First Scandinavian female imam to head a women-only mosque (Documentary, 2018)

Sherin is opening one of Europe’s first mosques run by female imams. The members of the Mosque aim to confront and challenge the fear surrounding Islam and call for a new kind of it including a feminist agenda. Sherin is impatient. She wants change and equality now. But her haste divides her organisation to the brink of collapse. After her own divorce, Sherin openly begins granting Islamic divorces to women unhappily married and performs inter-faith marriages of Muslim women and non Muslim men. She wants to grant Muslim women the freedom to divorce and marry. But how do you break centuries of tradition from within a religion?

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The documentary offers a powerful insight of the first Scandinavian female imam, Sherin Khankan
and her struggle to assert her status as a woman in the Muslim religion. Born to a Syrian refugee and Muslim father and a mother from Finland and christian, it is precisely this multiculturalism that has shaped her and brought her to where she is today. The director, Marie Skovgaard, followed the woman imam for three years, from the beginnings of the Mariam Mosque to its first internal crisis in 2018. Sherin Khankan has founded the first women-only mosque in Copenhagen as a reaction to the patriarchal turn taken by Islam. Full of ambition and determination, she wants to advocate another Islam, where gender equality is valued and where Muslim women have a place to be listened to and advised. For her, an imam is like a spiritual guide, a consellor, she has to serve the community by helping people who come to her. She devotes much of her time to welcoming Muslim women, listening to their problems, often related to domestic violence, and trying to provide solutions. Her model is Ibn Arabi who tried to break with the idea of rationalism within Islam.
But the gender issues she raises and her willingness to reform Islam confronts her with many critics within the Muslim community. And above all it is still difficult for this community to conceive of a female imam, who can lead the prayer and perform the marriage. This change is too radical. She gained support and began to attract the attention of the media. Her new popularity allows her to advocate her vision of Islam in Europe and the United States.
But where she is going to draw fire is on her vision of interfaith marriage. According to Sunni Islam, Muslim woman can't marry a non-Muslim man, unlike men who have the right to. But Sherin Khankan wants to establish gender equality in islamic marriage and thus allow interfaith marriage for Muslim women. According to her, there is nothing in the Quran that says this.
She will grant many interfaith marriage but this will be at the expense of her own mosque, which will lose its most influential supporters like Saliah Marie Fetteh. She then begins to doubt, if Islam can really be reformed and modernized. But through his self-sacrifice the mosque endures, and welcomes three new women imam. And continues to grant inter-religious marriage.
This documentary takes an interesting look at Islam and its relationship with women, but above all it shows the extraordinary journey of a woman driven by her faith and her feminism.

Original title - The Reformist - A female Imam
A film by Marie Skovgaard
Denmark, 2019

© 2019, Licensed by First Hand Films

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