When we moved to Canada, the mosque had been my mother’s refuge, a place where she wasn’t judged on how she looked or dressed. Kneeling on the spongy pink-and-green carpeted floor of the mosque’s dingy basement—the area designated for women while the men prayed in the airier and more welcoming space above—was where I would ask Allah for guidance, just as my mother did. There was a kinship among the women who occupied that space together, as many of them resented being treated as second-class citizens within their own faith. Our only access to any ideological dialogue about the verses of the
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