What is niqab?
A garment made to cover the face, worn by some Muslim women. It is not the same thing as covering the face — the covering is the act, the niqab is one of several instruments for it.
A niqab is a covering shaped and worn for the face. Its forms have varied widely across places and periods, and it should not be reduced to the one style most visible today.
Niqab and face covering are not the same
Covering the face is an act; it can be done with the hand, the edge of a headscarf, or any loose cloth. The niqab is a garment made for that purpose: one instrument among several. Garments constructed the same way, such as the burquʿ and the lithām, carry the same ruling for the same reason.
The distinction is load-bearing: most disputes about niqab are in substance disputes about face covering, and the two are routinely conflated.
Related terms
Jilbāb, khimār, cadar and purdah overlap in ordinary speech without denoting the same garment — set out in full here. Part of the confusion is translation. Malay cadar means a bedsheet; Indonesian cadar means niqab. English veil generally denotes a head covering rather than a face covering, which makes older English sources unreliable evidence for what was actually worn.
A significant portion of the modern dispute rests on vocabulary rather than substance.
Why it is called niqab
Two derivations are reported. Ibnu al-Aʿrābī traces it to the concealment of colour — the covering of the wearer's complexion by the cloth. Others trace it instead to naqb, an opening — the two apertures left in front of the eyes in the garment's original form; a reading supported by Ibnu Jinnī's description of the niqab as a woman taking a burquʿ and piercing (tanqubu) the place of the eyes in it.
Check your understanding
According to this note, what is the relationship between "niqab" and "face covering"?