Didem Ünal Abaday

This research aims to decode and map out the discursive contours of pious Muslim women’s narratives on gender, Islam, piety and fashion in the contemporary Turkish and German contexts. Its comparative focus on pious Muslim women’s engagements with Islamic fashion in a Western and non-Western context, will provide us useful tools to reveal the contextual specificities of pious women’s appropriation of veiling fashion, their negotiation of piety, gender identity and professionalism as well as their self-positioning vis-à-vis hegemonic gender discourses. Examining the contextual specificities and the sui generis aspects of pious women’s narratives on gender, Islam, piety and fashion, this research will attempt to disclose the fact that veiling fashion connotes a new possibility for unsettling age-old divides such as secular/pious, modern/traditional, Western/non-Western and can initiate a dialogue between different positionalities beyond their static interpretations in hegemonic public narratives.