ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the veiling fashion of young Muslims in Berlin must be understood as a religious and social practice in which perceptions of Islam as a universal religion encounters local veiling practices. Data for this chapter is based on fieldwork in various periods during 2004–2007 and 2011–2012 with young Muslims participating in a religious youth organization Muslimische Jugend in Deutschland e.V. in Berlin. During the weekly religious meetings, the youth were introduced to arguments for veiling which referenced both German society and the veil as a religious obligation. A fashionable headscarf and dress is not problematic as long as it is combined with modesty. Combining fashionable Western-style urban clothing with an emphasis on modest behaviour, education and work, taking pleasure in Islamic hip-hop and distancing themselves from their parent's generation, links these young women to a 'vision of modernity' dissimilar to the Western models – an alternative modernity.
