Last month, Germany’s first “liberal mosque” opened to much media fanfare. The woman behind the project, a lawyer named Seyran Ates, aspires to be Berlin’s first female imam and has proudly proclaimed that “there is no contradiction in being a Muslim and a feminist.” But, Vijeta Uniyal writes, the enthusiasm of the German and American media has not been reciprocated by Muslim groups in Germany or abroad:

After the major conflicts of the 20th century, the United Nations and its predecessor organizations sought to resettle millions of refugees in new homes. But, as Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf explain in The War of Return, the UN has taken a different approach to those Arabs who fled their homes during Israel’s War of Independence, seeking instead to keep them and their descendants in a permanent state of a homelessness. Matti Friedman writes in his review: