Contents

About the Book

A remarkable woman challenges the idea that Islam should be defined by masculinity and conservatism.

Named one of the BBC’s 100 Women of 2016, and the subject of a Guardian interview, Sherin Khankan is one of the very few female imams in the Western World. In addition she has founded the first mosque for women in Europe.

In her revelatory book, she addresses such issues as the place for modern women in Islam, fundamentalism, radical Islamic groups, Islamic divorce, Sufism…and she also describes her own personal journey as a female Muslim activist.

Women Are The Future of Islam shines a feminist light on a gentler, more inclusive, more liberal – but also fully engaged – side of Islam that we rarely see in the West. It’s an eye-opening, highly topical read.

About the Author

Sherin Khankan founded the first mosque for women in Europe and is one of the very few female imams in the world.

Awarded an MA in the Sociology of Religion and Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen, she is a lecturer, published author, columnist, activist, and former television commentator on religion and society. In addition she is an expert in contemporary Islamic activism and Sufism in the Middle East.

In August 2001 she founded the Association of Critical Muslims and, in 2014, the Exit Circle, Denmark’s first self-help group against psychological abuse. In 2016 she founded the Mariam Mosque in Copenhagen, as well as Femimam, an international group of female and male scholars who advocate for the need for female imams. Also in 2016, she was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Women, representing the world’s most pioneering women.

Sherin has a Syrian father and a Finnish mother. She spent a year in Damascus before the war, studying Islam. Today she lives in Copenhagen and is the mother of four children.

Introduction

I FIND IT important to transform knowledge into activism. As a sociologist of religion and philosophy, and a practising Muslim, I can offer new perspectives on Islam in the West. This book is written from an activist’s point of view and should be read as the individual story of a female Muslim activist in Europe. It is about my personal journey leading up to the establishment of the first mosque in Scandinavia with female imams and is for everyone who has an interest in Islam in the West and Islamic feminism. It does not represent a definitive text or absolutist view of Islam in Europe. I have found my place in the loneliness that comes from not being a member of the ‘established consensus’.

It is my hope that this book can challenge patriarchal structures and readings of Islam, and the spread of Islamophobia, give new insight into contemporary female Islamic activism in the West and above all inspire a new generation of Muslim women to become activists and open up new mosques with female imams in other places around the world.

CHAPTER ONE

The making of Mariam Mosque

At the wheel of a borrowed car, Saliha and I head towards Copenhagen with the certainty that we are driving into history. In less than three hours, on this Friday, 26 August 2016, we will officially become the first female imams in Scandinavia. The title ‘imam’ is among the most notorious and disliked in Denmark due to the growing Islamophobia in the world. Saliha, a Danish convert and Arabic expert with a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies, and I have discussed the meaning of ‘imam’ many times since we first met and started our feminist movement. It is a controversial title, one that, to this day in Scandinavia and most places in the world, belongs exclusively to men. As we drive into the city centre, we play with words and both realise that, within an hour, ‘imam’ will transform into an ‘imamah’. Saliha rejects the title ‘imamah’ for herself and prefers the term ‘khatibah’ (a woman who delivers the sermon). I hesitate as well. But in that very moment, realising that I am about to lead the Friday prayer, I decide to embrace the title of imamah with more confidence than ever before. It is a title that conveys a variety of meanings and practices, and can be defined as ‘one who leads prayer’, ‘one who leads the mosque’ or ‘one who offers Islamic spiritual care’.

Now things are becoming real. Soon, when I recite the call to prayer, the first mosque for women in Scandinavia will be officially established. To be sure, it’s an important event for Denmark, my native country, which consists of an archipelago and a peninsula tied to Germany that rises up like a ship’s mast between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. For six months, the opening of Mariam Mosque has been the subject of much discussion. However, we decided from the beginning to keep a low profile. In order to preserve the spiritual atmosphere, no media personnel were allowed inside the mosque. Only a few select female journalists, including a reporter from the Guardian, were allowed to participate in the prayer rituals, and then without cameras. The journalist from the Guardian then published an article online based on her experience. Little did we know that, soon afterwards, news of our mosque would spread worldwide, from Copenhagen to China. On the verge of becoming a female imam, my life is at a turning point.

