(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - "Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire, it’s all about sex and naked skin,” Ibrahim Burak Birer, 31, who started the magazine told the Daily Mail.
"But we, and millions of women around the world, believe that fashion can also be different."
Angered by nude images in fashion magazines, Birer decided to create a magazine that would contest the usual concepts relating fashion with ‘nudity’.
Working with his friend, Mehmet Volkan Atay, 32, he created Ala, a magazine described as the avant-garde of "veiled’” fashion.
The name of the magazine, which stems from the Ottoman era, means "the most beautiful of the beautiful."
The fashion magazine was described by German magazine Radikal as "the Vogue of the veiled”.
Hijab, an obligatory code of dress in Islam, has always been a highly divisive issue in modern Turkey, amid opposition from the secular elite, including army generals, judges and university rectors.
Hijab was banned in public buildings, universities, schools and government buildings in Muslim-majority Turkey shortly after a 1980 military coup.
In 2007, Emine Erdogan, the wife of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was blocked from entering a military hospital or refusing to remove her hijab.
In September 2010, the Higher Education Board ordered Istanbul University, one of the country's biggest, to end its hijab ban. The rules cover almost all Turkish universities.
Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations.
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