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Full disclosure here, I have never worn a hijab or a sari. I am not from the religious and cultural groups that produced them. I do have sources on everything I am about to say, but plenty of writers have researched my own religious tradition, have sources, and still manage to come out with a description of me that I don’t recognize. I am very grateful to my friend Aisha and her daughter Safiya for looking over my draft to reassure me about whether I inadvertently wrote anything both ignorant and insensitive. To my huge relief, they said it’s a go. Big sigh of relief on my part.

The Hijab

Up first is the hijab. Many Westerners associate any form of veiling with Islam, but veiling is much older than the religion. Veils were worn for centuries by upper class women in Syria and Iran, as a sign of social status (Aslan, 95). There is even a theory that Cleopatra, last pharaoh of Egypt, may have worn full body veiling, at least on one occasion (Fletcher, 101), and she predated Muhammad by over 600 years.

The Koran is the collected words of God as dictated to Muhammad, beginning in 610 CE (Armstrong, 28 and 29). The Koran does advocate modesty. For example in chapter 24, verse 30, it says “Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity” and then in verse 31 it goes on “tell the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their chastity, and not to reveal their adornments except what normally appears.”

So it raises the question, which are the adornments that “normally appear?” Or in other words, what is the definition of modesty? It’s a fuzzy concept in any culture. If your definition of modesty does not include veiling, then the Koran does not require veils for women (Aslan, 94). It does suggest that believers who come to Muhammad’s house to ask something of his wives should do so from behind a hijab (Quran, 33:53, hijab is used in the quote in Aslan, 96, screen is used in other translations). I thought this sounded like it’s the believers, who are supposed to wear the hijab, not the wives. But the word can be used to mean a light screen or curtain, which makes a lot more sense of this situation.

And while we’re on the topic of definitions, let’s clarify the terms. In modern terminology, the hijab is the head covering that covers the hair, neck, and maybe the chest. It is not the same as the niqab which is a face veil that leaves only the eyes uncovered. It’s also not the same as the burqa, which is an all-encompassing garment that covers the entire body, sometimes including the eyes, leaving a mesh screen from which to see. In the historical record, these distinctions in the definitions have not always been perfectly observed, which just adds to the confusion when you’re reading historical documents.

Whatever the exact hijab Muhammad was referring to looked like, it was quite clearly designated as something used for Muhammad’s wives, not women in general. The phrase “donning the veil” was also used synonymously with the phrase “becoming Muhammad’s wife,” which makes it even clearer that the veil was not required for all women (Aslan, 96).

We do not have a record of when the veil became general practice, but it was not during Muhammad’s lifetime. It was probably three or four generations later that it became a general thing (Armstrong, 36). My sources disagree on whether women did it to follow the example of Muhammad’s wives (Aslan, 96) or whether they were copying Greek Christian women in Byzantium (Armstrong, 36).

After Muhammad’s death, his followers went through the same kind of schisms and reconciliations that Christianity did in the first few centuries of its existence. During that time, many followers looked back at reports of how things were done by Muhammad and his companions, even for issues that were not covered in the Quran. These reports were called hadith (Armstrong, 57 and 159).

One of the clearest explanations of the hijab comes from Abu Dawud, a 9^th century compiler of hadith. He says that when Asma, the daughter of a companion, came to Muhammad in “thin clothes.” He “turned his attention from her. He said: O Asma’, when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands” (Abu Dawud, Book 32 Number 4092).

It is notable that this particular explanation does not appear in some other notable compilations of the hadith, but many of them do include references to the value of modesty and head coverings without necessarily including clear definitions. (For example, here or here.)

Not everyone accepted all the hadith. Since Muhammad didn’t write them down himself, there was always the question of authenticity. In addition, there was the question of how much they mattered, even if they were authentic. Some legalists argued that they should be free to write laws according to their own situation without reference to what Muhammad did in some other situation (Armstrong, 63). Many Muslims ended up accepting some of the hadith, but not all.

So if you add up the fuzzy concept of modesty with debate over which hadith to accept, it is understandable why there are devout Muslim women who absolutely believe that the veil is an essential part of their religion, and there are other equally devout Muslim women who do not believe that their religion requires the veil.

If we skate over a millennium of history with reckless haste, we get to 1899, when a wealthy Egyptian man named Qassim Amin wrote an explosive book called The Liberation of Women. In it, he argued for girls to receive primary education and a reform of the laws on polygamy and divorce. Neither of those were new arguments. But he also insisted on a symbolic reform: the abolition of the veil. He wrote “Anyone observing our present social situation will find proof of the fact that our women have broken away from their role as slave, and that there remains but a hijab between them and freedom” (Kurzman, 66).