Last night was a short one. Yesterday evening, all the members of the Femimam group, including me, were working at the mosque late into the night in order to have it ready for the opening. These things are always last minute. Saliha and I were on the late-night news. When we got back late to my seventeenth-century house in the countryside of Dragør, a historic fishing town over nine miles from the capital, neither of us could get to sleep until three in the morning. It’s a good thing adrenaline cancels out fatigue, because as we drive towards Copenhagen and the rural landscape gives way to the first brick buildings of the suburbs, I recite the adhan, the lyrical call to prayer that penetrates the hearts of every Muslim to the point of becoming part of his or her being. I also recall the main points of my welcoming speech.

And suddenly we’re in the city centre, driving along the canals, right by Borgen, the seat of the Danish parliament, known around the world from the eponymous television series. Mariam Mosque (named in homage to Mariam or Mary, the mother of religions, who ‘unites and protects where there is no hope or light’, has a sura, or chapter, of the Quran named after her, and is viewed by some Muslims as a female prophetic figure) is not far from here, at the heart of the touristy area, along a commercial pedestrian street where all the big fashion brands have stores: H&M, Malene Birger, Tiger of Sweden, etc. From the road, you wouldn’t notice anything: the prayer room is on the first floor above street level, in a discreet building above a fast-food restaurant.

Denmark has two main mosques, both located outside the centre of Copenhagen, and equipped with minarets. In general, mosques are places of religious worship, but also education and some have even inspired humanitarian work and reforms. Opened in 2014, the big Hamad Bin Khalifa Mosque, financed by Qatar, is attended by Sunni Muslims. Imam Ali Mosque, which opened the following year and has a pretty blue dome, is the sacred house of worship for Shi’ite believers. The rest of the Danish Muslim community, over 270,000 strong (4.8 per cent of the total population of 5.6 million) meets in modest prayer rooms, most often in apartments or in the basements of buildings in peripheral areas. Mariam Mosque, which is open to all Muslims including Sunnis, Shi’ites, Alawis, Ahmadis and whoever else wants to come, is an all-inclusive mosque, based on Sufism, a mystical tradition and spiritual path within Islam.

Ideally placed in the town centre, the mosque is an apartment of just over 800 square feet, composed of a vast room adjoining a large prayer hall (forty feet long), an IKEA kitchen and four offices, all decorated with Scandinavian furniture and thick white carpet on the floors, accented with Iranian handmade carpets in the prayer hall. Our mosque also has a library with Islamic books donated by a publishing house. Not long ago, it was occupied by the consulate of a Mediterranean member country of the European Union. But as soon as the diplomats gave notice, the owner, who knew I was looking for a place, offered the use of it to me in order to set up Mariam Mosque. Jacob Holdt, a world-famous photographer, especially renowned for his documentary work on the homeless in America, with whom he lived for seven years in the 1970s, is not a Muslim. He has simply spent his life embracing the cause of discriminated minorities (junkies, prostitutes, African-Americans, etc.). His method is to befriend his opponent through understanding the life stories of the other. I have been friends with Jacob for the last fifteen years, after he took an interest in our cause to promote Muslim feminism and the fight against Islamophobia. He, too, is exasperated by the racist, anti-Muslim climate spreading throughout Denmark, Europe and the world. He wanted to help us. Allahu Akbar, God is great.

Around noon, Mariam Mosque starts filling up. Dozens of women, with and without veils, flow in. The majority are practising Muslims, young women originating from Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey and several African countries, but also converted Danes. There are non-Muslim women as well, including the invited journalist from the Guardian, some students, two Protestant pastors and a few representatives from secular feminist non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like KVINFO, the Danish Centre for Research on Women and Gender.

