Anita Rao
I’ve shared before that I grew up with a lot of religious education. Sunday mornings were spent shuttling between Catholic Sunday school and Hindu Balavihar. Learning about the Bible, then learning about Ramayana, one of two great Hindu epics. I heard a lot about religious texts, but I never really cultivated a practice of interpreting these stories and lessons for myself.
All of that religious education came flooding back to me recently when I read “Hijab Butch Blues,” a memoir by author and activist Lamya H. Lamya tells stories from their life and particularly their journey with queernesss alongside stories from the Quran. And their book was a reminder to me of the vast possibilities that open up when you examine religious texts on your own terms and put them in dialogue with all parts of your identity.
This Is Embodied, I’m Anita Rao
It’s clear from their writing that Lamya thinks deeply about the intersection of faith and sexuality. And the many ways that queerness and Muslim-ness are not mutually exclusive — which I can’t wait to dig into with them now. Lamya, welcome to Embodied!
Lamya H
Hi, thank you so much for having me on the show.
Anita Rao
So in your memoir, you tell the stories of 10 different figures from the Quran to reflect and share experiences of your own life. That's kind of the frame and structure that you use for this book. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with the Quran growing up and your exposure to the stories.
Lamya H
So I grew up in a predominantly Muslim country around mostly Muslim people. And I went to an Islamic school for most of my life. And so I grew up with the Quran sort of being everywhere, you know, from playing in the background when you know, we would go to stores, to learning Quran in school, to hear in recitation. But for a very long period of my life, my appreciation for the Quran was mostly aesthetic. It was something that, you know, we read or we listened to, but we didn't really understand the meaning of, and then I started reading the English translation as a young adult. And the more I read the stories, I found myself really fascinated by them as people. As people who, like, sometimes make mistakes, as people who sometimes made questionable decisions. And that's kind of how my memoir came about is really thinking of prophets and figures in the Quran as deeply human people and really reflecting on their lives and the way that the stories intersected with the things that I was learning as I was going about my day-to-day life.
Anita Rao
I love the way that you describe your young self in your memoir: someone who is deeply curious, who is searching for that recognition of parts of your self in the text that you are exposed to. And you share a story in your memoir about one figure in particular Maryam, who is also known as the Virgin Mary in Christianity, and you describe yourself at 14 years old sitting in class learning about the Quran and really seeing yourself in her story. Can you take us back to that moment and how learning about her opened up some new possibilities for you?
Lamya H
Yeah, in some ways, I've always known that I am queer. And even though I didn't have the words for it as a younger kid, as you know, someone growing up, I didn't, I didn't have the words for the concept. But at some level, I deeply knew that these feelings that I was feeling for women were different from other people. And then I remember being 14 and reading Surah Maryam in class in, you know, this Islamic school that I went to. And we read this translation of a verse that talks about this incident where Maryam is, you know, living alone in a temple and has devoted her entire life to worship, doesn't really see a lot of other people. And this angel disguised as a man comes to her door as this sort of like handsome, well-proportioned man and you know, knocks on her door and says, "I have something to tell you." And immediately she says, "I don't want to talk to you, please leave." And I remember reading the translation to that and having this moment of, "Oh, wait, Maryam doesn't like men, is Maryam like me?" And I found myself like, even before I knew what I was doing, or saying, like putting my hand up and being like, "Hey, miss, did Maryam say that to this angel because she didn't like men?" And my class of other 14-year-olds all like went like totally silent for about 30 seconds. And then like everyone started giggling. But there was this moment in which you know, I just felt so deeply connected to Maryam. And in my book, I wonder if Maryam was a dyke. And in some ways I do - I wonder that, but I didn't need her to be because in that moment, just seeing myself in the Quran, seeing this person, you know, also have no interest in men in this way that felt deeply familiar to me, just really made me feel so connected to me and and connected to Islam in the sense of like, there being other people like me, in the world.
Anita Rao
You trace this really long, winding journey of exploring your queerness from these moments in your childhood, like encountering Maryam's story to moving to the U.S. You found queer community in your 20s, you went on a lot of bad dates before meeting your current partner. And you describe how along this path, you've encountered people expressing surprise that you'd be queer and Muslim at the same time. And you've written before that it didn't occur to you that these two things were actually supposed to be at odds until you were kind of performing these identities in a really public way. Can you expand upon that for us?
