This new memoir explores Muslim identity through a queer lens

Taken from the spring 2023 issue of Dazed. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here

The first time I encountered Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg’s seminal 1993 novel about lesbianism in America, I was enamoured by its tenderness. This year’s Hijab Butch Blues, a memoir by essayist and activist Lamya H, takes Feinberg’s work further and adjusts the lens. The opening pages of this queer Muslim opus find the author as a 14-year-old in Qur’an class considering a lesbian Virgin Mary (Or Maryam, as she is known in Islam), before the book develops into part-autobiography and part-reinterpretation of Islamic and Middle Eastern lore. In this coming-of-age story following the author from their birthplace in south Asia to the Middle East and eventually New York, where they are now based, Lamya’s strength is pulled from the mythologies they discover in the Qur’an.

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.

When we connected on a video call, the anonymous New York-based author kept their camera off, switching my focus to the cadence of their voice – their dialectical shifts hinting at the different places, and personas, they’ve lived.

Your narrative structure makes me think about both geographical displacement and the displacement of desire – themes present in many religious texts, by way of spiritual and bodily transition.

Lamya H: There’s a freedom that displacement offers, in the sense that it allows you to invent yourself anew. And I think there are ways in which, at least in my experience, it made it possible because I was so used to moving around a lot. I felt like I could be queer in the ways that I wanted to, and if things didn’t work out, I could move. It’s also interesting because I think displacement is also such a big theme in Islam. So many prophets were displaced. Musa [Moses], for example, moving with his people across the Red Sea to a different land, and even Prophet Muhammad moving from Mecca to Medina. That’s such a theme both in Islam and in my life. And I think it definitely relates to queerness. In the sense that it made it possible for me to live my queerness in ways I don’t necessarily know I would have been able to [if I was] living in the same city my parents were in, or even the same country.

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.

It’s like the chapter for Maryam [Mary]. You positing her sapphism was great, because Maryam is so often desexualised. Lesbians and queer women, unless they’re commodified within a pornographic framework, are desexualised too. I love that you reintroduced sexuality to Mary, who is positioned on one side of the dichotomy a lot of the time.

Lamya H: I just keep coming back to those lines over and over in the Qur’an, where this handsome man comes up to Maryam, and she’s just totally unfazed. She’s like, no, thank you. Please leave. I just so viscerally remember reading that at 14 and being like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something here,’ even if I didn’t have the words for it. I think the idea of seeing these prophets as living, breathing people is important to me in terms of the stories I want to model my life around or carry with me.

I was struck by the way you write characters in the book and how you celebrate your love for friends that you made when you moved to New York. I love the descriptions of your first trip to a Muslim LGBTQ+ meetup, especially.

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.

What, for you, is the moral of this story?

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.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H is published by Icon Books and available now.

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