The hijab began as war-time protection but never lost that martial function

Evidence

In The Veil and the Male Elite, the Moroccan feminist Fatema Mernissi wrote, “The veil, which was intended to protect them [Muslim women] from violence in the street, would accompany them for centuries, whatever the security situation of the city. For them, peace would never return. Muslim women were to display their hijab everywhere, the vestige of a civil war that would never come to an end.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 810

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the reader’s reading on dress and moral panics — a deep pre-modern origin story for a contemporary Islamophobic flashpoint.
• DEFINE: Offers a historical-causal origin of the veil as emergency street protection that became permanent.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing Mernissi’s source — what specific early Islamic civil war and which city violence does she say the veil responded to?