Amin’s book is often considered the beginning of Muslim feminism. It was predictably controversial in its day, and it is still unsettling now. If we stop with the brief summary of championing education and fair laws for women, then most modern readers can cheer him on. But the more we read, the more we start cringing. Amin was French-educated, and his rationale for urging change was that Muslims were so backward and Europeans were so glorious. The only path to success was the European path, and Muslim women needed elevation so they could do a better job of raising Muslim men to be successful (Ahmed, 155). Egyptian women, he said, were ignorant, unsanitary, unattractive, and they had no thoughts beyond obsessing over their husbands (Ahmed, 157). In a largely segregated society, you’ve got to wonder how many women he actually knew before making this judgment.

Regardless of his motives, Amin’s thoughts on the veil did have an impact, and he wasn’t alone in wanting to get rid of it. The next several decades saw many Muslim women taking it off. So much so that in 1955, a prominent historian was able to confidently predict that the veil was about to become a thing of the past (Ahmed and Keating, 40). Which is yet another example of how historians are not very good at predicting anything.

Far from disappearing, the use of the veil has been on the rise over the past half century. Wearing it is even more hotly debated than when Amin was writing. Obviously, many women wear it as part of their religious beliefs. But by the 1970s and 1980s, other women were wearing it as a cultural statement, with pride in their own heritage and a rejection of the idea that Western ideals are necessarily better (Haddad, 48 and 226). Still other women wore it as a form of protection from harassment (Ahmed, 232). There has been plenty of internal bickering among these groups, criticizing each other for wearing it, or not wearing it, or wearing it for the so-called wrong reasons.

Various governments have both required and forbidden it, or proscribed which kind of veil is acceptable and which are not. When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran in 1979, he imposed a penalty of 74 lashes for women who did not wear the veil (Ahmed, 232). This extreme penalty raised the hackles of many who didn’t like the Ayatollah anyway, but eyebrows went up again in 2002 when French President Sarkozy introduced legislation to ban full veiling. He said “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity” (quoted in Aslan, 104). I cannot possibly comment on this better than Reza Aslan, author of No God but God, who speaking of Sarkozy’s argument, said that “at the heart of this argument is the profoundly misogynistic belief that no Muslim woman would freely choose to wear the veil, that she must be forced into her hijab by her husband or her father or by the societal restrictions placed on her by her religion—that, in fact, Muslim women are incapable of deciding for themselves what they should or should not wear, so it must fall to the state to decide for them” (Aslan, 104). The law remains on the books to this day.

In a recent collection of essays by American Muslim women, the introduction says that “most of us are exhausted with the hijab debate” (Abdul-Ghafur, 5). So I will take that exhaustion and move on to the sari.

The Sari

I found the sari more exhausting than the hijab. I can find literally dozens of web sites which assure me that the sari is the oldest garment still worn in the world because it is mentioned in the Rig Veda, which dates from somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 BCE.  But what these web sites conspicuously lack is the actual reference or a direct quote from where it is mentioned in the Rig Veda.  I searched a full text version, and I’m drawing a blank.  If anyone can provide me with the actual reference please let me know where it is.  But in the absence of any actual quote, I have to admit I can’t find any evidence that the sari is as old as all that.

I did find a couple of possible references in the Mahabharata, which is a classical epic poem, sort of the Hindi equivalent of the Iliad or the Odyssey. It was compiled from the 3^rd century BCE to the 3^rd century CE, and it includes the story of Draupadi, who wore a single piece of cloth, and when vengeful man tries to strip her of it, the Lord Krishna protects her by making it infinitely long, so that no matter how much he pulled, he could never get to the end of it. (Beholding that Apsara, of figure unrivalled on earth for beauty, alone in those woods and clad in a single piece of cloth, Saradwat’s eyes expanded with delight.”)

Is this really a reference to a sari? I don’t know. A sari is certainly a single piece of cloth, but so is a toga from the Roman Empire. So is the wrap-around skirt that many African women still wear today. So however we’re defining sari (and I’ve read more than one definition), it’s more than just a piece of cloth. I even ran across a theory that Alexander the Great is responsible for the sari because Indians may have been inspired by the Greek chiton when he arrived. I find this pretty unconvincing since Alexander wasn’t in India long, didn’t go very far in, and I’m pretty sure Indians could have thought of the concept without the help of an invading European.

The physical evidence is equally confusing.  A statue was recovered at Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan, dating from about 2000 BCE. Some have said the priest-king is wearing a sari, though since all that remains of the statue is only from the shoulders and up, not much of the sari is there, and elsewhere I’ve seen it linked with Muslim clothing and not the sari at all.

