Female imam bans the burka in Berlin’s liberal mosque
SEYRAN ATES started a small revolution in the Muslim world yesterday. In a makeshift room in the back of a Berlin church, she defied extremist threats to open Germany’s first liberal mosque and become one of the world’s tiny number of female imams.
With her head uncovered, she delivered the first Friday sermon to a mixed congregation of men and women who sat together. Everyone is welcome in her mosque: the only thing that is banned is the burka.
“We are defending the good name of Islam,” she says. “Ever since 9/11, Islam has been associated in people’s minds with violence and terror. It is up to us to defend our religion from the extremists. If not us, then who? We are fighting Islamism with Islam, and extremism with religion.”
Ms Ates is what many in the West have called for: a Muslim leader who openly repudiates both violent extremism and traditional Islam’s repressive attitude towards women.
She is well aware of the risks that come with her stance. “Yes, I’m frightened. I’d be a fool if I wasn’t,” she says. “But I have never let fear stop me from doing what I believe I should do.”
The 54-year-old is no stranger to danger. She was shot in 1984 while working as a counsellor for Turkish women and almost died of her wounds.
The child of Turkish immigrants – she came to Germany at the age of six – she has fought to create a mosque for what she calls “modern Muslims”.
For now, her Ibn Rushd Goethe Mosque is just a converted back room at the back of a Lutheran church. But it is the only mosque in Germany where men and women can pray together.
Referring to the burka as “just a tradition, a way for men to identify women as their property”, she says she has no problem with headscarves. “It’s not the headscarf I have been fighting all these years, it’s intolerance.”