Seyran Ateş

Seyran Ateş — Biography

Born on 20 April 1963 in Istanbul to a Kurdish-Turkish family, Seyran Ateş emigrated to Germany with her family at the age of six. She studied law at the Freie Universität Berlin and went on to practise as a lawyer in Berlin, focusing mainly on family and criminal law while representing women affected by forced marriage and domestic violence.

In 1984, at the age of 21, she was seriously wounded in an armed attack by a member of the far-right Grey Wolves while working as an interpreter at a women's counselling centre; the woman she was assisting was killed in the same attack. In 2006 she became one of the founding members of the German Islam Conference and took part in the federal Integration Summit, but that same year she temporarily gave up her legal practice after threats and attacks from opposing parties in court cases. Renewed death threats following the 2009 publication of her book on Islam led her to withdraw entirely from public life between 2009 and 2011; she resumed practising law in 2012 and formally surrendered her law licence in 2024.

Ateş gained international attention in 2017 when she founded the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin, Germany's first liberal mosque, where men and women pray together without gender segregation — a step widely seen as a direct challenge to traditionalist interpretations of Islam. The mosque's opening brought a fresh wave of death threats, and she has lived under continuous police protection since. She co-founded PEN Berlin in 2022 and has received numerous honours, including the Order of Merit of Berlin and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.