
Three explanations are offered: those women did not regard face covering as obligatory; levels of religious observance differ; and a practice regarded as recommended can be left.
A fourth explanation is added, and this is where iḥrām actually enters: not as a separate, narrower case, but as the explanation for the wider pattern. On this argument, Ibnu ʿUmar's well-known ijtihād that a woman in iḥrām must leave her face uncovered led large numbers of women, including those known for their beauty, to appear bare-faced during ḥajj and ʿumrah. Ibnu ʿAbd al-Barr records the moment this became visible: Abū Ḥāzim b. Dīnār (d. 140 H), seeing a strikingly beautiful woman drawing every eye as she circled the Kaʿbah or threw the pebbles at Jamarāt, told her, "Servant of God, cover your face — you are captivating people, and this is a place of hope and of dread." She answered him, "My iḥrām is on my face. God confound you, Abū Ḥāzim." — a sharp, teasing rebuke, not a blessing: the Arabic sakhira Allāhu minka means God mocking him in return, not forgiving him. Her reply echoes an athar of Ibnu ʿUmar himself, reported by al-Bayhaqī: "A woman's iḥrām is on her face." Seeing that at scale, part of society came to treat face covering as unimportant generally — the visible mass exception during pilgrimage dulled the sense that it mattered outside it too.
Even so, face covering is held to have remained the practice of pious Muslim women through this period, with Fāṭimah bt. al-Mundhir and Ḥafṣah bt. Sīrīn cited as evidence.
Check your understanding
The note accepts that most pre-Islamic Arab women did not cover their faces. What conclusion does it then draw?