Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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She reimagines Prophetic tales in contemporary, colloquial language, and interweaves lessons she extracts from the Quran with her daily life experiences. It feels the same when the author writes about being in an LGBTQIA+ centre for a poetry event, and two women ask how Lamya identifies in terms of sexuality. Thankfully, Lamya manages to avoid the question, but the couple then patronisingly thank them for being “such a good ally”. Time and again, Lamya challenges readers to reject longstanding, culturally-informed binary ways of thinking. She writes about the uniquely heart-breaking homophobia of Muslims, who are also a minority in the West" This book is testament to the fact that I am not alone at all. There is comfort in that solidarity, and it is a reminder that our mere existence is a form of resistance. At one point, Lamya contemplates the whale that swallowed Prophet Yunus and offers the interpretation that, rather than a punishment, it may have been a means of protection – “a brief respite, a shelter, a resting place. Protection, for the time being.” She then describes how her pseudonym serves a similar purpose: “A whale that allows me to keep fighting, to fight with my writing.”

This memoir was well-written, engrossing, and introduced me to a community and life path that was, in some ways, new to me. Lamya H is an immigrant, a hijabi, and a non-binary lesbian. I am always fascinated when people who are not cis-het pledge allegiance to religious groups that tell them that they are worse than worthless, that they are a walking abomination, and I truly try to understand what leads people to do this. I want to be clear that there is no conflict between belief in god and being LGBTQ+, and that there are many denominations that embrace people who are not cis-het and do not preach that the bible considers them monsters. However, I have had LGBTQ+ friends and acquaintances over the years who are adherent Orthodox Jews, Eastern Orthodox and Evangelical Christians and I do not get that. (I discussed this with a group of colleagues last night and was angrily told that the Eastern Orthodox church is not anti-LGBTQ+ so I looked it up this morning. The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States, declares, “Like adultery and fornication, homosexual acts are condemned by Scripture.”) I think that’s what relates your work to spirituality. When you’re true to yourself, you might need to define your own moral compass. That’s a huge responsibility, because you’re figuring yourself out outside of a context that people have defined for you previously. Lamya H: Yeah, and I think what’s really hard about that is that we don’t, as queer people, necessarily have models in the same way. I think of myself ten years ago, not knowing a lot of queer elders, or just not knowing what the possibilities were for my life. That’s also part of why I wrote this book, because it felt like a way to put stories out there into the world about alternative ways to live. I think about that a lot. The fact that we’ve had to chart our own way, and do it without models. This is also where some of the Qur’an stories come in for me. Once I started seeing all these prophets as flawed characters who make somewhat questionable decisions, and you know, are possibly queer and have their own difficulties and stories, it felt more possible to have them as models, as opposed to these saintly figures who never do anything wrong. From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own--ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant. A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir.

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It turns out 2023 has been the year of the memoir for my reading list so far. I didn't set out to do that intentionally, but I think I'm up to around 11-ish and most have been wonderful. Hijab Butch Blues might be Lamya H’s first work of autobiography, but they have been publishing essays on queer Muslim subjectivities and prison abolition since 2014. Moving from academic longform to first-person narrative was a learning curve for the writer. Trust and faith are major themes in the story, and Lamya parallels the necessity of trusting ourselves and others during periods of doubt and isolation to the physical and spiritual journeys prophets undertake to achieve enlightenment. In Hijab Butch Blues , Lamya takes us on a trip through time and space as we follow their complex relationship with sexuality and gender. Lamya H: I remember that moment blowing my mind because I didn’t even think you could pray like that. The way being in the mixed-gender line felt so right. A few times we tried to do that at the Islamic centre [in New York] as well, with varying degrees of success. I think another aspect of the community thing is also really just building communities of queer Muslims that are able to practise in ways that feel more expansive and queer and not gender-segregated, for example. Where critique and questioning is not only allowed but welcome, and is done in ways that feel like they expand possibilities. I think those are the things that have really saved me in the end – having access to community, and feeling a part of something that feels like it’s building towards justice. Lamya is a practising Muslim and writes about reading the entire Quran during Ramadan, going to the local Islamic Centre for Eid prayer and reciting the Ayatul Kursi when scared. Lamya H: I want the audience to come away with the sense of how messy faith is, but how that mess is also generative. And not just faith, actually, but queerness, race – all these things are messy. The lived experience of these things is never linear, never simple. But complexity in and of itself is something to aspire to, because it makes space for different kinds of lives. It makes space for queerness, among other things. It allows an expansiveness that is important to me. It’s taken me a while to realise that, but it’s something I wanted to convey. And also just this idea of love being more than romantic love, and expanding out to the love you can have for your community, your chosen family, your partner, the people around you. [It’s about] expanding the notion of love and queering the idea of love itself.

