Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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Like, how is it that nobody is talking about how disrespectful those comments about Allah's gender ate? Yes, it's true that we are unaware of His gender. We use He/Him/His for our own convenience. But apparently mankind's unawareness of gender= non-binary god. For me, it made perfect sense reading that Lamya introduced their partner (Liv) to their family as a friend, not a girlfriend. Liv and Lamya agree a set of rules that they follow so the family are none the wiser about the true nature of their relationship. Among my queer Muslim friends, this is a common story because it’s an act of self-preservation.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H - BookPage Book review of Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H - BookPage

This time, Lamya’s friend Rashid is the one to call Lamya out, over their attitude of assuming white and light-skinned people are better than them. Advocates for queer visibility on Christopher Street Day 2021 (CSD) in Stuttgart, Germany. Picture by Christian Lue. Trigger Warnings: Suicidal ideation, racism, Islamophobia, abusive relationship, internalized homophobia, mentions of violence and abuse, blood, classism, homophobia, alcohol, gunThere are people who will call this book blasphemous . . . but there will also be those readers whose minds will be opened, their perspectives broadened, and their binary ways of thinking dismantled.” —The New Arab But this is the same community, the same family, that Lamya notes would preside over funeral prayers and who they stand side-by-side with during long Ramadan prayers. 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”. Lamya, who is gender nonconforming, also writes of how the “rigidity of gender” follows them “like a punishment everywhere, across oceans and continents”. The author writes about feeling patronised by a friend who says Lamya would “make a beautiful trans man”.

Hijab Butch Blues Review: The Powers of Faith and Hope Hijab Butch Blues Review: The Powers of Faith and Hope

However, in this memoir, the author shows us how their faith in Islam and queer identity are an inseparable part of who they are. They draw a lot of parallels between their life experiences and stories from the Quran in a way that I thought was interesting and provided some new perspectives into the stories I'm quite familiar with. The author also touches on the challenges of being an immigrant twice in their life, first in a rich Arab country and second in the USA, as a person of South Asian descent and the discrimination they face throughout their life as a Muslim hijabi person and a brown person. I could personally relate to some of their experiences as a Muslim and immigrant myself and thought the narrative around those experiences was quite impactful. But at the same time, this book tought me things about the Muslim experience in another part of the world I wasn't familiar with and how queerness can be experienced through that lens. Then, something happens to Lamya. Like the prophets they’ve been learning about in the Quran class of the international school in the Muslim country that isn’t where they’re family is from, Lamya receives their own wahi, their own revelation. In the class, they hear the translated version of the Surah Maryam, the story of the prophet Maryam who was born a girl instead of a boy and promised to Allah before she was born. Maryam is sent by her family to live in a mosque all by herself as a child and then one day, she is chosen by Allah to give birth to the prophet Isa on her own. Lamya sees some of themself in the story of Maryam. At fourteen, they already know there is something different about them than the girls in their class. They know they weren’t born “right” either, and they find comfort in Maryam’s story. “I am fourteen the year I read Surah Maryam. The year I choose not to die. The year I choose to live.” I's nice to see how much of how she processes her life experiences is linked to the Quran, but then she veers off into blasphemy. 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.

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To those coming from other, less tenuous situations, her need for anonymity may sound exaggerated—but for those who share her experiences and those willing to embrace the truths of her own life as she explains them, her concerns are well-founded. Her prose is both precise and beautiful. She challenges herself with her own thinking every bit as much as she does her readers. When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don’t matter, and it’s easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: When Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be... like Lamya? What makes this book so remarkable is Lamya's integrity both as a Muslim trying to create a lens that allows her to see her faith broadly and affirmingly and as a scholar and political thinker aware of the ways colonialism and hierarchies of color shape our world.