BERLIN -- Seyran Ates recalls the searing pain of a bullet tearing through her neck. She remembers wavering on the brink of death and telling God that she had to rejoin the living. A 21-year-old law student at the time, working at a women's center in West Berlin, she was nowhere near finished with the world.
"'I want to go back,' I told God," Ates, now a 55-year-old lawyer and women's rights activist who is also studying to become an imam, recalled of that afternoon. "I still have a mission."
More than three decades later, that mission came to fruition a year ago when she stood before a congregation of Muslim men and women kneeling side by side as they recited prayers in the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque -- the first Muslim house of worship in Germany where women, many with dark ponytails and long curls uncovered -- are recognized as imams. Any Muslim is welcome to join: men or women, Sunni or Shiite, transgender, gay or straight.
"We want to send a signal to political Islam," Ates, wearing a long, white tunic trimmed with gold, told a packed room on the opening day, when journalists outnumbered worshippers. "We want to show that another Islam exists, that has nothing to do with terrorism."
Over the past year, that something has grown into a congregation of 35 core members -- many of them women. They help Ates organize weekly prayers, give tours to school groups and hold seminars on democracy, love and the concept of an open, tolerant interpretation of Islam and a forgiving God.
Three years after a wave of more than 1 million, mostly Muslim, migrants arrived in Germany seeking asylum, culture wars over religious identity and the possible threat posed by Islam have led to a rise in nationalist, populist movements. The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel was nearly brought down last week over a dispute with the Bavarian sister of her conservative party, which sought to turn back refugees at the border.
The Bavarian conservatives of the Christian Social Union joined the far-right party Alternative for Germany in promoting a narrative that refugees pose a threat, after several highly publicized killings and sexual assaults in the country led to charges against Muslim migrants. The party ordered that crosses be displayed in all public buildings in the state, and Merkel's new interior minister, Horst Seehofer -- also a Bavarian -- declared that "Islam is not a part of Germany."
Against the backdrop of these debates, Ates sees the survival of the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque, which recently celebrated its first anniversary, as proof that Muslims living in Germany need and are open to an interpretation of Islam that reflects the values of the Western society in which they live.
She recently extended the lease on the room where the mosque is housed for two more years, defying those who foretold a swift demise for the project.
"A couple of days after we opened the mosque, a young man showed up and told us, 'You won't be here long. The Arabs will never allow it,'" she said. Instead, hundreds of people from across Germany, Europe and abroad have visited or attended services. Those most committed to its survival have made donations, some giving as much as about $580, Ates said, emphasizing that the mosque receives no public funding.
Protection provided by the police and paid for by the city government, in place since she published the book Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution in 2009, was increased to a personal security detail after the heightened threats on her life.
Days after the mosque opened, Dar al-Ifta, an influential arm of the Egyptian Justice Ministry that issues religious verdicts, denounced the mosque and declared that allowing men and women to pray alongside one another violated Islamic law. Turkish news outlets reported that the mosque was a terrorist organization with links to the Islamist cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey blames for a coup attempt in 2016 against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan .
Despite a video message in which Ates states that the "the Rushd-Goethe mosque has nothing to do with the Gulen movement," the rumors have persisted. She blames them for the fact that few Turks have joined the congregants, although they make up the vast majority of the estimated 4.5 million Muslims living in Germany.
Despite the demands of running the mosque, she takes Arabic classes and continues to work as a lawyer. She considers achieving a degree in Islamic theology important to her recognition in the Muslim community. "I want to understand the words and know the meanings so no one can say, 'She's just a lawyer,'" she said.
Born in Istanbul to a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father, she emigrated with her parents to what was then West Berlin in the late 1960s, part of the first large wave of Muslim immigrants who came to fill the blue-collar jobs needed to rebuild the German economy after World War II. Ates was 6 when she and her four siblings moved into a one-room apartment with their parents.
As she learned German and excelled in school, Ates says, she came to understand that it was not the crowded living conditions that she found suffocating, but the realization that because of her sex, she was not afforded the freedoms of her non-Muslim peers.
"I was a girl," she wrote in 2007 in Zeit Online. "I embodied the family's honor, and my hymen -- for a long time I didn't even know what that was -- was more important to the whole family than my brain."
At 17, she fled her home, graduated from high school and started studying law at the Free University of Berlin. To support herself, she worked as a counselor in a women's center. In September 1984, she was speaking with a client when a man wearing a trench coat entered the center, pulled out a pistol and fired three shots. One hit the client in the stomach, killing her; the other struck Ates.
She survived to see the suspect, a Turkish bricklayer, acquitted for lack of evidence, which enraged her. For years, she struggled with the psychological fallout of the attack. She returned to her faith, but was again alienated by Berlin's traditional, conservative mosques, where women were forced to pray behind a curtain. She decided that if the faith community that she needed did not exist, she would create it.
It took years of planning, fundraising and looking for a suitable space. While she received support from like-minded liberal Muslims from Switzerland to the United States, the critics have remained.
What keeps her going is the encouragement, not only from social media postings but also from the visitors who go out of their way to find a place of worship that previously existed only in their dreams.
Religion on 06/30/2018