Denmark’s first women-only mosque, complete with women imams, is currently opening in Copenhagen in what the woman behind the project, Sherin Khankan, calls ‘a feminist project’. The Mariam Mosque, as it is called, is being led by and for women, who will also lead Friday prayers.
»I have never felt at home in the existing mosques. The new grand mosques are unbelievably beautiful, but I have the feeling of being a stranger when I am there. We women stand up in the balcony and look down on what is happening. Many women and young people don’t even go into the mosques as you enter into a male dominated and patriarchal space in which a man has the floor, a man leads prayers, men are in focus and dominate. That is why we are now setting up a mosque on women’s terms«, says Sherin Khankan.
