While a large body of the literature confirms the existence of diverse styles of the hijab and attributes this diversity as a consequence of religious authorities’ socialization mechanisms across the Islamic world, the literature still lacks sufficiently fresh research-based evidence to assess the actual effects of these official mechanisms on individuals’ perceptions towards the hijab. This crucial research gap is the central focus of this study and I present research-based evidence in this paper to contribute to filling this gap from a demographic perspective. Generally speaking, the results of this analysis have shown that the social perceptions on the hijab are substantially affected by the main demographic determinants. Of them, age composition and education play overwhelmingly a more important role: while the high-educated younger cohorts hold substantially modest and liberal perceptions towards the hijab, the opposite applies to the low-educated older cohorts. In sum, the results of this analysis not only cast a revolutionary doubt on the success of the authorities’ long-term religious bombardment strategy but also argue that such a failure will become increasingly a more visible observation due to the country’s demographics particularly a growing university educated youth bulge fuelled by the global modern communication technologies.
