If a da'iyah (caller to Islam) stays in a country where they do not know the Shari'ah hijab, how should he begin with them, and should he proceed gradually with them without ordering them to cover their faces?
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
The questioner : Shaykh, may Allah reward you. If a person travels abroad to call Muslims and non-Muslims, and in some Islamic countries they may not know the hijab in its correct form, is it permissible for him to begin with them gradually? For example, he starts by covering the head, and once he has succeeded in covering the head and they have become accustomed to this matter, he moves them to covering the face, and so on. Or should he begin with them directly with the Shari'ah hijab?
The Shaykh : No. What we see is that if he arrives in a country where they do not know the hijab except for covering the head, hair, and body, and they consider it permissible to expose the face and hands, he should not confront them from the start. Rather, he should come to them little by little, just as the call in the early days of Islam was little by little. For these people, covering the face is strange, and they may never accept it. Some of their foolish people may even warn against receiving knowledge from this da'iyah. The wise person is the one who averts the greater evil by means of the lesser one.
The Shaykh : No. What we see is that if he arrives in a country where they do not know the hijab except for covering the head, hair, and body, and they consider it permissible to expose the face and hands, he should not confront them from the start. Rather, he should come to them little by little, just as the call in the early days of Islam was little by little. For these people, covering the face is strange, and they may never accept it. Some of their foolish people may even warn against receiving knowledge from this da'iyah. The wise person is the one who averts the greater evil by means of the lesser one.