The excitement is palpable – this Friday is not like any other. Women greet and hug each other, volunteers serve coffee and tea along with homemade cakes and Syrian dishes like hummus and mutabbal (a dip made from aubergines and tahini) made by my father. I see new faces and faces I know. There is an atmosphere of trust and expectation in the build up to this long-awaited moment.

I slip away to the prayer room in order to focus before the adhan and prayer. As I start the first verses of the call to prayer (Allah is the greatest / I acknowledge that there is no God but Allah / I acknowledge that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah / Come to prayer / Come to worship), I think of my Syrian grandfather, Naïm, a muezzin at the Great Mosque of Damascus (also known as the Umayyad Mosque), and my maternal grandparents who were farmers in Finland not far from the Arctic Circle, especially my grandfather Olavi, who fought in the Winter War of 1939–1940.¹ How surprised they would be to see their granddaughter wearing a hijab and calling believers to worship Allah! It’s no small thing for the adhan to be performed by a woman. At Mariam Mosque, believers are delighted with women’s sonorous voices, which they claim to find ‘more soothing’ than the typical masculine scansion. I agree: I, too, am moved by women’s voices.

The room has filled up. There are around seventy participants, a third of whom are non-Muslim. Everyone appears at ease, appreciating the minimal yet warm decor: off-white curtains, lit chandeliers hanging at regular intervals and, on the qibla wall (which believers will face to pray), are verses from the Quran painted in calligraphy: ‘I have created you male and female and made you into nations and tribes so that you may know each other …’

When I finish singing the adhan, I begin my speech. I reveal the reason we started our mosque, which can be summed up in three ideas: offering and promoting a spiritual approach to Islam, based on a rereading of the Quran anchored in the reality of today’s world, with a specific focus on women’s rights; challenging patriarchal structures within religious and educational institutions, as well as patriarchal readings of the Quran and the Hadiths (the oral accounts written down after the Prophet’s death that relate his words and actions); and promoting Islamic feminism in order to fight Islamophobia, which has escalated considerably since recent terrorist attacks in Paris and London. ‘We are here to worship Allah,’ I say, ‘but also to challenge the conservatism and paternalism that reign supreme at the heart of our society where men have all the power. Too often, the younger generations desiring to fully live out their faith do not see themselves in these imams who come to us from within our own countries and abroad. We must offer alternatives.’ I then describe my function as an imam: ‘It’s not just the person who leads prayer; the imam must be a spiritual guide, someone capable of answering the questions of our time. I’m a sociologist of religion and philosophy with specialisation in Islam, Sufism and Islamic activism. I took courses in Arabic and Islamic spiritual care and am currently in my fourth year towards becoming a certified psychotherapist. There are so many delicate subjects that women would rather discuss with other women than with men, starting with marriage difficulties. It’s a well-known fact that imams in some traditional mosques aren’t particularly receptive to certain problems women can have, such as psychological or physical violence …’

Calmly and without raising my voice, I insist on the following: ‘We are here to transform Islam in Europe and beyond, in order to show the world that this is a peaceful religion. We will change things from within. And we will take as long as necessary and go as far as China if we have to in repeating this message in order to put an end to the reign of ignorance.’

I don’t forget to point out that, with the exception of the Friday prayer service, the mosque is open to men. There are actually some men who come during the week, often as part of a couple for marriage preparations or conversion, as well as for seminars, dhikr (Islamic mediation) devotions or lectures. In fact, the Islamic marriage contracts we offer are very different from those in other mosques around the world. Ours stipulate in the preamble that women have the right to divorce, polygamy is not an option and that, in the case of divorce, the woman keeps the same rights as the man and custody of the children is shared. In cases of physical violence or emotional abuse, the union is no longer valid. Moreover, at Mariam Mosque, we celebrate interfaith marriages because we acknowledge the reality that in Europe there is a high chance that a Muslim woman could fall in love with a non-Muslim man. We have to respond to this consideration and we do it by respecting Quranic legality, since you only need to study the sacred book to discover that it doesn’t oppose such unions. I once officiated at the wedding of a Norwegian couple who had been refused by ninety-six different imams around the world. I’ll come back to this point later in my story.

