Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

Product Information

Written with deep intelligence and a fierce humour, Hijab Butch Blues follows Lamya as she travels to the United States, as she comes out, and as she navigates the complexities of the immigration system - and the queer dating scene. At each step, she turns to her faith to make sense of her life, weaving stories from the Quran together with her own experiences: Musa leading his people to freedom; Allah, who is neither male nor female; and Nuh, who built an ark, just as Lamya is finally able to become the architect of her own story. In many ways, reading Hijab Butch Blues felt like looking in a mirror. It wasn’t an exact reflection by any means, but I could recognise so many of the experiences recounted in this captivating memoir. 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.

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. 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”. Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas and My Butch Career: A Memoir by Esther Newton (2000, 2018)

Distinct and interesting in its collaborative approach, Gender Failure was co-written by musicians and writers Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote and interrogates and tears down gender binaries and gender roles throughout. One chapter, called “Do I Still Call Myself a Butch?” by Coyote is just two sentences long: “Yes. Of course I still do.” Coyote also wrote Tomboy Survival Guide, a memoir told in stories that touches on coming-of-age butchness. 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.

An influential voice in the realm of cultural anthropology and LGBTQ+ studies, Esther Newton’s two memoirs — the first published in 2000 and the second in 2018 — combine personal and scholarly writing on gender and sexuality. In My Butch Career, Newton writes: “Bar dykes were the first to show me how to be butch, which means they showed me how to have style. Postmodernism and consumerism have given style a bad name.” Indeed, throughout her oeuvre, Newton writes about butchness from so many angles. A documentary is currently being made about her and her work. 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 Miss gurl's even ranked the Prophets from favorite to least favorite; did your Quran classes not teach you about the very real verse in the book about respecting ALL Prophets?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”. The memoir is uniquely told in the format of chapters devoted to a prophet and/or religious story from the Qur’an and mini-essays of Lamya’s takeaways from them. As I read “Hijab Butch Blues,” certain ideas and themes kept recurring in my mind that highlight the essence of the memoir.

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? As for those to whom she has opened up, Lamya has reframed it as “inviting in” rather than “coming out”, and she believes that being vulnerable can help others become more understanding and accepting. Even without a queer vocabulary or knowledge of acronyms, Lamya knows “instinctively” that those feelings are out of place, making them feel so alone that they want to die. A masterful, must-read contribution to conversations on power, justice, healing, and devotion from a singular voice I now trust with my whole heart' Lamya is a practising Muslim and writes about reading the entire Quran during Ramadan, going to the local Islamic Centre for Eid prayer and reciting the Ayatul Kursi when scared.I think this memoir was very successful in discussing the nuances of being part of both queer and Muslim communities. The author talks about the struggles they encountered as a hijabi person among non-Muslim queer people who either had a hard time relating the author's experiences or downright invalidated them. At the same time, within the Muslim community, the existence of queerness within the community is either never talked about or deemed as a western influence or sometimes labelled as a "mental health issue". The author also argues that the coming out experience looks very different for Muslim queer people especially when their only tie to their culture is through their relationship with their family and can be lost if their family doesn't accept their queerness.

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.” 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. 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. It seems easier to ease herself out of sight than to grapple with the difficulty of taking shape in a world that doesn't fit. She is a queer teenager growing up in a Muslim household, a South Asian in a Middle Eastern country. But during her Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam, and suddenly everything shifts: if Maryam was never touched by any man, could Maryam be… like Lamya? 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.

From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her 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.