Through its 10 chapters, the memoir generally follows the arc of Lamya’s life, beginning when she was a young girl in an international Islamic school, discovering her attraction to women and sometimes feeling suicidal. She moved to New York City at 17 to attend university, feeling unsure of her sexuality and of America’s gay culture. Now in her mid-30s, she has found love, her people and a life she could not have imagined as a teenager. sketchyblondes On Work and Class in “The Haunting of Bly Manor” " I loved the show (and maybe relate to self-sacrificing Dani a bit too much)(I cried)(I was all about that ending),…" 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.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H | Waterstones Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H | Waterstones

Icon Books is an independent publisher of thought-provoking non-fiction. We publish science, history, politics, philosophy, psychology, humour and much else besidesI know first-hand how easy it is to feel alone, and for a time, I wondered if I was the only one out there – the only lesbian on the planet who wore hijab and prayed five times a day.

Hijab Butch Blues - Springer Lamya H.: Hijab Butch Blues - Springer

AND IF ALLAH's (SWT) GENDER HAS NOT BEEN SPECIFIED ANYWHERE IN THE QURAN NOR THE HADITH.....THEN HE IS NON-BINARY, Y'ALL 🙌🏻🎉🥳!!!!!!!!!!!! Masterfully constructed . . . a reminder of the power we have within ourselves and within our communities to defeat complacency, indifference, and cruelty.” — Autostraddle Aster On Palestinian Liberation Is Queer Liberation " Generally, people are more open to social progress when things are in less turmoil and they don’t feel threatened, so…" Lamya’s] determination to fight for a better world is inspiring…will leave readers feeling uplifted and empowered.” — Queer Space MagazineTo help Lamya do this, they imagine what Asiyah’s life looks like after the Pharaoh dies. They imagine Asiyah free to build a life for herself “based on her principles — principles that [they’ve] heard in [their] mother’s stories about her: kindness for everyone, compassion, and justice.” They resolve to do the same even in this country that doesn’t want them because “there’s nowhere in the world that’s magically free of racism and Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia.” i have never felt so seen and called out by a memoir, which probably (definitely) influenced my rating here. I too am a queer Muslim hijabi activist who writes under a pseudonym and isn’t out to family. More than that – in that mirror, I could see my queer Muslim friends beside me, the homophobia in Muslim spaces and the Islamophobia and racism in queer spaces. There are people who will call this book blasphemous, and who will be incredulous as to how a Queer Muslim woman can compare her struggles to those of the Prophets. But there will also be those readers whose minds will be opened, their perspectives broadened, and their binary ways of thinking dismantled as they engage in critical thinking beyond the parameters of whatever version of faith they may have been indoctrinated with.

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

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. 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”. 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. Hijab Butch Blues is a memoir from Hijabi, Queer, Nonbinary, Muslim author Lamya H. At age fourteen, Lamya realizes she has a crush on her female teacher. 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, they read 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?

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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. 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.

Butch Memoirs To Check Out in Honor of “Hijab Butch Blues” Butch Memoirs To Check Out in Honor of “Hijab Butch Blues”

This is really an unforgettable memoir that is full of heart, well written and teaches you so much about life. I think the author did a brilliant job of taking us into their world and I enjoyed every bit of it. 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. I don’t know exactly how the story of Maryam is framed in the text, but I wanted to add one detail that may provide another layer of significance to the story and its inclusion in the memoir. Maryam is not a prophet; Maryam is the Arabic name referring to the Virgin Mary, and Isa is Arabic for Jesus. Maryam would not have been sent to a mosque since this predated Islam. More importantly, though, Islamic tradition draws from a shared narrative history among the Abrahamic faiths, and Maryam is one of a select few figures from those traditions who has their own dedicated surah/chapter in the Quran. The Quran grants a great deal of importance to Mary, and in my experience this translates to a great deal of respect for Mary among Muslims. 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”. Lamya H’s debut memoir Hijab Butch Blues doesn’t exactly begin here. When we first meet Lamya, they are fourteen years old and they “want to die.” Actually, they don’t want to die exactly. They want to disappear, they want to never have existed in the first place: “I just don’t want to do this thing called living anymore, and this feeling both creates and fills up an emptiness inside me. I want my parents never to have had me, I want my friends never to have known me, I want none of this life I never asked for. I want to never have lived at all.”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. “It’s completely outside the realm of their imagination that people can be both gay and Muslim,” writes Lamya in her book. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya On Editor’s Notes: Horror Is So Gay 2 " thank you so much for being a member and supporting work like this!" A masterful, must-read contribution to conversations on power, justice, healing, and devotion from a singular voice I now trust with my whole heart'