I give the floor to Saliha Marie Fetteh, who delivers the khutbah, or sermon. A Danish intellectual and author who converted to Islam many years ago, she is one of the khatibahs (women who give the sermons) of our mosque. In 2015, she joined the Femimam movement. I met her on 10 November of the previous year at Copenhagen airport. We were both heading to Istanbul along with other leading male imams from the area, where we were to participate in a conference on interfaith dialogue. An expert in Arabic, she lived in Iraq for eight years and now teaches college courses in Arabic, which she has mastered to perfection.

In order to block any criticism, to carry out our work without questions and assert our legitimacy, it is essential that the women who are actively involved at Mariam Mosque have solid and rigorous intellectual training. This is the case for Saliha Marie, but also for the three other women who are in the process of becoming female leaders on the team, who are all working to become female imams or khatibahs as well. Together, we hold advanced degrees in religion, Middle Eastern studies, the Arabic language, Islamic archeology and other related fields. My dream is to educate a new generation of the best-trained female imams in Islamic spiritual care in Denmark and Scandinavia. This discourages eventual charges of amateurism that some might wish to bring against us …

Saliha’s sermon is on the theme of ‘women and Islam in the modern world’. In passing, she even amuses the assembly by bringing up ‘the burkini controversy’, a recent dispute which stirred up France, provoking a lack of understanding. ‘I hope you’re not looking for a burkini,’ she says, ‘because they’ve run out of stock all across Europe ever since the mayors in the French villages made them front-page news!’ According to some sources, thousands of women ran out to buy burkinis in order to show their solidarity with Muslim women who chose to wear the Islamic swimsuits that were banned from certain beaches on France’s Côte d’Azur.²

The moment for prayer has come. I invite the non-Muslims who are present to join in, and they agree. We lean over, get down on our knees, touch the ground with our foreheads, say ‘Allahu Akbar’, or ‘Allah is great’, and repeat it many times. For me, the act of sharing the experience with non-believers is nothing unusual – it is at the centre of my life, since I am the product of a marriage between a Finnish immigrant mother who attended a Protestant church and a Syrian father who barely practised his faith (though he’s started praying five times a day again in recent years, ever since war broke out in his home country in 2011). As the ceremony finishes, I address the non-Muslims: ‘And there you go, it’s done: now you are all Muslims! Because according to Islamic tradition, your participation in this prayer means conversion. You knew that, right?’ The assembly is a tiny bit dumbstruck but realises two seconds later that I’m joking. And everyone laughs.

There is a rare feeling of solidarity and unity in the room. Everything has gone marvellously and I’m incredibly happy about it. We’ve demonstrated that Christians and Muslims can pray together, side by side. Our ‘direct action’ is proof.

Curiously, the emotion that fills me is analogous and just as powerful as that which I feel listening to the Kindertotenlieder (‘Songs on the Death of Children’) by Gustav Mahler: an overwhelming emotion that brings us back to God. I’m not the only one who’s moved – a woman I don’t know looks like she’s about to cry. She confesses to me that she’s crying for the first time since her child died – somehow the prayer became a channel for her repressed sorrow, and the connection between the prayer and the Mahler song cycle I was thinking of, along with this grieving mother, shakes me. She assures me that she’ll be back again. I then approach another woman, half Danish and half Arabic, who says she has always been the one to recite the Quran in her family. She holds a master’s degree in Islamic archeology and she, too, has longed for a community that supports female leadership in the mosque. I ask her if she would consider joining our community by leading the next Friday prayer at Mariam Mosque, and she gladly accepts after some consideration. Ever since, she has been the main person who leads the Friday prayers for believers praying to Allah, because she is the most excellent out of all of us at reciting the Quran, while I usually deliver the khutbah.

