Notes
The complete archive.
Every article on this site lives here — the reference answers that make up its sections, news summaries, contributed accounts, and longer essays.
Niqab on social media: everyday practice, commerce and public debate
A review of public content on Threads and Instagram shows niqab discussed as personal practice, everyday clothing and a commercial category in Malay-language posts, alongside niqabi support networks and ban debates in English-language ones — a platform snapshot, not a survey of opinion.
Two Malaysian women, writing about the purdah in their own words
Two Malay-language blog accounts, published by their own authors: a mother who wore the veil in the 1980s, was turned away from a teaching placement over it, and now wears it sometimes; and a 21-year-old whose first niqab brought tears, then a rumour that she had turned Shia.
Five women, put in front of a camera in the same year
Not blog posts this time, but interviews and incidents from 2025–2026 news coverage: a schoolgirl, a law student, an award winner, an actress, and a second actress, each answering in public for wearing niqab.
What Southeast Asian research found
Studies interviewing women who wear cadar in Indonesian universities report motives beyond covering: obedience, piety, honour, identity, alongside persistent stigma in the same institutions.
Finding work, wearing niqab
A GP in the UK on the difficulty of being hired at all. Broader UK research finds half of hijab-wearing women report being passed over for advancement. The numbers specific to niqab are harder to find, and that gap is worth naming.
Women who wear niqab, in their own words
First-person accounts published by the women themselves. Linked rather than reproduced, so the account stays where its author put it and remains hers to edit or remove.
Women who stopped wearing it
A site that only carried accounts of women who kept the niqab would be advertising, not reference. These are accounts of leaving it. The pastoral note struck elsewhere on this site applies here more than anywhere.
Living under a ban
What the laws mean in practice, from women subject to them. The strongest source is a research report interviewing 35 women in France, obtained with consent, which individual blog accounts from ban countries are not.
When everyone else started covering their faces too
For a while, mask mandates made niqab-wearing women less visible rather than more. Research interviewing sixteen women in the US and Europe found a real, if temporary, drop in the prejudice they described experiencing.