Female activists who are fighting the oppression of women were arrested in Sweden over the weekend after staging a topless protest in a Stockholm mosque.

According to the Swedish publication AftonBladet, three women from the activist group Femen entered the mosque at around 11 a.m. and threw off their burkas to reveal bare skin covered in anti-religious messages.

ADVERTISEMENT

“No to Sharia! No to oppression! Free women!” the women shouted in English.

All three were arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct.

“We’re lucky if we got arrested,” Egyptian activist Aliaa Elmahdy explained to AftonBladet after being released from jail. “If we did that demonstration in my country, we were going to get raped, we’re going to be cut with knives, we were going to be killed.”

Last year, Elmahdy was kidnapped in Egypt after posting a nude photo of herself on her blog. She has now been given political asylum in Sweden and is working with the group Femen to fight the oppression of women by religion and the sex industry.

“We want the message of women’s spring, freedom to women,” another activist named Jenny told AftonBladet. “Freedom to have your own individual choice to decide over your body, not to have somebody else telling you ‘We do that.’ We should not be called ‘whores’ or that we are doing something shameful, like they were calling us today in the mosque. They were calling us ‘whores’ and ‘whores from hell’ and that we didn’t get fucked and that’s why we were there.”

ADVERTISEMENT

“My message in the church today was gender equality and my body is no sin.”

The video below from AftonBladet contains nudity and is NSFW.

ADVERTISEMENT

(h/t: Friendly Atheist via Addicting Info)