A dynamic is triggered. In the media, the reception is positive, even if, as I expected, we experience criticism from just as many Muslim conservatives as from the Danish far right. The first group opposes us with arguments that are hardly surprising and are almost identical to those raised when the first female pastors were ordained in the Danish Lutheran Church in 1948: ‘You’re too sensitive, there are rules that apply to you, so you can’t lead prayer …’; to which they add a special reason: ‘Should we open a mosque reserved exclusively for men? Surely the Danish public would think it was an outrage.’ On the opposite end, the Islamophobic Danish far right sees our initiative as another sign of the threat of Islam to ‘Danish values’.

The women at Mariam Mosque are offering the world a counter-story, another narrative. For fifteen years, Islamic terrorism and the fear of it – from the Muhammad cartoons controversy, the shootings in Copenhagen in 2015, the Paris attacks the same year, not forgetting all the other attacks perpetrated by Muslim fanatics, especially in Iraq – have monopolised the public’s attention, fanned Islamophobia, fed defiance and created fear within an entire community of believers, who are suddenly being called to justify actions that the public – need I say more? – clearly disapprove of and condemn. This prayer on Friday, 26 August 2016, belongs to a manifesto: it proclaims (or, rather, recalls) the existence of a contemporary, progressive, tolerant, peaceful, open and welcoming Islam. The one recognised by the silent majority, who practise this religion of peace and love daily.

Before becoming an imam, I was involved in politics in the Radikale Venstre (Danish Social Liberal Party), founded the Forum For Kritiske Muslimer (Forum for Critical Muslims, devoted to promoting debate in the Muslim community) and created an organisation to help girls and women subjected to psychological violence called Exitcirklen (the Exit Circle). On this Friday in August, upon returning home at the end of the afternoon, I think of my mother who, when I was little, affectionately called me Hyttynen (‘mosquito’) because ‘I was very thin and always on the run’. Just after leading this first Friday prayer, my sister Nathalie calls me ‘fierce and fearless’, and my very close friends call me ‘the tigress’. My father always told me – and still does: ‘Just put your feet down, child. You’re going too fast, and no one can follow you. Put things on hold and just breathe.’

When I enter the house, I find the other ‘wild animals’: my four children, Aisha, Salaheddin, Djibril and Halima Mariam, aged thirteen, nine, eight and six. They belong to the four elements – air, water, fire and earth – and are as unruly one expects children to be. One day, around the time of the opening of Mariam Mosque, I was getting ready for the Friday prayer, putting on my white scarf and Syrian galabiyya (a long-sleeved garment that goes all the way down to the ankles), a gift from my father that I converted into my imamah dress. Halima Mariam, my youngest, had a friend over. Halima’s friend whispered in her ear: ‘Do you know what an imam is?’

Halima looked at her with proud tigress eyes and answered, ‘Yes, it’s a woman who does very important things!’

This story shows that it’s possible to change a century of fixed narrative in the mind of a five-year-old (Halima’s age at the time).

Six months after the opening of Mariam Mosque, I take my four children to visit it on a day of prayer. I write notes to each of their teachers to justify their absence. ‘On Friday my children will be off school since I will be showing them the school of real life and introduce them to Islamic feminism in practice’, I write. With no exceptions, all their teachers approve of the idea, which isn’t surprising in a liberal nation like Denmark. On the appointed day, we attend a magnificent ceremony during which Djibril, my younger boy, reads a passage from the Quran. Later on I ask my older boy, Salaheddin, what he thinks of the experience. ‘It’s different from Baba’s mosque,’ he answers.

‘What do you mean, “different”?’

