The hijab was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shi’ite community.   Muslims believe that the Quran was written over a period of 23 years, beginning on 22 December 609 CE, when Muhammad was 40, and concluding in 632, the year of his death.   

This means the hijab was invented 1300 years after the Quran was written.   Islamic law and fatwas did not start forcing women to wear the hijab until 1981.   “In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane.” To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.  By the mid 1980s, a form of hijab never seen in Islam before the 1970s had become standard gear for millions of women all over the world, including Europe and America.”

Women In The World published an article titled “The day 100,000 Iranian women protested the head scarf (hijab).”  A seldom-seen collection of photographs, shot in Tehran in 1979, is challenging perceptions of the feminist movement in Iran.  The article states in part:  When 34-year-old photographer Azadeh Fatehrad first laid eyes on an image by Hengameh Golestan, of women protesting in the streets of Tehran in 1979, she was struck immediately — it was unlike anything she had seen before.   Born in 1981 in Iran, Fatehrad had learned in school that women made a smooth transition to Islamic rules imposed after the 1979 Revolution — in particular adopting a compulsory dress code, the hijab. But Golestan’s image told a different story: thousands of women in the street, protesting the announcement that the headwear would be mandatory.

Iranian women continue to protest the oppressive hijab today.  OddNaari published an article on July 13, 2013 titled “Iranian women are now defying compulsory hijab rule by refusing to wear it inside their cars.”  The article states in part:  “The women of Iran have taken the fight against hijab to another level now.”

March 8, 2019 Activists Appear Unveiled in Tehran on Women's Day.  Small groups of Iranian women celebrated International Women's Day by appearing publicly unveiled in Tehran and calling on Iranians to support their defiance of mandatory veiling in the Islamist nation.

Iranhumanrights.org publised a report on January 22, 2019 titled:  Iran Sentences Men Who Supported Women’s Protests Against Compulsory Hijab to Six Years Prison.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia published the following fatwa titled “The legality of the Hijab” (Part No. 5; Page No. 224)

All perfect praise be to Allah, the Lord of all worlds. May Allah's Peace and Blessings be upon the noblest Prophet and Messenger Muhammad, his family, and Companions. I have read an article written by the person called Ahmad Baha' Al-Din, in some newspapers. He alleged the lawfulness of some things that Allah prohibits. In his column "Yawmiyyat", (Al-Ahram Newspaper, issues nos. 36992, 36993, 36994, 36996), the writer launched a severe attack on Hijab (veil) and Niqab (face veil). He called to unveiling the face and considered Hijab a Bid`ah (innovation in the religion). He claimed it is just a matter of dress that is part of personal freedom. He even alleged that women used to wear Niqab as a tradition and Islam did not ordain or come with it. He falsely claimed that women used to sit with the Prophet (peace be upon him) unveiled and used to go for trade, pasturing and war with their faces uncovered and they remained in such a state during the era of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, the Umayyad, and Abbasid Caliphates. He said that when the Turks embraced Islam, they spread their non-Islamic traditions of their tribes, such as the one-eyed veil, yashmak, and imposed them on Muslim and Arab women. The writer expressed his views on the permissibility of unveiling the face, denied Hijab, inserted false claims and lies, and twisted the proofs to give different implications.

It is known that urging women to unveil their faces is an evil call, rejected by Islam and the sound intellect; it is an anti-Islamic idea, indeed.

British Muslim Qanta Ahmed writes in part on March 18, 2017:  As a Muslim, I strongly support the right to ban the veil.  At last, the European Court of Justice has made a stand for European values.

Rigid interpretations of the veil are a recent invention. They’re derived not from the Quran or early Islamic tradition but from a misogyny which claims a false basis in the divine. So when the ECJ supports employers who ban the hijab, it is categorically not impinging on anyone’s religious freedom.

I was raised as an observant Muslim in a British family. Women, I was taught, determine their own conduct — including their ‘veiling’. We’d cover our hair only if we freely chose to do so. That’s why I’m baffled by the notion that all good Muslim women should cover their hair or face. My entire family are puzzled by it too, as are millions like us. Not until recent years has the idea taken root that Muslim women are obliged by their faith to wear a veil.

