A Muslim feminist who triggered death threats and fatwas by founding a liberal mosque in Berlin, is planning to open a similarly inclusive place of worship in the UK as part of a 'revolution' in Islam.
The Guardian reported that Seyran Ateş, a Turkish-born lawyer and human rights campaigner, visited London this week to investigate potential sites for a liberal mosque open to men, women and LGBT Muslims on an equal basis.
Ateş hopes to establish the UK-based liberal mosque within a year, and says her aim is to create similar places of worship in every European capital.
'I'm not alone with this idea. It is a movement, it's a revolution,' she told the Guardian. 'I may be the face of the liberal mosque, but I alone am not the mosque. We have millions of supporters all over the world.'
However, the opening of the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque last month, in a space rented from a Lutheran church in Berlin, sparked a hostile reaction from conservative Muslims in Europe, Egypt and Turkey.
Ateş received death threats via social media and was told 'you will die' during a street confrontation.
Egypt's Dar al-Ifta al-Masriyyah, a state-run Islamic body, declared the mosque's principles incompatible with Islam, and the legal department of Cairo's al-Azhar University issued a fatwa against liberal mosques.
Turkey's main Muslim authority, Diyanet, said the mosque was an experiment 'aimed at nothing more than depraving and ruining religion'.
Ateş, 54, who has had police protection since 2006, was forced to enhance her personal security.
She did not publicise her itinerary for her two-day trip to London, and she was accompanied by close-protection officers.
Asked by the Guardian if she feared for her life, she said: 'Yes, a little bit. I could be in danger. People recognise me.'
The Berlin mosque was crowded on its opening day, but numbers dwindled following the death threats. 'It made people afraid to come,' said Ateş. But, she added, 95 per cent of emails she had received since the opening of the mosque in Berlin were supportive.
'There are more and more people wanting to break the chains. In many countries you can find people who are practising what we're doing, but they are doing it under cover, privately,' she said.
'Liberal and secular Muslims are squeezed out by radical Islam, so they decide to be silent. It's not so easy for liberal Muslims to be 'out'. It's like being homosexual. They are tarnished as the "enemy of Islam".'
Though the Berlin mosque took eight years to establish, she said 'I think now things will go faster'.
Ateş is planning to open a second liberal mosque in Freiburg by the end of this year, and is working closely with other progressive Muslims, including Ani Zonneveld, a female imam based in Los Angeles, Shirin Khankan, a Danish female imam who opened a female-led mosque in Copenhagen last year, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, an Algerian-born gay imam based in Marseille, and Elham Manea, an expert in sharia law based in Zurich.
Ateş said that in the UK there was a particular need for liberal Islam because of the presence of sharia courts. 'Sharia is a war against women's rights, nothing else,' she said. 'The UK has helped Islamists to bring women under Islamic sharia law and its patriarchal structures.'
Ateş is also opposed to headscarves, and when she opened the Berlin mosque, she said women wearing burqas or niqabs would not be allowed in. She has subsequently compromised, with women required to show their faces to her or other female leaders at the mosque and then given the option of replacing their head coverings. But no woman wearing a niqab or burqa has as yet come to the mosque.
She said: 'There is no Islamic requirement [to cover one's head]. There is no theological argument even in the most conservative interpretation of the Qur'an'.
She added that the hijab, niqab and burqa represented the sexualisation and subjugation of women. 'It's men saying, "I cover her because she is my property." In Germany more and more women are veiled. You see children of four or five wearing headscarves. Women in north Africa are fighting not to wear the hijab while western women are fighting to wear it. I'm on the side of women worldwide who don't want to be veiled.'
The liberal mosques in Berlin, Freiburg, London and elsewhere will be open to Muslims from all sections of Islam, such as Sunni, Shia, Alawi and Sufi.
