Queer Muslim Research Articles

‘Of Course Muslims Can Be Gay’: Sexuality and Religion in Adiba Jaigirdar’s Young Adult Fiction

Today, Irish Young Adult (YA) literature examines a wide variety of youth experiences. However, an aspect that it is still slowly beginning to address is Ireland’s multiculturalism. While it is possible to find racialised characters or characters who belong to marginalised ethnic minorities in some Irish YA texts, white characters still predominate. Thus, it is significant to highlight the work of those authors who offer a depiction of today’s multicultural Ireland and a window into the experiences of characters that are usually found outside the mainstream, as is the case for Adiba Jaigirdar. Her YA novels The Henna Wars (2020) and Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating (2021) depict experiences and challenges that many Muslim girls may encounter in contemporary Ireland. This essay aims to analyse, in particular, how both novels explore matters of sexuality and religion together with race and ethnicity by focusing on how these intersecting elements of identity are negotiated by the characters of Nishat and Hani, two queer Muslim girls. This intersectional analysis will focus on how sexuality and religion working simultaneously both shape, and are influenced by, the girls’ experiences in a multicultural yet mainly white and Catholic Ireland.

Reimagining home and responsibility: The case of queer Indonesian Muslims

This article investigates the lived experiences of queer Indonesian Muslims by revealing how the intertwined concepts of tanggung jawab (responsibility) and home are navigated within the boundaries of national values, religious faith, and non-normative genders and sexualities. Through ethnographic research across Java, Indonesia, the analysis illustrates how tanggung jawab is enmeshed with societal and religious expectations that redefine the notion of home for queer Muslims. Home, in this context, transcends its meaning as a physical geography to represent an emotional and spiritual haven where family, faith, and queer identities intersect. The article further explores the relevance of biological and traditional family connections, presenting a contrast to the Western focus on queer chosen families. By exploring the symbiotic relationship between responsibility and home, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of queer Muslim subjectivities, exploring their unique strategies for forging identities and spaces of belonging within Indonesia’s heteronormative societal framework.

A constructivist grounded theory of Queer and Muslim identity integration in college

The constructivist grounded theory (CGT) explored how queer Muslim college students integrate their religious and sexual identities. By using intensive interviews concurrent with an iterative analytical scheme, the study identified a cycle of identity integration. Findings suggest that queer Muslim college students navigated identity gatekeepers by redefining religious truths and reflecting on their beliefs. They contextualized themselves within their communities as they preserved their familial connections and cultural congruity. Queer Muslims also disrupted taken-for-granted notions of authenticity through a process of selective outness and differentiated religion from culture and belief to process cultural attitudes and construct a more cohesive and integrated identity as both queer and Muslims. The CGT sheds light on the complexity of the Muslim identity and troubles religious structures by highlighting collectivist paradigms, nuancing self-authorship, and complicating the nexus between religion and culture.

Unearthing Gender and Sexual Identity through Intersectionality: A Critical Study of We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

Unearthing Gender and Sexual Identity through Intersectionality: A Critical Study of We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

Queer Muslim Piety: The Hijab Practices of LGBTQ Muslims in Boston

Abstract: This article examines how queer Muslim pieties are constructed through sartorial practices, specifically, wearing hijab, and what these pious subjectivities suggest about gender, piety, authority, and identity more broadly in the American Muslim community. In Muslim communities, hijab is imbued with heteronormative assumptions and is often thought about in terms of modesty relating to hetero male desire. Yet people who fall outside heteronormative paradigms also choose to cover, suggesting there are alternative meanings to lift up. Based on interviews with three queer Muslim women in Boston, the author found that through donning hijab, queer Muslim women mark degrees of intimacy and privacy with others, protest and resist normative forces within Muslim and LGBTQ cultures, and secure for themselves a gendered and visible Muslim identity, while simultaneously subverting gender norms. This article shows the creative ways Muslim women have negotiated religious and secular authorities to imagine new, playfully pious possibilities for themselves and the Muslim community.

