According to the following report from the Austrian public broadcaster ORF, shops specializing in the sale of full-face veils may actually be nodes in Salafist networks.

Many thanks to JLH for the translation:

Experts Warn Against the Spread of Nikab Shops

Experts are warning against the spread of so-called nikab shops in Germany, which offer full-cover clothing for Muslim women.

These businesses are “not just fashion shops, but parts of a Salafist infrastructure,” said the director of the Global Islam Center at the University of Frankfurt am Main on Tuesday for the ARD TV magazine Report Mainz. Furthermore, veils for girls as young as two years old are sold there.

“Meeting Place for Salafists”

Schröter continued that these shops are centers “in which information is passed on and which function as meeting places for Salafists of both sexes. The scene is clearly extremist, unsettling, and demands action.”

According to Report Mainz, covert photographs show a saleswoman pressuring a customer to cover up. The magazine speaks of a “shocking development, especially when it concerns the indoctrination of children” according to the Freiburg Islam scholar Adbel Hakim Ourghi. There were symbols in several of the shops which may be connected to the jihadist terror group, Islamic State.

Comparison With the Extreme Right Scene

According to the “Report Mainz” website, what the expert Susanne Schröter sees in these shops is a parallel to shops which carry products for right-extremist followers. “These are stores where the symbols of a movement can be acquired, and that also exists in the rightist scene.” She places the nikab shops in the in the category of “extremist consumer culture” as well.