Raw and unflinching, Hijab Butch Blues heralds the arrival of a truly original voice, asking powerful questions about gender and sexuality, relationships, identity and faith, and what it means to build a life of one's own. The final chapter resonated with me the most. Named after Yunus, also known as Jonah, the story is a famous one, of a man rejected by his community for his religious convictions and swallowed at sea by a whale, which is canonically understood as a consequence of having given up. Yet Lamya questions this exegesis. They see a similarity between their own life and the allegory of Yunus. Both have worn themselves thin fighting for the causes they hold dear and, in the end, both are left to decide how much longer they can struggle in vain to change the minds of others. It is both humbling and inspiring to read Lamya reassess even the language of giving up, “And I promised myself that if the conversation wasn’t constructive, I would—like Yunus, I realize for the first time—allow myself, and them, the dignity of leaving.” This principle invariably speaks to Lamya’s decision to abbreviate their surname and provide only contextual clues about the exact country of their birth and their migration as a child. Even in the form of the memoir, which by nature traffics in vulnerability, they refuse to surrender their totality. It's one thing to write about a Muslim struggling with their sexuality, BUT IT'S A WHOLE OTHER THING TO COMPLETELY MISUNDERSTAND QURANIC VERSES AND DECIDE ALLAH'S (SWT) GENDER YOURSELF??????? No one, not even the prophets, questioned Allah's (swt) gender, SO WHY ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH SHOULD YOU??????!!!!!! With that said, this memoir stands out for me as one I know I'll be thinking about for a long time to come. I devoured this book, while simultaneously trying to savor it. It was just so good I couldn't help myself, like when someone gives you a favorite treat as a kid and you try to make it last, but you fail miserably. So while Hijab Butch Blues left me with no shortage of questions of my own, it also was a comforting read.A masterful, must-read contribution to conversations on power, justice, healing, and devotion from a singular voice I now trust with my whole heart' AND IF ALLAH's (SWT) GENDER HAS NOT BEEN SPECIFIED ANYWHERE IN THE QURAN NOR THE HADITH.....THEN HE IS NON-BINARY, Y'ALL 🙌🏻🎉🥳!!!!!!!!!!!!

Taking its cue from Leslie Feinberg’s historic 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues, Lamya H’s debut memoir Hijab Butch Blues orients the emotional and political development of a genderqueer youth as they leave their South Asian birthplace with their family to go live in a rich Arab gulf country and then, much later, relocate to the United States to pursue an education.

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While Lamya refers to the chapters of the book as essays, the chapters flow seamlessly together and are laden with thoughtful metaphors – sometimes, quite abstract. An influential voice in the realm of cultural anthropology and LGBTQ+ studies, Esther Newton’s two memoirs — the first published in 2000 and the second in 2018 — combine personal and scholarly writing on gender and sexuality. In My Butch Career, Newton writes: “Bar dykes were the first to show me how to be butch, which means they showed me how to have style. Postmodernism and consumerism have given style a bad name.” Indeed, throughout her oeuvre, Newton writes about butchness from so many angles. A documentary is currently being made about her and her work. The book is titled as an ode to Leslie Feinberg’s award-winning 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues. Like its inspiration, Hijab Butch Blues delves into what it means to be a gender nonconforming activist, while navigating the biases and prejudices held in queer circles.

I want to focus on the reality for LGBTQIA+ Muslims. There have been far too many news stories about queer Muslims contemplating suicide or worse, dying by suicide. This book is not written by a Muslim, and if it is, may Allah forgive them. This book is a total and absolute shattered portrayal of Islam, if you are non-muslim, then know that this book should not even be on Goodreads. This is a violation of Islam and everything that it has to do with.Reading about this couple’s journey in allyship to queer Muslims, not just Lamya, gives me hope that change is possible within religious communities, one friend at a time. After moving to the United States for university, Lamya recalls “deciphering the hierarchies of this country” – from white supremacy to Arab and Muslim names alone rousing suspicion. Lamya writes that their “brown hijabi Muslim body is seen as scary, disempowered, both hypervisible and invisible at the same time”. I know first-hand how easy it is to feel alone, and for a time, I wondered if I was the only one out there – the only lesbian on the planet who wore hijab and prayed five times a day. Advocates for queer visibility on Christopher Street Day 2021 (CSD) in Stuttgart, Germany. Picture by Christian Lue. And yes, I get that coming out to the public, especially when you're in a very homophobic environment, is terrifying. It's a big risk, I know. But comparing "Mom, I actually like vagina" to how a Prophet liberated his people from a tyrant is...dude, what do I even say?