Lamya H
Yeah, these are both identities that I've always been and I've always held dear. I've always been queer, I've always been Muslim. And yeah, I've just, I've never thought of them as at odds with each other. It was only when other people would ask me about it that I was like, "Oh, huh, this is the, this is what the narrative is." To me, both those identities are deeply part of who I am and are intertwined with each other. I don't think I could be queer without being Muslim. And I don't think I could be Muslim without being queer. And to me, they also play off of each other. I think what is really beautiful about queerness is the way that it causes you to break open assumptions and really put a lot of thought and intentionality into your life. And at the end of the day, I think that's what God wants from us, too, is this idea of like being really thoughtful about our lives and putting effort into how we interact with the world and with each other. And, yeah, to me, there's a lot of overlap there in ways that are really beautiful and that feed off of each other.
Anita Rao
You talk in the preface of your memoir, or you share that your favorite verse from the Quran is one in which Prophet Ibrahim turns to God with doubts and says, "I believe in you. But I also have questions and hesitations and uncertainties." And I know that sometimes doubts can make people turn away from religion, from faith. But for you, you really turn toward God with your questions. What has made you do that throughout your life?
Lamya H
I think faith and doubt are so intimately twinned, because faith doesn't exist without doubt. It would be certainty otherwise. And I think what's really cool about the Quran is that there's so many stories of prophets and other, and other people just doubting. There's also a story about Moses slash Musa who asked to see God. And yeah, and that story about Ibrahim is absolutely like, absolutely one of my favorites because, you know, in the Quran, Ibrahim, like, talks to God and has these whole, sort of like, conversations and almost this like intimate connection with God, and still has these doubts. So yeah, I think that they're both actually very intertwined with each other. And I think that's one of the beauties of faith too is that you have to embrace doubt. You have to use that doubt in ways that are generative and that cause you to also, like, think critically about what is being asked of you. Yeah, and so to me that that doubt is a really important part of faith. And I think that anyone who seeks to shut down that line of questioning is really doing a disservice, not only to themselves, but to the larger community in general.
Anita Rao
You are definitely a deep student of religion. You describe all of these moments throughout your memoir where you, in conjunction with groups of friends or other folks in your community, are taking passages in the Quran and going piece by piece and really kind of interrogating different interpretations of what these stories can mean. And you do over time, come across and revisit particular passages that sometimes give you trouble or pause because of the way they talk about women or the way they talk about dynamics in a partnership or with the, the way they talk about homosexuality. How do you form dialogue with these parts of this text that you care so intimately about but sometimes don't resonate with you?
Lamya H
I think what's been really, really helpful in that regard is having other thought partners and having other people to sort of like be messy around and to have interpretations around. In my book, I talk about reading the Quran with a really dear friend who similarly approaches the Quran through a lens of you know, well, not everything is going to resonate with me, not everything is going to work for me right now in this moment. And what are the things that we can sort of, like, come back to? Or what are the things that we can be like, this just doesn't work for me? Yeah and so, sort of like reading in community has been really, really incredible, because it also opens you up to different ways of thinking, and just the validation of like, some things are going to feel not great. And that's okay. It's okay to sit in that discomfort. And it's okay to sit in that unease and that doubt.
Anita Rao
I'd love to dig a bit more into your relationship with your community. You have really built this robust community of people who hold and support you in all of the intersections of your identity, but it's been a journey for you to let yourself be fully vulnerable always and let other people in. And you talk really beautifully in the book about this term, queer indispensability. I'd love for you to talk more about that and maybe share an example of what that looks like in your own life.
