Dialectics of Normativity and Historicity in al-Maududi and al-Asymawi’s Hijab Thought for Islamic Education

Abstract

Debates on Muslim women’s dress are often taught as if they culminate in a binary verdict: obligatory or non-obligatory. This framing obscures the epistemic process through which different legal conclusions emerge from shared scriptural references. This article reconstructs the debate between Abu al-A‘la al-Maududi and Muhammad Sa‘id al-‘Asymawi and formulates its implications for Islamic education. The study employs qualitative library research with a comparative-hermeneutic design. Its primary corpus comprises al-Maududi’s al-Hijab and al-‘Asymawi’s writings on hijab, supported by recent scholarship on contextual Qur’anic interpretation, Islamic education, religious moderation, and controversial-issue pedagogy. The analysis maps textual sources, historical assumptions, legal reasoning, ethical objectives, and pedagogical consequences. The study finds that al-Maududi privileges normative continuity and textual authority, whereas al-‘Asymawi emphasizes historical causality, social context, and the ethics of modesty. Their disagreement is therefore primarily methodological rather than merely juridical. The article proposes a text-context dialectical pedagogy that teaches khilafiyah as a reasoned interpretive process and uses contested religious issues to cultivate critical religious literacy, argumentative ethics, and contextual judgment without dissolving normative commitment.