As one of his last goodwill gestures to American Muslims, President Barack Obama visited The Islamic Society of Baltimore mosque on Wednesday to address concerns over growing Islamophobia in the country.

This mosque he went to has the reputation of being conservative, as it preaches and practices an orthodox brand of Islam.

The president would have done better to visit the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo mosque in Ohio, whose policies include initiatives to institute gender parity and other progressive ideas.

Obama urged Muslims to embrace pluralism and democracy, to fight anti-Semitism and to speak out against terror. All laudable!

But what he failed to emphasize was equality for Muslim women.

Progressive and reformist Muslims are hence rightly disturbed about Obama’s visit to a fundamentalist mosque, one known for separating women and men.

Authors Asra Q. Nomani and Ify Okoye objected to Obama’s visit partly because American Muslim women continue to face discrimination in these conservative mosques.

Writing in The New York Times, they note that, “In much the same way that he wants to mitigate Americans seeing Muslims as the ‘other’, we have to challenge the Muslim systems that segregate women as the ‘other’.”

They're right. Cultures can have subcultures with retrogressive forces that need to be resisted.

Too often we tend to become protective of communities that are seen as victims of racial profiling, but we ignore the many practices within these communities which marginalize or even oppress some of their own people.

This is something Western feminists also need to address.

Whether Obama’s message of peace and tolerance will resonate with attendees at this particular mosque remains to be seen.

Its former imam, who served at the mosque until 2003, was at one time a member of the radical Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan and in 2004 told the Washington Post suicide bombings were sometimes justifiable in extreme circumstances.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of The American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a reformist Muslim movement, told Fox News the Baltimore mosque Obama visited is “heaped in Salafism and ideology that is really incompatible with Western identity”.

He recalled that the mosque invited a speaker a few years ago to deliver a sermon in which homosexuals were labelled as “deviants” with a “mental disorder”.

The mosque in Ohio, on the other hand, is taking tentative steps in the right direction. Although men and women are still separated by a barrier, they at least pray side by side.

It has also deemed ablution before prayer unnecessary under modern standards of hygiene.

Although it has been criticized for being too secular and liberal in its interpretations of Islam, it has nonetheless provided contemporary Muslims with alternative and modernized ways of practicing their faith that arguably fall within the fold of Islam.

Why Obama would choose a conservative mosque over a modernist one befuddles many reformist Muslims.

Yet he is not alone among political leaders who seem to have been misled about which Muslims to buddy up with.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also hobnobbed with members of conservative mosques.

Ironically, the reformists are a minority, so are the politicians just trawling for votes?

Our political leaders need the wisdom and foresight to court forces of change and progress rather than entrenched and parochial ones.