Queer Muslim Piety: The Hijab Practices of LGBTQ Muslims in Boston

Abstract: This article examines how queer Muslim pieties are constructed through sartorial practices, specifically, wearing hijab, and what these pious subjectivities suggest about gender, piety, authority, and identity more broadly in the American Muslim community. In Muslim communities, hijab is imbued with heteronormative assumptions and is often thought about in terms of modesty relating to hetero male desire. Yet people who fall outside heteronormative paradigms also choose to cover, suggesting there are alternative meanings to lift up. Based on interviews with three queer Muslim women in Boston, the author found that through donning hijab, queer Muslim women mark degrees of intimacy and privacy with others, protest and resist normative forces within Muslim and LGBTQ cultures, and secure for themselves a gendered and visible Muslim identity, while simultaneously subverting gender norms. This article shows the creative ways Muslim women have negotiated religious and secular authorities to imagine new, playfully pious possibilities for themselves and the Muslim community.

Queering Jihad in South Africa: Islam, Queerness, and Liberative Praxis

This essay examines the theology and politics of queer Muslims in South Africa. Through a queering of the analytical lens of “struggle and praxis” or jihad, this essay traces the deployment of the term jihad by a collective of queer Muslims in Cape Town. In this articulation, queer Muslims play with their inherited traditions of liberation, challenging its presuppositions, and expanding its contours. This essay argues that these queer Muslims read liberation traditions through their experience and praxis which guide their orientations toward theological meaning-making and community practice. By doing so, they challenge the regulatory nature of hegemonic forms of queerness, which emerged in the Global North, resonating in the local posturing of South Africa as a safe space for queer people, ignoring the disparity between the law and public practice, and erasing the experiences of the margins of the queer community. By embracing this marginality, queer Muslims “reimagine” tradition by presenting an inclusive alternative theology and praxis, suggesting a queer possibility within Islam.

Too Muslim to Be a Feminist and Too Feminist to Be a Muslim? Locating Lived Experiences of Feminism and Muslimness in Social Work Academe

In this paper, two authors seize space as Muslim women feminist social work educators and researchers. We challenge and hopefully silence homogenizing, essentialist and Islamophobic constructions. The first author is a hijabi, Indo-Caribbean, able-bodied cis-heterosexual Muslim feminist; the second author is a disabled, queer Muslim of South Asian heritage. We identify as racialized and firmly rooted in intersectional critical feminist perspectives. Using an autoethnographic, conversation-based approach, we share our narratives (lived experiences) in social work academe. Navigating feminisms, Muslimness, strategic essentialism and Islamophobia while engaging in a critical praxis, we attempt to bring together contradictory discourses for critical examination. We engage with the following questions: How do Muslim women fit (or not fit!) in social work academe? How do Muslim women fit (or not fit!) in critical social work feminist spheres? And what do Muslim feminist futures look like in social work academe? Our lived experiences as racialized Muslim feminists are standpoint perspectives which offer situated knowledges that disempower dominant social work discourses. Social work can no longer be reactionary and preserve the status quo; it must move forward with foresight and be an active player in dismantling inequities.

