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The Daily Beast

Zainab Khan

Mohammed Abdullah Saleem, who faces new criminal charges of sexual assault, tried to ban Zainab Khan from burying her father. Now, she tells her courageous story of standing up to one of Chicago’s most powerful imams.

The decision by courageous women in Kabul, Afghanistan, to defy the orders of mullahs and carry the coffin of a young woman, Farkhunda—slain for the false accusation of burning the Quran— took me to a dramatic moment last spring when I faced off against an imam, not in some faraway city in our Muslim world, but in our own backyard, right here in the United States, in the Chicago suburb of Elgin, Ill.

Today, that imam, Mohammed Abdullah Saleem, faced new criminal charges for alleged sexual assault.

My confrontation with the imam was about something much more ordinary, but also deeply personal, and my experience reveals the…