Seyran Ateş was born in Istanbul in 1963 to a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father and is living in Berlin since 1969. She studied law at the Free University of Berlin and worked as a lawyer with interruptions from 1997 to July 2024. From a young age, she was committed to women’s and human rights as a schoolchild and student. In June 2017, Ateş opened the liberal Ibn Rushd Goethe Mosque in Berlin. It is the first liberal mosque in Germany where all gender pray together and where all gender can take on any role of religious leadership in the performance of religious rituals. In addition, the community is intensively committed to the rights of the LGBTIQ+ community. In 2020, Ateş founded the Mernissi-de Gouges – Educational and Social educational institution. In 2023, she launched the project Democracy Mobile: Next Stop: Democracy! with the educational organization https://www.demokratie-mobil.berlin/. Seyran Ateş is the author of numerous socially critical books. Her voice is one of the most influential in the fight against violence based on tradition, religion and culture. As a lawyer, she all gender from Islamic countries in particular. In addition to numerous awards, she is the recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class, the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon and the Order of Merit of the City of Berlin. She has been awarded the Marion Dönhoff Prize for International Understanding and Reconciliation and the Human Rights Prize of the University of Oslo. In 1984, she narrowly survived an attack on a counseling center for women from Turkey. Due to her commitment to fighting forced marriages and to a self-determined life for Muslim people, among other things, she has repeatedly received death threats. Since 2006, she has been under personal protection by the Berlin State Criminal Police Office.
