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SEA STACHURA: Fatima in America is an installation of four rooms. Each space is designed to reflect a specific Arab woman Hend Al-Mansour admires. The walls are red and gold and sky blue, with silkscreen prints. One room has Somali architecture, another Moroccan, and Iranian.

HEND AL-MANSOUR: It is kind of a refuge for me because I'm seeing a part of myself in those women, and it's like a mirror. Al-Mansour also sees it as a mirror held up to Muslim women. She sits at her sewing machine stitching blue fabric for the exhibit. She grew up in Saudi Arabia.

SEA STACHURA: She was a doctor and unmarried and deeply unhappy. On one hand, she was a respected doctor in an international hospital. On the other, she was a woman. And under Saudi law, needed a guardian to do anything, from renting an apartment to getting a passport.

At 40, she decided to move to the US. Now, she's an artist creating work about women and religion. Al-Mansour walks over to one of her silkscreens and explains this print was inspired by an Iranian choreographer. In the center of the print is a queen on a horse.

HEND AL-MANSOUR: I have a dancer who also has a mustache, a mother with her daughter carrying flowers. And this is Quran. So it's--

SEA STACHURA: What part of the Quran is this?

HEND AL-MANSOUR: This is the woman chapter.

SEA STACHURA: The silkscreen bears Quranic script on how a man should treat a woman. Whatever the Quran says is Allah's law and can't be changed. This verse leaves a sour taste in her mouth.

HEND AL-MANSOUR: Like the part that says, "Marry your choice of women, 2 and 3 and 4. A woman inherit half of what a man inherit." And one very offensive part is one that says beat them-- beat them. Like, if they don't obey them, Quran allowed men to beat women.

SEA STACHURA: Al-Mansour says she's angry that some cultures still practice those laws and treat women as second-class citizens. But she acknowledges that not all Muslim women are mistreated.

HEND AL-MANSOUR: When Muslim women come to my show, they said you don't represent us. This is not what our experience is. But this is my experience. And I'm sure it's not only my individual experience. It's many women from where I came. I mean, I'm a Muslim, and I love Islam. But I don't want to be deceived or blinded. I want Islam to move, to change.

SEA STACHURA: The symbols and images that saturate Al-Mansour's work will likely fly over the heads of most Americans, unless they're familiar with Islam or the Arab world, then the work could be controversial. Al-Mansour is aiming to start a dialogue about Islam within Muslim communities.

She walks over to one piece. It's a blue circular platform surrounded by three pillars the platform has Arabic script around its edge. In the middle are six faces, each surrounded by flames. The script is the word Allah and the faces are of Muhammad and holy family. Al-Mansour says she's never seen an image of Muhammad in Saudi Arabia. It's forbidden. But she always wanted to draw his face.

HEND AL-MANSOUR: I wanted to make them beautiful and sacred and respectful. I didn't want to evoke any negative feeling in anybody.

SEA STACHURA: She also points out that images of Muhammad are not forbidden in all Muslim countries or by all Islamic scholars. And whether or not some people are offended by it, she says she won't change her work.

HEND AL-MANSOUR: They can't do anything to me so far. [LAUGHS] And I was in the Middle East, and I had suffered a lot from that mentality and that attitude. The reason I came here is just to have a space to talk.

SEA STACHURA: And a space for others to talk about their reaction to her work. I'm Sea Stachura, Minnesota Public Radio News, Saint Peter.