Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

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The surahs of the Quran enable Lamya to sharpen their sword as an advocate for social justice. With a precision of prose that is at once riveting and clear-sighted, the ethical and spiritual lessons of the holy book are shown to empower their queerness instead of obfuscating it. Allah, the lord of the universe, is not a NON-BINARY. Allah is not limited by something that HUMANS made up- in Islam, if you are MUSLIM- like the author APPARENTLY is- then you KNOW that Allah has no human aspects- he cannot be confined by time, space, and such things. Meaning he cannot be NON BINARY because that is a random term that HIS creation made up to explain something random- 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.” At the forefront throughout were their tumultuous experiences – from introducing their partners to family as “friends”, to latent Islamophobia at airports and racist microaggressions at school and work. 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.

For Prinx Silver, a drag king and transmasculine person in his mid-30s, “butch is that queer identity that allowed me to reclaim my masculinity that I thought I wasn’t allowed to have. I see it more as a way of moving through the world, of being perceived, or like a feeling.” Cassie Agbehenu, a soft butch and Bristol Butch Bar regular, similarly describes it as a “reclamation of masculinity … it can be caring and nurturing and joyful and sexy”. Taylor, a butch lesbian, says: “I’m 55, I come from a feminist movement, and my whole life has been dedicated to trying to persuade people I’m a woman, because they don’t want me to be one. So that’s where the fight is for me.” Lamya starts Quran study readings with a Queer Muslim group and discovers that Muslims can pray side-by-side instead of the traditional male in front of the female hierarchy. She “nerds out” about a new tafsir of the Quran, and becomes closer to her friend Manal as the two read, interpret and discuss the surahs together. 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 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. 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.The contrast between those upbringings is night and day, of empowerment and disempowerment respectively. A masterful, must-read contribution to conversations on power, justice, healing, and devotion from a singular voice I now trust with my whole heart.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

I do realize that I’m somewhat playing into these binaries and strict categorizations by applying such a specific scope to this list, but I hope this will be seen as a useful starting place for memoirs on butch and/or masc identity and not restrictive. Definitely shout out any books you’d like to recommend in the comments, even if they don’t necessarily explicitly touch on butch identity! I’ve included some recent releases as well as some slightly more under-the-radar titles that skew academic or hybrid in form. I’d love to hear more suggestions!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. This coming Tuesday marks the pub day for Hijab Butch Blues, a new coming-of-age memoir by Lamaya H that centers the author’s queer hijabi Muslim immigrant experience. The title is a playful spin on Stone Butch Blues, the iconic novel by Leslie Feinberg that has become a beacon of butch and masc-of-center identity exploration in queer literature. 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”. 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 he

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.

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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. 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. Is it not bad enough that the non-Muslim world falls further and further into depravity and is trying to poison their own children and future generations through Western media? We Muslims have to be exposed to this nonsense too? Homosexual acts are SINFUL, period. There are only male and female genders, PERIOD. Allah SWT is referred to as HE because He is the Greatest and Most Merciful Creator; to refer to Him as "them" degrades His existence, makes Him feel alien rather than close to our hearts and compassionate, and besides all that, "they" is PLURAL not singular - there is only ONE God. The story is not strictly chronological – each chapter is themed around a prolific Islamic figure, aside from the chapters about Allah and Jinn. “I’ve always thought of these characters and figures in the Quran as deeply human and messy, and this definitely made me way more empathetic towards them,” says Lamya, who began writing the book with an essay about Hajar, the wife of Prophet Abraham. “All these other essays had been here all along, it felt like I couldn’t stop writing them, because for so long I had been thinking about both my life and the lives of these Prophets and complicated figures – so it felt like a lot of those essays just wrote themselves.” She ultimately finds a community of like-minded Muslim Americans when she attends a “coming out Muslim play”, a gathering that she writes “feels like a window into Jannah”.

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”. These are the moments of intertextuality that make Hijab Butch Blues a truly remarkable rupture in the literary fold. The teachings of the Quran here function to unravel their identity. Lamya shirks the expectation that they might embrace their queerness by way of abandoning their religion. Instead, it is through deep study of the Quran and engagement with the queer Muslim community in New York City that they finally discover a sense of spiritual belonging. A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran inthis “raw and relatable memoir that challenges societal norms and expectations” (Linah Mohammad, NPR).

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AND IF ALLAH's (SWT) GENDER HAS NOT BEEN SPECIFIED ANYWHERE IN THE QURAN NOR THE HADITH.....THEN HE IS NON-BINARY, Y'ALL 🙌🏻🎉🥳!!!!!!!!!!!! Butch and transmasc identities are obviously separate, but I have known a lot of folks for whom they bleed together or folks who have moved between them at different points of life. This memoir speaks to that experience, following the author’s journey as a butch lesbian into starting testosterone and coming out as trans at the age of 40. Ty Bo Yule used to own the former dyke bar Pi in Minneapolis (which unfortunately is one of the many lesbian spaces that no longer exists). 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.