‘In the big mosque, the imams are seventy-year-old men sitting on thrones from which they never get off.’

I love this spontaneous and funny response. It pinpoints the purpose of Islamic feminism and our goal in establishing a women’s mosque: deconstructing hierarchies and dismantling the ‘thrones’ on which the men, in a dominant position, have been monopolising the discourse for too long without considering the issues affecting Muslim women.

CHAPTER TWO

Between forest and minaret

Nothing predisposed me to becoming a woman imam. I never could have imagined such a destiny for myself. Yes, my father was born in Syria (known long ago as Bilad al-Sham or ‘the northern country’) and grew up in Damascus in a house in the historic part of the city, twenty yards from the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. Yes, before sunrise, my grandfather Naïm, married to Wajiha and father of six children who worked hard to support his family, was a muezzin who would climb the thousand steps of the west minaret to call the faithful to prayer. I have often imagined the voice of this man I never knew rising up in the warm early morning and soaring over the Damascene rooftops, singing: ‘prayer is better than sleep’. But to tell the truth, as a young girl, I pictured myself becoming an actress or a psychologist rather than an imam engaged in the intellectual fight for Islamic feminism, challenging patriarchal mindsets.

Damascus, the city where ‘a gazelle sleeps beside a woman’ (in the words of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish), was founded in the third century BC. Damascus, capital of a beautiful and martyred country, was devastated by seven years of an atrocious war that has already taken more than half a million lives at the time of writing; 2.7 million Syrian children do not go to school because they have either been destroyed or it’s too dangerous. My father comes from there. His father, Naïm Khankan, has a small shop in the old souk. He sells shoes, nightshirts, undergarments and handkerchiefs. The family isn’t well off. Among his siblings (three sisters and three brothers) my father is the only one who goes on to study at a university. While studying Arabic literature, he earns a living teaching at high school. Ambitious and entrepreneurial, he confirms his place as the intellectual in the family by writing for various newspapers and publishing a book of short stories, titled Strangers When We Met. The title is prophetic, announcing his immanent love story with my mother many years later in Denmark. Naïm dies without warning in 1967 while fasting for Ramadan. My father finds him in the early morning, sitting and crying. He looks weak. My father brings fruit to his bedside and my grandfather tells him: ‘Go in peace, Allah will give you the fruit of Paradise.’

My father goes into the city to look for his brothers and sisters, and when he returns home, all the doors are open. He knows his father is dead. When a person dies, it is customary to leave all the doors of a house open in order to allow the soul to take flight. Then in 1970, my father loses his mother to a stroke. It is not long after the death of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was loved by many Syrians, including my father.

During the 1966 coup d’état which brought Hafez al-Assad to power, whose reign would last thirty years until his death in 2000 (with his son Bashar becoming his successor), my father finds himself aligned with the regime’s adversaries due to his political activism and criticism of the government in a series of articles published by clandestine outlets. However, the mukhabarat, the secret police, establishes a climate of terror and the disappearances of those in the opposition multiply. My father sells all 150 copies of his book and flees to Denmark, planning to later join his close activist friends.

On a cold December night in 1970, my father reaches Copenhagen, the capital of the little kingdom of Denmark and then home to 5 million people. He has travelled by car from Damascus to Aleppo, by taxi to Istanbul, by train through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Italy, Austria and West Germany, then finally by ship over the Baltic Sea to Copenhagen. He had wanted to go to Stockholm from there, but he lost his train ticket. A kind woman gives my father some money so that he can stay at a student hostel. The Christmas lights illuminate the streets of the capital and my father decides to remain. He has never seen such beautiful streets with so many lights. He goes to the police to turn himself in.

