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. Of the people the author does come out to – their doctor, their friends and one friend’s parents – I could empathise with Lamya, and the “complicated calculation” they felt obliged to make each and every time they decide to come out to someone.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H | Waterstones

The memoir swings, pendulum-like, between her own story and her reflections on the stories at the heart of Islam, stories that shape her understanding of what it means (or can mean) to be female and Muslim. This pairing of personal and theological truths is powerful and respectful of both individual and cultural identity. 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.By turns joyful and harrowing . . . profoundly generous and full of perfectly observed moments.” —Xtra Magazine 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.

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H, Hardcover | Barnes Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H, Hardcover | Barnes

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. 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.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 — Lamya H

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.”As an immigrant from a “rich Arab country,” Lamya H was often asked by acquaintances in the American LGBTQ+ community how she could possibly remain a practicing Muslim, given Islam’s reputation for oppressing women and queer people. Hijab Butch Blues, Lamya’s memoir, is a generous, probing and candid response to that query. 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). Look, if you want to write a book about your experiences as an LGBTQIA Muslim, go ahead. But newsflash; it is possible to talk about your experiences WITHOUT blatantly disrespecting a whole religion, y'know.