No Justice, No Peace: Queer Afghans in Life and Death, from Home to Diasporas

In May 2016, while I was attending my first LGBTQ+ Muslim Retreat in the United States, I was looking for familiar faces and those with similar backgrounds as mine: Afghan, Muslim, refugee, queer. I found them all except for the Afghan part. On the very first day of the conference after a long day of attending workshops, I rested my head on one of the new friend's lap as everyone was sitting in a healing circle, talking, sharing their stories and laughing. The languages spoken in this circle varied from English to Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, and Farsi. I was yearning for someone who would speak Dari or Pashto to me. This was the first time I had found myself in a circle of Muslims who also happened to be LGBTQ+. It felt like I had found my home. Yet, there was something missing, my native languages, Dari and Pashto. It was like I needed to hear a queer or trans person speak my tongue. I shared this desire with my new friend whose lap had become my resting nest for hours. He immediately said the name “Wazina.” Do you know Wazina? He asked. No, I don't, I responded. I immediately jumped out of his lap, facing him asking him more about Wazina.Wazina and I, both Afghan, Muslim, refugee and queer, met in person four years later in October 2020 after months of Zoom calls and talks. Our first in person meeting was not an ordinary one. We met during a pandemic. We met at my place in Philadelphia with our bags that carried our kafans, secret items we wanted to leave behind, souvenirs from our pasts and items that we wanted our loved ones to remember us with after we die.This was in preparation for our artistic project and performance: Khuda Bowad Yarat/When I Am No Longer Here. In our past Zoom calls and continued conversations, we both nostalgically talked about Afghanistan, a place we both call home, our queer Afghan Muslim refugee experiences, our love lives and deaths. Will our families mourn us after we die if they find out who we were? Will our loved ones find out about our secret lives and lovers? Where will we be buried?About our performance piece: Khuda Bowad Yarat/When I Am No Longer Here is a visual recreation and reconciliation with queer Muslim death and burial rights that asks if we can fully expose who we are before death. With the Khuda Bowad Yarat/When I Am No Longer Here performance, we hope to reclaim our rites of passage as queer Muslims and as well as find ways to heal in our lives.We have dedicated this performance to those of us, queer, displaced, marginalized, third culture, hiding, surviving, striving, and deeply desiring the traditions and rituals that give us peace of heart, but knowing they aren't always guaranteed to us or reflect us in our true forms.Based on this performance, in this conversation, we (Qais and Wazina) will discuss queer Muslim life, death, secrets, and the ways we find healings in our journeys of life. This was a conversation conducted over Zoom while Qais had returned to Kabul, Afghanistan, after a decade in exile and Wazina was in New York.

The Portrayal of an Iranian Queer Muslim Teenager in Arvin Ahmadi’s How It All Blew Up

This research examines the representation of an Iranian queer Muslim teenager in Arvin Ahmadi's How It All Blew Up. It also evaluates how the novel describes the sufferings of an Iranian queer Muslim teenager through symbolism, which Ahmadi uses as his aesthetic strategies. This research is descriptive qualitative, which examines the primary text by using close textual analysis. This research engages with Stuart Hall's theory of representation and Chris Barker's queer theory. The research investigates the symbolism representing the sufferings of an Iranian queer Muslim teenager and what aesthetic strategies the author uses to question mainstream society, which tends to exclude a queer teenager from “normal” belonging. Indeed, the analysis is engaged with Stuart Hall's theory of representation and Chris Barker's queer theory. This research discovered five representations of the protagonist character in the novel, namely Amir is represented as an Iranian queer Muslim that was born to an Iranian Muslim immigrant family, an Iranian queer Muslim that grew up in a Muslim family that did not strictly implement Islamic teachings, an irreligious Iranian queer Muslim, an Iranian queer Muslim that was attracted to people of the same sex, and an Iranian queer Muslim that struggled with his family's acceptance of his queerness. Indeed, this research discovers four symbols that are used to represent the suffering of an Iranian queer Muslim teenager, including the symbol of fortress, tunnel, tattoo, and wall. Thus, Ahmadi’s novel reveals how a queer Muslim teenager struggles to fight for his rights to be acknowledged and appreciated in the ideas of “normality” and social belonging.

Erratum

Erratum for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, “Searching for the Next Intifada: Exercises in Queer Muslim Futurism,” Meridians 20, no. 2 (2021): 443–65.Due to a publisher error, a quote on page 448 of this article was not properly credited. The passage should have read as follows:I extend this framework to capture various literary, visual, musical, cinematic, performative, theatrical, and other modes of expressive cultures aligned with social justice movements that at once critique differential distributions of power, resources, and life chances in the present and conjure what German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch once called the ‘anticipatory illumination of art’ that is necessary to envisage social life anew. (Kapadia 2019: 165–67)The passage has been corrected in the online versions of the article.https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547969

Queer, Muslim, and Maghrebi: An Intersectional Analysis of Immigrant Identities in Contemporary France

This study investigates the complex ways in which queer Muslim women with origins from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) negotiate belonging and selfhood in France. Drawing on a three-month long digital ethnography, I employ an intersectional approach to explore the juxtaposition of “Muslim” and “lesbian/ bisexual” identities and to answer the question, “How do queer Muslim immigrant women negotiate and conceptualize their identities in contemporary France?” As a marginalized group within a marginalized minority of immigrants from the MENA region, queer Muslim immigrant women have been overlooked in scholarship, public discourses, politics, religious, LGBTQ+ spaces, and religious spaces. This research addresses this gap by exploring the identity-related struggles of queer Muslim immigrant women in France and contributes to studies on Muslim subjectivities, immigration, and gender. Based on my findings, I argue that queer Muslim immigrant women in France negotiate their identities through reconfiguring “secular” and “Muslim” identities and queering religious texts. This negotiation takes place, in part, by using social media to connect with others who share a similar conceptualization of their identities within digital spaces.

