Last year Sherin Khankan’s husband gave her an ultimatum: she could continue as Denmark’s first female imam or remain his wife. “Blood will be spilt and marriages dissolved when women challenge male dominance,” she concludes in her new book. “That’s the price of change. I know, because it happened to me.”
It was not that her husband opposed her creation of the Mariam Mosque in Copenhagen where she leads women – both veiled and bare-headed – in Friday prayers. Rather, Khankan insists, he was concerned for their four young children and frightened for her. When a Le Monde journalist asked what trait enabled his wife to combat Islamists and Islamophobes alike, he replied, “Fearlessness.” “And he’s afraid of that fearlessness,” she says. “I think that many people support the revolution, but they just don’t want the leader to be their wife.”
.... She is also rare in conducting interfaith marriages. Her first couple were Swedish, a Christian man and a Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, who wished to honour each other’s religion but not convert. They’d been turned down by 96 imams across Europe. This intransigence, Khankan believes, is a barrier to Muslims feeling they belong in the west. “You hear some parents say, ‘It’s not a problem to us because we have raised our children well, so they won’t fall in love with a non-Muslim.’” [The Times (£)] Read more
