“People in Arabia have been covering their faces for thousands of years in cotton material.”
Was the Cotton material made in China ?
In any case the History of the Burqa may be different than you think
Before the gender apartheid instituted by the Taliban beginning in 1996, Afghan women enjoyed many liberties, such basic rights like universal suffrage and equal pay, which was ensured by Afghanistan’s Constitution written in 1964.
Even up to the early 1990s, a large percentage of urban women participated in the workforce, and since the 1950s, girls in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, and other major cities attended schools.
Half of the university students were female; women made up forty percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, seventy percent of its teachers, and thirty percent of its civil servants (Stabile & Kumar, 2005).
Women in Afghanistan had a lot of mobility and presence in public life, and while many of them wore head scarves as part of their religion, they did not wear the burqa.
The burqa was originally worn by very few Muslim women— it was traditionally worn by the minority Pashtuns in the very conservative and rural parts of Afghanistan.
Don’t even get me Started on Iran...
I grew up in a Muslim neighborhood in India. I saw plenty of women wearing burqa in 1940’s & 1950’s. I came to USA in 1960.