“Rewish,” or “al Rawshana,” is a colloquial Arab term that means “hip” and also “distracted or confused,” according to Allegra Stratton’s “Muhajababes,” a lively (and rewish) exploration of youth culture in several Middle Eastern nations. One of the many people Stratton interviewed for her book — a bike-glove-wearing female member of a dance troupe that inexplicably describes itself as “an R&B band” — told Stratton that the region’s booming under-25 demographic is being made ever more rewish by their exposure to two seemingly opposed forces: racy pop music videos full of gyrating, pulchritudinous singers like Haifa Wehbe and what Stratton calls the “piety trend,” which has more and more young Muslims heeding the call of TV mullahs to abandon smoking, drinking, displays of flesh and premarital sex.

The result is a new breed of mermaid-like creatures, spotted by Stratton all over the streets of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai and Damascus. These are “muhajababes,” from “muhajabe,” a term for the veil. Zina, a girl Stratton met in a Cairo cafe, is a classic example. Her hair was covered with “a flower-patterned headscarf” but she was also wearing heavy makeup and jeans so tight she couldn’t fasten the top button. When Stratton asked Zina why she also smoked (widely considered “haram,” or forbidden, to observant Muslims), Zina grew “frosty.” Then she explained: “If I smoke and wear the headscarf you know that I’m not one of them [that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group]. You know that I’m Islamic. That I am devout. But I’m also different … If you know what you’re looking for then you’ll see being a Muslim these days is a different thing.”

Story here.