Lamya’s organizing work centers around creating spaces for LGBTQ+ Muslims, fighting Islamophobia, and abolishing prisons. In her free time, she eats lots of desserts baked by her partner, plays board games with whoever she can corral, and works on her goal of traveling to every subway stop in the city. She has never run a marathon. Lamya H (she/they) is a queer Muslim writer and organizer living in New York City. Her memoir HIJAB BUTCH BLUES is forthcoming from Dial Press in February 2023. Lamya’s work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Vice, Autostraddle, Vox, and others. She has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Aspen Words and Queer|Arts. 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. The response Lamya gets from the teacher is the usual heteronormative answer I’ve heard in Quran class myself, but it doesn’t matter. With this simple yet monumental realisation that Lamya is not alone in feeling like this, they are empowered to keep living. 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).

Hijab Butch Blues: Queer Muslim memoir confronting orthodoxy Hijab Butch Blues: Queer Muslim memoir confronting orthodoxy

Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas and My Butch Career: A Memoir by Esther Newton (2000, 2018) From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of their struggles and triumphs by comparing their 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. More than a must-read . . . a study guide on Islam, a handbook for abolitionists, and a queer manifesto. It inspires critical thinking, upholds activist self-care, and permits the defining of one’s own queerness. By the end . . . readers will see queerness—theirs, others’, and the concept—’for what it is: a miracle.’” —NPRI'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. Masterfully constructed . . . a reminder of the power we have within ourselves and within our communities to defeat complacency, indifference, and cruelty.” — Autostraddle 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. Searing . . . a bold story of taking hold of one’s life and building something completely unique.” — BuzzFeed A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran ina memoir that’s “as funny as it is original” ( The New York Times).

Hijab Butch Blues: Book review - Lacuna Magazine

An insightful memoir-in-essays by a queer nonbinary (she/they) Muslim author, which pairs stories from the Quran with stories about their life. This truly exceeded all expectations. Lamya touches on immigration, Islamaphobia, racism, homophobia, and more as she finds hope in a religious text while needing to remain closeted to much of their community, including their family. Their devoutness happens *because* of their identity, not in spite of it. It’s a nuanced, powerful view of religion. Not only that, Lamya is a talented writer. I’ll be thinking about this memoir for some time to come. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys memoirs that grapple with faith/religion. I found this a fascinating and fitting analogy, because practically every Muslim I know has a story about someone who was possessed by a jinn. And in Hijab Butch Blues, it’s dispossession that empowers Lamya to challenge this mindset – in themself and others. The very concept of a Queer Muslim is considered to be an oxymoron by more conservative and puritanical Muslims, who believe rigidly that queerness and religiosity cannot overlap"Many of my favorite queer memoirists and writers do not necessarily identify within these categories or are critical of their limitations. Audre Lorde famously wrote in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name of her experience going to the lesbian bar The Bagatelle: “For me, going into the Bag alone was like entering an anomalous no-woman’s land. I wasn’t cute or passive enough to be ‘femme’; and I wasn’t mean or tough enough to be ‘butch’. I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.” Lamya remembers examples of this, like when early on this couple “bemoaned the ‘homosexual agenda’” – as well as how they have grown in their allyship since then, making queer friends and confronting their prejudices. After Lamya comes out to him, Rashid asks Lamya to hold him accountable if this happens. Even in multiracial and politically progressive circles, Lamya’s hypervisibility as a Muslim others them. At a queer gathering, the author recalls being singled out by one person who admits he was glad to have spoken to Lamya, and that otherwise he would have “studiously avoided the religious Muslim in the room”.

Hijab Butch Blues — Lamya H

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.” Hijab Butch Blues book was released earlier this month with The Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and while Lamya has written essays in the past, this project is her first-ever book. “I don’t have any formal training as a writer, my parents wouldn’t have even considered that as a career,” Lamya tells me over Zoom, her camera screen blank to protect her identity.

Lamya H reflects on what was gained and what was lost by writing her debut memoir under a pseudonym. Such was the case with some of Lamya’s own friends, like one who she calls Rashid. When she finally reveals her truth to him, he responds: “Listen. I’m prone to saying ignorant things about queerness sometimes. Please don’t let it slide. Please tell me if I ever do that. Please hold me accountable." 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.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H: 9780593448762

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.I almost didn’t include this one, because it touches on butchness the least of all these books. But in a standout chapter, the soft-butch author chronicles her shifting relationship to the categories of butch/femme, once something she thought of as dated but gradually changed her mind about. This memoir is primarily about the aftermath of the biking accident that led to Crosby becoming paralyzed, but this chapter on gender includes a lot of fascinating things at the intersection of gender and disability, and the book is open and personal about sex and disability throughout. 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" you can bullshit me as much as you'd like, but I REFUSE TO READ A BOOK THAT NOT ONLY HAPPENS TO BE BASED ON MASSIVE MISINTERPRETATIONS OF QURANIC VERSES, BUT ALSO CONFIRMS ALLAH'S (SWT) GENDER AS NON-BINARY (because it doesn't say whether he's a man or woman, so like, wHaT eLsE cOuLd He bE?? 🤡) WHEN IT HAS NOWHERE BEEN MENTIONED IN THE QURAN NOR HADITH AND IS BEST KEPT UNKNOWN TO MAN??!!! As a Muslim, I find that downright disgusting.