Intersectional Narrative Practice with Queer Muslim Clients

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore the way intersectional narrative practice offers rich descriptions of preferred storylines for queer Muslims in response to racism, sexism, heterosexual dominance and Islamophobia. Drawing on two original narrative practice examples with my queer Muslim clients, it outlines how intersectional narrative practice responds to the unique challenges Muslims face in navigating multiple systemic barriers (Crenshaw [1989]. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. Available from https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article = 1052HYPERLINK “https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article = 1052&context = uclf"&.). In praxis I have intentionally incorporated different perspectives of cultural humility, feminism, unique- nuanced outcomes, the failure map, the queer art of failure, and collective narrative practices to reveal the nuances of care required in working with people and communities responding to systemic hardships. The outcomes of the practice examples demonstrate that Narrative Therapy and Community Work (NTCW) provides a framework for social justice and inclusive practices. The stories we tell and are told exist in a context that is shaped by broader sociopolitical discourses, and exploring shame and strength, failure and faith, loss and love through an intersectional narrative practice allows queer Muslims to grow and heal, grounded in their faith and family.

Who are the allies of queer Muslims?

ABSTRACT This article aims to locate the forces inspiring the emergence of pro-queer religious activism in contemporary Indonesia to elucidate how and why Islamic values are mobilised by a minority of Muslim actors for the defence of sexual minority rights. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2018, the article introduces a range of stakeholders, including religious leaders, activists and Islamic scholars supporting LGBTIQ+ rights, as ‘allies’ of sexual minorities. I begin by exploring discussions around Progressive Islam to subsequently focus on my interlocutors’ own definitions of the term. Drawing upon interviews and participant observations at events bringing together religion, gender and sexuality, this article identifies three key forces behind pro-queer religious activism. These include previous membership of the Indonesian Islamic Student Movement (Pergerakan Mahasiswa Islam Indonesia), inter-faith dialogue, and the Gusdurian Network (Jaringan Gusdurian). Participation in these three groups emerges as a force shaping the allies’ conceptualisation of progressive Islam making pro-queer activism possible but not unavoidable.

ZAHED, L.-M. (2020). HOMOSEXUALITY, TRANSIDENTITY, AND ISLAM: A STUDY OF SCRIPTURE. CONFRONTING THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY. AMSTERDAM: AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

The book under review is authored by Ludovic-Mohammed Zahed (b. 1977), a French scholar of social psychology and the founder of Homosexuels musulmans de France, an association for gay and queer Muslims in France. With his work Zahed, who identifies as a feminist, gay Muslim and holds a position of an imam in an inclusive mosque in Paris, seeks to contribute to the expanding body of academic work that engages with issues of gender and sexuality in Islam. As his sources of inspiration, he names Islamic feminist scholars Fatima Mernissi (e.g. 1987; 2003) and Amina Wadud (1999; 2008), as well as a prominent scholar on sexual diversity in Islam, Scott Siraj Kugle (2010; 2013). If Islamic feminist studies have already evolved into an established field that has its roots in the 1980s, topics of homosexuality and non-binary gender identity in Islam have begun attracting scholarly interest only relatively recently. Particularly in the last decade, there has been a visible growth in the number of published works that have engaged with these topics from theological, sociological, and historical perspectives (e.g., Roscoe & Murray, 1997; El-Rouayheb, 2009; Habib, 2010; Shah, 2018). Challenging the premise that homophobia and misogyny are in compliance with Islamic ethical values, Zadeh’s book clearly draws on the arguments developed in these trailblazing works.

