Germany's First Liberal Mosque Opens in Berlin
Germany's first so-called taboo-breaking mosque was inaugurated in the capital with a mission to spread a liberal form of Islam. Dozens of people gathered for Friday prayers. A female imam called for prayers, and the faithful kneeled behind her in rows and turned to the direction of Mecca.
The mosque is liberal in every sense as it opens its doors to all Islamic factions — Sunni or Shia, Alawite or Sufi. It allows men and women to pray together, and it even welcomes gay and lesbian Muslims. There will be no segregation as all worshipers will be allowed to sit side-by-side.
Seyran Ates, who founded the mosque, said the project was eight years in the making. The 54-year-old German-Turkish lawyer, author and activist has been known for her liberal stance on Islam, having called for a "sexual revolution" among Muslims and vowed not to allow ultra-conservatives to rob her of her right to be Muslim.
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"There's so much Islamist terror and so much evilness happening in the name of my religion...it's important that we, the modern and liberal Muslims, also show our faces in public," Ates said. "We want to send a signal against Islamic terror and the misuse of our religion," she added.
Some women who attended wore veils or head coverings, but Ates stressed this kind of clothing will be disallowed. "[This is] for safety reasons and because it is our conviction that the full-face veil has nothing to do with religion, but is a political statement," she explained.
The Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque was named after medieval Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd and German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe. It doesn't look like a mosque from the outside, and no minaret can be seen. That's because it is in a 90 sq.m. room on the third floor of an old Lutheran church in Moabit that was rented for a year.