All of this is basically a long-winded way of saying that I have no idea how old the sari is, and I’m not entirely convinced that anyone else does either. But certainly there are statues and friezes of women in saris from at least the first few centuries of the common era (Lynton, 10). These saris are draped in a variety of styles and cover (or don’t cover) a variety of different body parts. But after the fifth century, the pictorial evidence thins out again and we just don’t have a lot to go on for a millennium (Lynton, 12).

When pictorial representations do reappear, it is clear that saris were ubiquitous for Indian women, but that they varied widely from region to region, not just in fabrics and colors, but also in how they were tied.

The person most closely linked with the modern style is a woman named Jnanadanandini Devi. She was from Bengal, where the prevailing regional sari style was almost transparent and did not include a blouse or a petticoat underneath. This was a problem for her when she moved to Bombay with her husband, who was in the Civil Service. In Bombay she was expected to interact with the Victorian English society, whose office dress code definitely did not include women in transparent fabric. So she experimented with several innovations, including a blouse and petticoat, worn to appease British standards of modesty (Ranavaade, 33). It is commonly reported that the blouse is thus a British addition to the Indian fashion, but in fact blouses were mentioned in classical Sanskrit poetry (Lynton, 11). But it is true that more women wore them after the Victorian era. Jnandanandini also experimented with throwing the end (or pallu) of the sari over the left shoulder, so as to leave her right hand free (Ranavaade, 33).

Jnanadanandini gave lessons in how to wear the sari in her new style, and she is assumed to be the author of an anonymous article extolling its virtues. The style quickly became popular, but regional styles were alive and well too up until the 20^th century, when the nivi style began to take over (Ranavaade, 15). This is the style that you are most likely to have seen, and it too is generally worn with a matching blouse and the pallu thrown over the left shoulder.

The uniformity was reinforced after India achieved independence in 1947. The new nation needed a symbol to unify around, something that was appealing and specifically not British. The sari fit the bill, and it was adopted as the dress code for women working in the army, police, schools, air industry, and government (Banerjee, 219). Not long afterwards, Bollywood was on the rise. The film stars of the 1960s wore the sari and continue to evoke the same alluring grace as Audrey Hepburn and her little black dress do for Western women (Banerjee, 220).

In the 1970s, Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India, wore the sari strategically for political purposes. At home, she wore handloom cotton saris to support the economy and link her with Mahatma Gandhi’s campaigns for handmade cotton. But when she traveled abroad, it was a different story. Those saris were silk, colorful and spectacular. It was power dressing, Indian-style. Either way, she was sending a message to her constituency: successful, modern women wear saris. She also collected saris from each region she visited, which became a national trend (Banerjee, 219).

The most interesting thing about sari is perhaps that it has survived at all in this globalized world. The sari tradition is so strong that not only do many Indian women still wear it at home, but some of them continue to wear it even when they move to Western countries. Its strongest rival is not jeans and a t-shirt, but the other major Indian clothing style for women, the shalwar kamiz. In a time where so many traditional clothing styles have completely given up in the face of mass-produced Western wear, including the styles for Indian men (Banerjee, 235), it’s nice to know that the world isn’t completely homogenized. Long may the sari continue.

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Selected Sources

I used so many sources for this episode that it is difficult to pick just one, but for the hijab segment, I’m going to go with Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam. Dawud’s hadith on the veil can be read here. And for the sari segment, I’ll go with Mululika Banerjee’s The Sari. The quote from the Mahabharata, and indeed the rest of that extremely long epic, can be read here. Further sources include:

Abdul-Ghafur, Saleemah. Living Islam out Loud : American Muslim Women Speak. Beacon Press, 2005.

AHMED, LEILA, and JOSHUA E. KEATING. “VEIL OF IGNORANCE.” Foreign Policy, no. 186 (2011): 40–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41233421.

Armstrong, Karen. Islam : A Short History. Phoenix Press, 2009.

Aslan, Reza. No God but God : The Origins and Evolution of Islam. Ember, 2012.

Fletcher, Joann. Cleopatra the Great : The Woman behind the Legend. Harper Perennial, 2012.

Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, and John L Esposito (eds), Islam, Gender, & Social Change (New York, NY, 1997; online edn, Oxford Academic, 31 Oct. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195113563.001.0001, accessed 23 Aug. 2026.

Kurzman, Charles. Modernist Islam, 1840-1940 : A Sourcebook. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Lynton, Linda. The Sari. Harry N Abrams, 1995.

Ranavaade, Dr Vaibbhavi Pruthviraj. “THE STUDY OF THE INDIAN FASHION SYSTEM WITH A SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON WOMEN’S OCCASION WEAR” International Journal of Textile and Fashion Technology (IJTFT,” n.d.

The featured image is by Ramadhan Notonegoro from Pixabay.