Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque

Listen for a moment. Traffic hums along the street in Moabit, and somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Then you notice the yellow brick of an old Protestant church. Its arched windows sit in neat rows, and the walls are plain and calm. Nothing here looks like a mosque. There is no dome and no minaret. Yet inside this church complex, in rooms rented from the parish, one of Europe's most debated Muslim congregations meets to pray.

This is the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque. It opened in June 2017, and from its first Friday it made headlines far beyond Berlin. Its founder set out a simple idea. Women and men would pray side by side in the same room. Women could lead prayers and give sermons. People from different branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia and others, would be welcome together. Visitors of any faith, or none, could come too. In many mosques around the world, these ideas are still controversial.

The founder is Seyran Ateş. She is a Berlin lawyer and a long-time campaigner for women's rights, with family roots in Turkey. For many years she has spoken out against forced marriage and violence against women. That work brought her threats long before the mosque existed. When she announced this project, the reaction grew even stronger. She became one of the first imams in Germany to be a woman, and she has lived under police protection. Keep that in mind as you look at the quiet doorway in front of you.

Now consider the name. It joins two thinkers from two very different worlds. Ibn Rushd was a Muslim philosopher from Córdoba, in what was then Islamic Spain, known as al-Andalus. He lived in the twelfth century. He wrote long commentaries on the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and he argued that faith and reason could work together. Scholars in Christian Europe read him in Latin translation. They knew him by another name: Averroes.

The second name is more familiar to Germans. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the country's great poet, the author of Faust. Many visitors do not know that Goethe was deeply fascinated by the Islamic world. Late in life he wrote a collection of poems called the West-Eastern Divan. A divan, in this sense, is a book of collected poems. He wrote it in conversation with the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez. So the mosque's name is a small bridge. One Muslim thinker who shaped Europe, and one European poet who looked East.

Here is a surprise that many passers-by miss. The building that hosts this mosque is a church, and a historic one. Saint John's Church in Moabit belongs to a group of suburban churches designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1830s. Schinkel was the leading architect of Prussian Berlin. Many of his grand buildings stand near Museum Island. Here he worked on a smaller budget, for what was then a poor district on the edge of the city.

Look at the brickwork. Schinkel liked clean, simple forms, often inspired by early Italian churches. The pale brick, the round arches and the flat surfaces give the building a calm, almost modest face. Later additions joined the church over the years, including the arcade and the bell tower. The whole site feels like a small, enclosed world in the middle of the street. And today a Christian parish shares part of this ground with a Muslim congregation.

Why a church? Founding a new mosque costs money, and finding a landlord can be hard for a group that attracts controversy. The Protestant parish agreed to rent out space. For many people, this arrangement says as much as any sermon. In Berlin, different faiths have often shared buildings in practical ways. But a liberal mosque inside a Schinkel church is unusual even here. It shows how this city often solves problems: with compromise, and with whatever rooms are available.

The reaction to the mosque's opening was fierce. Religious authorities abroad criticised it sharply. Egypt's official body for issuing religious rulings, Dar al-Ifta, spoke out against mixed prayer and women leading men in worship. Turkish religious officials also condemned it. On social media, Ateş received a flood of hostile messages, many of them threats. At the same time, she also received many messages of support from Muslims who said they had waited a long time for a place like this.

This is why security matters so much here. Visitors cannot always walk in freely. The congregation often asks people to register before they attend a prayer or a guided visit. Please respect that. It is not unfriendliness. It is the reality of a small community that still faces real danger. If you are standing outside right now, you are seeing the mosque the way most of Berlin sees it — as a quiet building on an ordinary street.

The room itself is simple, by most accounts. There is no grand decoration. Worshippers sit on carpets, and men and women share the same space. Women are not required to cover their hair. Face veils are not accepted inside, because the founders see open faces as part of an open community. Prayers and talks often mix Arabic with German. That matters for younger believers who grew up in Germany and think and feel in German.

Step back and look at the neighbourhood. Moabit lies on a kind of island, ringed by the River Spree and canals. For a long time it was a district of factories, workers' housing and a large criminal court and prison. Today it is home to people from Turkey, the Arab world, the Balkans and many other places. Kebab shops, bakeries, small grocery stores and old Berlin pubs stand side by side. A liberal mosque fits naturally into this mixed streetscape.

Whatever you think about the theological debates, the mosque raises questions that every visitor can feel. Who gets to speak for a religion? Can tradition and change live in the same room? Ibn Rushd asked similar questions about faith and reason nearly nine hundred years ago. Goethe asked them about East and West. Here, in a borrowed room in a Prussian church, a small group of people asks them again each week.

Before you walk on, look once more at the plain yellow brick and the round arches. Listen to the street — the buses, the voices in several languages, the bells of the church above. This building was planned in the 1830s for Protestant workers on the edge of a royal city. Today it shelters a congregation its architect could never have imagined. As you leave, notice how easy it would be to walk past without knowing. Many of Berlin's most important stories look exactly like this.