Searching for the Next Intifada

Abstract This article explores the possibilities of distinctly queer and Muslim futures rooted not only in Muslim diaspora communities but in the Muslim world itself. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000 are the author’s primary inspiration, whereas the future becomes a blank canvas onto which one can imagine the next global intifada, a giant popular uprising fought on many fronts. The author examines the work of artists Jassem Hindi, Layla tul Qadr, Saba Taj, and Hushidar Mortezaie, who look at the future in terms of parallel imaginative possibilities rather than in temporal terms. In addition to these artists, the writings of scholars and artists Jose Estaban Muñoz, Ronak Kapadia, Etel Adnan, and Hamed Sinno further emphasize the future-facing nature of both queerness and Islam, as well as the radical possibilities of telling queer Muslim stories in the future.

In Defence of an Unalienated Politic: a Critical Appraisal of the ‘No Outsiders’ Protests

The trope of the repressive Muslim, obstinately attached to their regressive world views, recalcitrant antagoniser of modernity, has become a thoroughly familiar drama. Redundant spectacles abound: events often highly mediatised, substantiated by conservativism and liberalism alike, deployed as justification for policing, surveillance and invasion. The 2019 protests against the ‘No Outsiders’ LGBT lessons held in Birmingham, England are one such spectacle. Foregoing the dominant portrayal of the protests as an event of Muslim homophobia, I instead examine the social processes that render the event exceptional in the British imaginary and the statecraft it subsequently enables. First, the protests’ production as a spectacular event is analysed through the historical conditions of Europe’s self-constitution through Islam-as-Threat. It is through liberalism’s amnesiac frame, one that erases its imperial and racist culpability, that the sexual exceptionalism that undergirds the spectacle of the protests can be understood. Second, reading the protests ‘sideways’, I argue, reveals how the displacement of homophobia onto Muslims continues liberalism’s tradition of situating its Others as oppositional to its purported gendered and sexual freedoms. In this context, sex education as deradicalisation of Muslim pupils becomes normalised, even as British liberalism disavows racism. Thirdly, the inclusion of queer Muslims as the authentic voice emerging from the cross-sections of queer and Muslim identity is critiqued as a ‘non-performativity’. Rather than offering a relational understanding of queer, Muslim and queer Muslim vulnerabilities, this inclusion elides an intersectional analysis of British homonationalism. I conclude by arguing for ‘an unalienated politics’ that is vigilant to co-optation, refusing to treat queerness as an exceptional site of injury. As such, how can we imagine the ‘queer’ in queer Muslim as a political position that refuses to capitulate to the hierarchisation of the human?

Letter-Poems to Shauki Masi

AbstractAn extension of an ongoing haunted queer diasporic kinship practice, this piece consists of letter-poems written to the author’s ancestor, Shauki Masi, who passed away several years ago. In this way, the author offers queer Muslim meditations on the five pillars of Islam: salat (ritual of daily prayer), zakat (alms), sawm (ramzaan), hajj (pilgrimage), and shahadah (declaration of faith). The five pillars of Islam offer a praxis through which Muslims can (re)balance their relationships, communities, and therefore the world.

A comparative analysis between the religious and comprehensive sexuality education policies in South African schools

With the dawn of a constitutional democracy, South Africa has enacted contentious policies, such as outlawing capital punishment and legalizing same-sex marriage. Within the educational environment, the religious education (RE) and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) polices remain the most controversial to date. A comparative analysis of their overriding objectives suggests the two policies coincide in terms of their purpose (e.g. protecting the rights of religious and sexual minority groups), reform (conscientizing learners about the oppression of othered groups), and action (instilling inclusivity and diversity in religious and sexuality education). Yet, despite the two policies’ corresponding position toward oppression encountered by minorities, the analysis shows some schools privilege the implementation of one policy over another. For example, the orthodox position taken by some faith-based schools in removing the teaching of sexuality diversity, and replacing it with religious studies. On the other hand, the analysis also shows that learners from both religious and sexual minority groups (e.g. queer Muslim youth), outside of faith-based schools, may face compounded forms of oppression based on religious, gender and sexual minority status. The analysis explores this sometimes conflicting intersection of religion, gender and sexuality, while suggesting new directions for future studies in RE and CSE.

Queer Muslims in Europe: Sexuality, Religion and Migration in Belgium, by Wim Peumans

Queer Muslims in Europe: Sexuality, Religion and Migration in Belgium, by Wim Peumans