The Berlin Mosque That Flew The World’s First Rainbow Flag Is Back Open
The Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin, the first mosque in the world to fly a rainbow flag, has reopened after a year-long closure forced by an ISIS-K plot to attack it. Founded in 2017 by Turkish-German lawyer Seyran Ateş, the liberal mosque welcomes queer Muslims, lets women and men pray together, and sits at the centre of one of Europe’s hardest conversations about Islam and queerness.
The closure, the threats and the comeback are all worth knowing as Berlin counts down to its CSD parade on 25 July 2026.
What is the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque?
The mosque opened in June 2017 inside a Lutheran church in Berlin’s Moabit district. Ateş, who has lived under round-the-clock police protection for many years after surviving a 1984 attack in which her colleague was killed, founded it as a place where queer Muslims, women in leadership, and Sunni, Shi’a, Alawi and Sufi worshippers could pray side by side.
Within a week of opening, Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta and Turkey’s Diyanet had both denounced it. A fatwa was issued. Ateş has been a named target ever since.
The 2022 rainbow flag moment
On 1 July 2022, the mosque hoisted a rainbow flag in the run-up to Friday prayers. It was the first mosque anywhere in the world to do so. Attendees wore stickers reading “Love is halal.”
“Especially for LGBTQ people of Muslim faith, such a sign is extremely important, because it shows that they do not have to choose between their faith and their sexual identity, but are accepted as they are,” Ateş said at the ceremony, as reported by CSD Berlin and Deutsche Welle.
The flag flew for the rest of July. Then the threats arrived in earnest.
Why did the mosque close in 2023?
In October 2023, German federal police arrested several Tajik nationals linked to ISIS-K who were plotting attacks on multiple German targets. Among them was the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque, which the would-be attackers had called a “place of devil worship”, and Ateş herself.
The mosque shut its doors. It stayed closed through the end of 2024. The community kept working quietly behind the scenes on a book and outreach project called Liebe ist Halal, or Love Is Halal.
Who reopened it?
The new public face of the reopening is Berfin Çelebi, a German-Kurdish trans woman and former drag performer who announced the mosque’s return on TikTok. In the new Love Is Halal book, she writes that the mosque is “a place where I can be not only a Muslim, Kurdish drag queen but actually celebrated for it.”
Tugay Saraç, who runs the mosque’s Islam and Diversity Contact Point, told Patheos the work is unavoidably risky. He pointed to the February 2025 murder of Muhsin Hendricks, the South African widely considered the world’s first openly gay imam, as a reminder of the stakes.
“In a time of retreat for queer rights, it’s our duty, not only as queer Muslims, but as democratic citizens, to speak up,” Saraç said.
Why this matters for Pride 2026
Berlin’s CSD parade falls on 25 July 2026. The Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque has not yet confirmed a 2026 flag-raising. But it has confirmed something more useful. It is open. The community is back. Queer Muslims have, once again, a place of worship that wants them there.
For us, that is worth marking.
