Inside the red-brick building that now houses the German capital’s newest and perhaps most unusual mosque, Seyran Ates is staging a feminist revolution of the Muslim faith. [...] The inaugural Friday prayers at Berlin’s Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque came to a close — offering a different vision of Islam on a continent that is locked in a bitter culture war over how and whether to welcome the faith. Toxic ills like radicalization, Ates and her supporters argue, have a potentially easy fix: the introduction of a more progressive, even feminist brand of the faith.

After the internet mocked the picture of US President Donald Trump signing the travel ban executive order, Swedish Deputy PM and Climate Minister has taken a dig at another similar picture. Isabella Lövin posted a picture of her signing an order with a queue of female ministers standing behind her. The image is seen as a parody of the picture of President Trump signing an anti-abortion executive order with a line of male ministers standing behind him.

LADAMA is the kind of band that people tend to make assumptions about. [...] LADAMA will be performing at World Music/CRASHarts' second annual CRASHfest at the House of Blues in Boston on Saturday, Jan. 28. The quartet plays propulsive original music rooted in the folk traditions of their home countries, a kind of cross-continental musical exchange. But theirs is something of a feminist undertaking, too.

Perhaps most importantly, a less male representation projects a less fusty national image at a time when “soft” power counts for ever more. Indeed, feminisation seems to be part of a broader French effort to “renew our global diplomacy for the 21st century”, in the words of Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, whose predecessor but one was a woman, Michèle Alliot-Marie.