My mother comes to Copenhagen on 1 January 1971 on a ship from Helsinki. She has come to visit her sister who is working in Denmark, where the economy is better than in Finland. In the second week of January, in the middle of the street, not far from the famous Tivoli Gardens amusement park, my father sees my mother, Irja, sitting and talking with her sister in a café. He approaches her and introduces himself. As they speak, she confesses that, like him, she is far away from home. At the age of twenty-one, she crossed the Baltic Sea, armed with her nurse’s diploma and the hope that she could work at Frederiksberg Hospital. My parents meet two more times that same evening. First, at a restaurant where my father throws several stolen glances at my mother, and later at a dance hall. The moment she is about to leave with her sister, he finally walks towards her and asks her to dance. That very dance becomes the beginning of their future. A month later, my father asks my mother to marry him! Her answer falls hard: she refuses, of course, as she barely knows him. However, they get married after ten months, my mother having only put up a month’s resistance to the charm of this generous and expressive man from the Middle East. Almost half a century later, they still form the strong and admirable couple who serve as an inspiring example for me. Every day their union reminds me how much the ‘clash of civilisations’ can be a fertile melding, a complementary enrichment. My mother is Christian and my father is Muslim. This rarely posed a problem for them, and when it did, my parents sought a point of convergence. Love is a process, an alloy of compromise and negotiation. I am the product of this wise philosophy. Half Finnish, half Syrian, my identity is there: an intersection. I am the East and the West. The village and the city. The refugee and the protected. I am a synthesis balanced on a tightrope. A product of Finland and Syria who came into existence in Denmark in 1974.

For a child, this in-between position isn’t always comfortable. Many mixed-race or bicultural children can attest to this: their search for their identity is more difficult, alternating between doubt and melancholy. Intuitively, they search for simple schemas that can provide clear answers to their questions. When they become adults, this complexity transforms into a richness. For me, it forms the basis for my political action. It allows me to adapt to any situation. I always look at things from several angles and I can naturally bring opposites into agreement. Differences don’t bother me. I know that the world is never black or white. It is grey, nuanced and at the same time … so colourful.

I’ve never defined myself by a national identity. Nation states are a human invention. When we’re born, it’s not written on our foreheads that we’re Danish, Syrian, Pakistani, French or German. I am a citizen of the world. My home is where my family is, or where I feel I am part of a community, where I give and receive love. Passports or genes have little to do with it. Some Danes consider themselves to be citizens above others. They pretend to love their country more than others based on an absurd syllogism: ‘I prefer my family to my friends, my friends to my neighbours, my neighbours to my compatriots, my compatriots to Europeans, Europeans to Muslims.’ This ‘love’ of Denmark has nothing authentic about it. As Kierkegaard wrote, this love is ultimately a sophisticated form of love for oneself. Yet Denmark occupies a special place in my heart. During my prolonged stays in Syria and Egypt, I always felt homesick. Denmark is where I was born, where I grew up, where most of my family and friends live.

Denmark is also the country that welcomes my father in the early 1970s. The far right is still marginal and foreigners are seen as an asset to the economy. Not long after he arrives, my father stays with a host family. He quickly learns Danish and can becomes fluent in the language. He opens a small perfume store, then sells it in order to have a stab at an enterprise he deems more promising: the restaurant industry. And so our patronym goes up in big golden letters on a busy pedestrian street in the centre of the city. Kankan – ‘Middle Eastern cuisine’, as the sign specifies – is located a few blocks away from what will become Mariam Mosque. It’s an immediate success, not only because of the quality of the food (the Syrian dish shish taouk, chicken marinated in a type of lemon aioli then grilled, is irresistible), but also thanks to Baba’s warm welcome. At the weekend, it’s not unusual for me to spend a good part of the day and evening there with my sister Nathalie. We help with everything, in the kitchen and the dining room, all the while listening to the other exiles’ passionate discussions about the politics of the Middle East and its leaders, like King Hussein in Jordan, Anwar el-Sadat in Egypt and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They often speak about the fate of the Palestinians, the war in Libya and the one between Iran and Iraq. I soak it all in.