Seyran Ates was born on April 20, 1963 in Istanbul, Turkey to a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father. In 1969, she and her family moved to West Berlin, where they settled along with other Turkish immigrant families. At 17 years old, she left home to avoid an arranged marriage and began studying law at the Free University of Berlin She survived a gun attack by a Turkish nationalist and after the client she was with passed away, she focused her career on the rights of Turkish women in Germany. Seyran’s book - Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution - also saw backlash against her and in 2008 she announced her resignation from public advocacy for women because of the violent threats made against her. Despite this resignation from public life, in 2017, she opened Ibn Ruschd-Goethe mosque (@ibnrushdgoethemoschee) a liberal mosque where men and women pray together and women imams lead prayer. In response to the opening of the mosque, Turkish and Egyptian religious authorities issued fatwas against liberal mosques, present and future. Despite these criticisms, Seyran has received a number of accolades as well. In 2005, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Price for her work on the 1000 Peace Women Project and in 2019 she won the University of Oslo’s Human Rights Award.