Yashmak

A yashmak, yashmac or yasmak (from Turkish: yaşmak, "a veil") is a Turkish, Egyptian and Turkmen type of veil or niqāb worn by women to cover their faces in public. During the Ottoman Empire, the garment eventually became transparent in the middle part of the 19th century. Upper-class women wore the transparent yashmak, while the peasants still had to cover their faces.

Eventually, due to various feminist uprisings, women stopped wearing the yashmak. One such woman who caused the abandonment of the yashmak in Egypt during the 1920s was Huda Sha'arawi. Today, there is almost no usage of this garment in Turkey and Egypt. In Turkmenistan, however, it is still consciously used by some married women in the presence of elder relatives of a husband.

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