Lamya H
Yeah, so first of all, I'm not the person who came up with this term. It's from this really beautiful play by this Sri Lankan artists D'Lo. And, to me, it's this way in which queer people make themselves indispensable in friendships and in relationships, so that they're not sort of like abandoned. This is how it plays out for me, in that I've lived with the sense of like, dreading of loss almost that comes with queerness. This idea that, you know, if you tell someone that you're queer, if you come out, like people will, will leave you. And so I found myself doing this thing in friendships where I would give more than I would take, because I wanted to be so indispensable to these people that I was like, building friendships with that, that they wouldn't leave me. And what's really interesting about writing this book is that a lot of people are like, "Well, have you have you done it? Have you figured out how to rid yourself of this?" And I'm like, "No, it's it's a work in progress. And it's something that I'm, you know, working really hard on." But one of the things that happened recently to me in my life, is that I had a baby and I think that really teaches you the power of community and teaches you about interdependence. Like there's, you know, there's, people talk about raising children in a village, like it takes a village, and I find that to be so true. It's a - you can't have that level of independence or like, indispensability, where you're not asking for things because it's just, it's so hard. And so, yeah, it's been really lovely to see all these relationships and friendships that I put so much effort into be reciprocated, like people have really shown up for me. And that's been so beautiful. And it's been hard, you know, to let people be there for you. But it's been just like really, really beautiful from you know, my friend set up a meal train and even like four months into the birth of my child that people were still bringing by food. It was like, the most beautiful thing ever. It feels so rooted in the sort of like interdependence, and that's something that I've always wanted in my life. And it feels really lovely to feel like, like, I'm getting there, you know?
Anita Rao
What has this process of becoming a parent done for the ways that you interrogate gender within yourself and also within the context of your religion?
Lamya H
What has been really cool about having a baby is that it forces you to kind of crystallize some nebulous things. So for example, I'm nonbinary. And I, I feel like I used to have a really hard time expressing that, because it felt like a taking up of space or whatever, like my own baggage and insecurities around it. But it's been really cool to reframe it in terms of, no, what is this relationship that I want to have with my child? What do I want to model for my kid? And so yeah, it's been really lovely, sort of, sitting with that. And like, you know, telling people that I'm not a mom, I'm a parent, please use that term, or just, I use the gender neutral term Baba for myself. And that's what my kid calls me, and that feels really sort of gender affirming. Yeah, it's been a really cool way to sort of like crystallize my own relationship with my body and my gender, both in terms of forcing me to like think through things and asking for what I need, and also really making me think about what I want to model to my kid.
Anita Rao
One of the things that I really took away from your book was that so much of our relationship with ourselves, with our religion is in a state of flux all the time. There's nothing static about it. And I know that the holy month of Ramadan just ended recently, and it can be a big time of introspection. I'm curious about any new thoughts or questions that have come up for you this year, in particular, in terms of gender and queerness.
Lamya H
For me, it was a really hard year to be fasting. I think the intersection of sort of like having a young child and fasting was really hard. And so what I found was helpful was to both do more and less, I did more of the things that brought me joy and less of the like, obligation things, which, which was like a really, you know, interesting thing to learn in your late 30s, that, you know, you don't have to do a lot of the obligation things. It's it's another thing that I've been like working a lot on, in myself, just really sort of like knowing where to put my energy as opposed to trying to do everything.
Anita Rao
I would love to end circling back to kind of where we started earlier that there is this assumption that you can't be both queer and Muslim. And you have in many ways, given evidence to the contrary and do that throughout your memoir. But are there questions that you would like people to ask themselves first before coming to you with that question that you've gotten so often in your life of how can you be both?
Lamya H
I don't actually mind when people have questions. But I think the questions need to be rooted in an openness, as opposed to coming at it from like, a really sort of, like, predisposed vantage point. Yeah, I think, shedding some of your assumptions before asking questions and framing questions so that they feel open as opposed to really sort of like rooted in Islamophobic or xenophobic or homophobic assumptions.
Anita Rao
Lamya, thank you so much for this conversation.
Lamya H
Thank you.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio W-U-N-C… a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast, consider a contribution at wunc.org now.
This episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Paige Miranda also produces for our show. Skylar Chadwick is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our technical director. Quilla wrote our theme music.
I also want to give a special thank you to Yasmin Bendaas and Jerad Walker from the podcast "Me and My Muslim Friends" for helping inspire this episode. You can check out their newest season all about Muslim Changemakers wherever you get your podcasts. You can also hear their conversation with sexual health expert Sameera Qureshi in the Embodied feed.
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Until next time…I’m Anita Rao taking on the taboo with you.