Muslim headscarves? Emel Algan, a Turkish Berliner, prefers the term "head coverings". Particularly when the head coverings bare a flash of individual style, resembling a trendy Peruvian knit cap or an elegant green felt bonnet.
Algan sees the new style as offering a potential bridge between the devout and the worldly aspects of her community, and a tool for compromise on the contentious issue of headscarves in public life in Europe.
"It conforms to the rules of Islam," Algan said, adding that her stylish headwear was "a proposal for peaceful coexistence" between supporters and opponents of the scarf.
In the beginning, this 43-year-old mother of six said she was above all looking for a no-fuss way to cover her hair without the countless pins and layers of fabric, but that was nevertheless "religiously correct".
"I wanted it to be pretty too," she said.
Algan, who is also the president of the association of Islamic women in Berlin, set off to a local milliner to have a few models made based on her ideas.
That was last summer.
Since then, the issue has taken on a whole new dimension.
Last September, Germany's highest court ruled that the 16 federal states could pass legislation to keep teachers and other public servants from wearing Muslim headscarves - a decision that set off a raging debate on the issue across the country.
Several regions, including the city-state of Berlin, have set draft laws in motion banning the headscarf in the public sphere, following more radical legislation in France which also outlaws the head covering for school pupils.
Algan is against such bans. For women like her, who have worn their headscarves since puberty, such campaigns feel like a personal attack.
"Wanting to tear it off is like ripping off part of their bodies," she said.
Incensed, Algan wrote a letter to Berlin's regional interior minister suggesting a "compromise" on the matter.
With her modern scarves that do not serve as an overt religious or political symbol, Algan said Muslim women could assuage the government's concerns while still respecting Islamic law.
Emel Algan says she feels comfortable in her head covering. Comfortable on the streets of the Kreuzberg district, with its large Turkish minority, and on the subway where people "no longer look at me like a foreigner".
"Some Germans even rave about them and ask me where they can get one of their own," she said.
But her letter to the interior ministry remains unanswered. And the response in her own community remains tepid.
Only mass production will allow the price of the garment - currently hovering between 50 and 100 euros (62-124 dollars) - to fall. Algan has shown her designs to friends and even organised gatherings for young women who have just started wearing a scarf.
The idea generally meets "with interest but a lot of reticence too," she admitted.
Recently, Algan began rereading Islamic texts, including passages from the Qura'n, that require women "to draw their cloaks about them" and noted that they fail to specify how or whether the hair that must be covered.
"God does not want us to wear uniforms," she insisted.
"To abide by faith, there are things more important than wearing the scarf. But, even if the rule proved not to have a divine origin, each person should be free to live according to her faith, with or without a scarf," she said.
Algan had the sharpest criticism for those, secular or Islamist, who tried to exploit the headscarf for their own political motives. In the Muslim community, she said, "the debate on the headscarf has not really begun".
"It's not just the opponents (of the headscarf) but both sides that need to change their thinking."
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