It’s a sign, I think, not of assertive Islam, but of what happens when Islamists are tolerated by a western culture that’s absurdly anxious to avoid offence. This strange, unwitting collaboration between liberals and extremists has been going on for years.

In response to cases brought by two veiled Muslim women from Belgium and France, the European Court of Justice has ruled that employers have the right to stop employees wearing visible religious symbols, including headscarves worn in the name of Islam. This ruling includes not only the burka and the niqab (already entirely banned from the public space by a number of European countries) but also the face-revealing hijab.   Read more.

Saudi women are also pushing back against Islamic law requiring them to wear the hijab.  StepFed published an article on July 14, 2017 titled: “Saudi religious police will study why some women don't wear hijab.”

The Washington Post published an article on December 21, 2015 titled “As Muslim women, we actually ask you not to wear the hijab in the name of interfaith solidarity.”  The article states in part:

For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful reminder of the well-financed effort by conservative Muslims to dominate modern Muslim societies.   We reject this interpretation that the “hijab” is merely a symbol of modesty and dignity adopted by faithful female followers of Islam.

This modern-day movement, codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf.” This conflation of hijab with the secular word headscarf is misleading. “Hijab” literally means “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” ”obstructing” and “isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean headscarf.

In colloquial Arabic, the word for “headscarf” is tarha. In classical Arabic, “head” is al-ra’as and cover is gheta’a. No matter what formula you use, “hijab” never means headscarf.  The media must stop spreading this misleading interpretation.

Pew Research found that only forty three percent (43%) of American Muslim women wear hijabs according to an article published by NPR on April 21, 2011.  The NPR article states in part “The split between women who've covered and women who've never done so has existed for decades. But now a generation of women is taking off the headscarf, or hijab.”  Therefore, after several years of “a generation of women taking off the hijab” the number of Muslim women now wearing the hijab in America is likely much less than forty three percent.

Islamic Research Foundation International, Inc. reports The Qur'an Does Not Mandate Hijab.  The Qu’ ran does not provide a specific dress code except for the need to be modest.  Therefore, the basis of what to wear is often decided in the manner described by Shaykh, Dr. Abou El Fadl.   “Abou El Fadl argues that in contemporary Muslim societies people tend to become authoritative by imposing a single viewpoint to the total exclusion of others. Shariah (Islamic law) is then invoked to quash debate by people who are themselves not adequately qualified to do so.”  Gulf News reports in part:  Saad Al Deen Al Hilali, a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at Al Azhar University, said on private television station ON TV that texts in the Quran on women’s attire are not “definitive” on the headgear.

Jihadwatch.org reports the following, in part, regarding World Hijab Day:

Today Leftist women all over Europe and North America can signal their virtue. But where is their concern for Aqsa Parvez, whose Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it? Or Aqsa and Amina Muse Ali, a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab? Or the 40 women who were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab; or Alya Al-Safar, whose Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain; or Amira Osman Hamid, who faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab; or the Egyptian girl, also named Amira, who committed suicide after being brutalized for her family for refusing to wear the hijab; or the Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia who were told that they had to wear the hijab or be fired; or the women in Chechnya whom police shot with paintballs because they weren’t wearing hijab; or the women also in Chechnya who were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab; or the elementary school teachers in Tunisia who were threatened with death for not wearing hijab; or the Syrian schoolgirls who were forbidden to go to school unless they wore hijab; or the women in Gaza whom Hamas has forced to wear hijab; or the women in Iran who protested against the regime by daring to take off their legally-required hijab; or the women in London whom Muslim thugs threatened to murder if they didn’t wear hijab; or the anonymous young Muslim woman who doffed her hijab outside her home and started living a double life in fear of her parents; or the fifteen girls in Saudi Arabia who were killed when the religious police wouldn’t let them leave their burning school building because they had taken off their hijabs in their all-female environment; or all the other women and girls who have been killed or threatened, or who live in fear for daring not to wear the hijab? Who is standing in solidarity with them? Those who taunt or brutalize hijab-wearing women are louts and creeps, and should be prosecuted if they commit any acts of violence.