“I hate wearing the tudung. It is hot, it is uncomfortable, and I cannot see what it is for.”

This one is worth separating into two questions, because they get answered as though they were one.

The first is whether the head-cover is difficult. Sometimes it is. Heat is real, discomfort is real, and there is no gain in pretending otherwise or in producing a lecture about women who manage it in harder climates. A hard thing is not made easier by being told it is easy.

The second is whether it is arbitrary, and that is the question actually being asked. The instruction in Qur'an 24:31 is not addressed to women alone. One verse earlier, at 24:30, men are told to lower their gaze and guard their chastity. Both sexes carry a duty here. The command is a shared standard of modesty, and the version of the story in which women bear all of it and men bear none of it is a distortion that Muslim men have every reason to stop repeating.

It is also worth naming what the discomfort is often standing in for. When a woman is made to feel that her body is a public hazard, that policing her is other people's business, and that her worth is measured in fabric, the cloth becomes the symbol of something she is right to resent. That resentment is not a theological argument. It is a response to how she has been treated.

Those are different injuries, and they call for different answers. One is a question about a command. The other is a question about the people who enforced it. Do not let the second silently settle the first.