During Ramadan last month, 27-year-old Avin Alyusuf and her 28-year-old husband Rezan Dersewi walked into the Iftar hall next to the Cologne Central Mosque, pushing their baby daughter in a stroller. It was two hours before sunset, but the room was already set up for breaking fast, with several Turkish women hovering over large vats of rice intended for hundreds of attendees. Turkish and German flags hung from the ceiling. Alyusuf and Dersewi, two Kurds who’d fled Qamishli, Syria, and came as refugees to Germany two years ago, approached one of the Turkish women.

“I want to know if there are classes for women at this mosque,” Alyusuf said in halting German. The Turkish woman frowned, confused. Alyusuf threw out words in Arabic and German, making signs with her hands: “Quran, classes, mosque, Arabic?” The Turkish woman called a man over to speak with the Kurds. He gave Alyusuf and Dersewi a card for the mosque. “Call this number and ask them tomorrow,” he said in German.

“Danke schön,” Dersewi said. The Kurds passed a large group of women in hijabs as they walked out. Alyusuf glanced at them and shook her head. “All Turks,” she said. They wouldn’t be able to communicate.

Alyusuf and Dersewi had come to the Turkish mosque because they’d heard it was one of the biggest in Germany. Ever since they came to Cologne, Alyusuf said, she’d been looking for a place to openly discuss Islam without feeling pressured to become more conservative. “I want to find a mosque that’s recognized by Germans, where I’m sure people aren’t extremist,” she said. She’d tried some of the Arab mosques, but felt there was no way she could ask the questions she had there: whether it was all right to take off her hijab, for example, or how to raise her son as Kurdish, Muslim, and German at the same time.

“We’re in 2017. Our religion needs to catch up with the age,” Alyusuf said. “These people are living a thousand years ago. All they talk about is customs and traditions.”

Most of the mosques in Cologne are too identity-driven, Dersewi added. “They are just trying to put more people in their group, and make you just like them.” Maybe they’d return to the Turkish mosque, but only if there was Arabic, he said.

Inside the mosque, refugees and older immigrants—Turks, Arabs, Persians, and others—gathered for the Iftar meal. A call to prayer sounded as everyone was served heaping plates of food, without questions about where anyone was from. One of the Turkish managers waved his arm across the room, telling me in formal Arabic that DITIB was sponsoring this: opening the doors to all kinds of Muslims, refugee or not.

But then a Syrian walked by and laughed, quipping in quick colloquial Arabic, “Why are you asking him about refugees? They’re all Turks. They haven’t been to the camps and they don’t talk to Syrians. They don’t know anything about our problems.” The Turkish man didn’t understand the Syrian’s Arabic.