She's a woman and an imam. A binomial that is a priori antagonistic. Seyran Ateş She was born in Turkey into a Muslim family but grew up in Germany. A lawyer by profession, she has lived under police protection since 2006. She began receiving death threats because she helped Muslim women who were being forced into marriage. Later, because she published the book Islam needs a sexual revolution (Islam needs a sexual revolution). And finally, because she opened a liberal mosque in Berlin, the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque, where women and men pray together in the same space. The documentary Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam (Seyran Ateş: sex, revolution and Islam) tells her life story.

What is happening in Spain and Catalonia is not an exception. All European countries face the same challenge: they don't know exactly what is happening in mosques and they have foreign imams with limited knowledge of the language and the country's social, cultural, and legal context. So far, no country has found a solution for this situation, but most have taken steps. These are some of the initiatives.

A thick curtain divides the carpeted room in two. In the smaller section, a couple of women are teaching a group of girls. The larger section, however, is reserved for boys, and the imam and his assistant are in charge of teaching them the Quran and Arabic. There's a bit of a commotion, nothing like the silence that reigns in the mosque during prayer.

Just as we have previously focused on changes within the Catholic Church or on crises of faith among young people, this Sunday we turn our attention to one of the religions with the most followers in Catalonia: Islam. It's not easy, because although there are 319 mosques in Catalonia, it's unknown how many imams there are, what countries they come from, or what their ideology is. The same is true in other European countries, but many governments have begun to take steps to better understand the situation in order to prevent radicalization and, above all, to facilitate a better understanding of the country's social and cultural reality. Journalist Mònica Bernabé has spent months investigating who the imams of Catalonia are and has spoken with countless experts. The conclusion is that Catalonia lags behind the rest of Europe in this regard.

The Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) have arrested an imam from the Marca del Ham neighborhood of Figueres for mistreatment of minors who attended the mosque he led. According to police sources, he used a rigid cane or an open hand to beat children who attended the religious center to pray and learn Arabic. After the incidents occurred several times, it was the families of the neighborhood's Muslim community who alerted the police and removed him from his duties.