Photographer Samra Habib is queer and Muslim. She has written about attending a queer-friendly mosque in Toronto here, and about the need to listen to queer Muslims in the wake of the Orlando attack here. Her photography project, Just Me and Allah, documents the lives of LGBT people in North America and Europe.
Shazad, Toronto
I was born in St Albert, Alberta, Canada. I grew up with a lot of extended family around me. We were semi-religious but everyone fasted during Ramadan and we all celebrated Eid. My parents divorced when I was 11 and that’s when my family dynamics changed. My mom raised me and my sister and did the best she could. She believed in God and taught me how to pray Namaaz but never forced us to be religious. She believed that just because you follow the five pillars of Islam, it doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a good person. Having a heart trumps being religious.
During my parents’ divorce, I tried to cling to Islam because I felt scared and conflicted. I thought I was a bad person and would go to hell for being gay and that coming out would stress my mom out even more. This continued until I learned about reconciling my sexuality with my religious beliefs in university. I stopped being scared. It didn’t make sense to me that I would burn in hell for loving a man.
It wasn’t until I moved to Toronto after graduation and was living on my own that my relationship with God changed from being based on fear to being based on love. Moving allowed me to reconcile my faith, South Asian culture and sexuality through community building by creating a chosen family.
Farhat, New York
I was raised in a somewhat liberal Bangladeshi family in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We lived in a working-class environment, yet my sister and I were sent to a prestigious English school with the hopes that both of us would one day end up in the US.
I was not religious while growing up, and I also knew I was queer since age 10. I felt ashamed of my sexuality and my gender. After I entered my first year at college, I was confronted with my queerness head-on and I took a year’s leave from college and went back to Bangladesh with the hopes of driving my queerness away. I devoted all my time to practicing Islam and incorporating the best values of the prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam.
I had a dear friend who accompanied me and truly guided me through this amazing journey of intricately understanding glorious Islam. Yet, I continued feeling that I would not be able to change. I returned to the US for my second year at college after which I started making some queer friends and became more comfortable with my sexuality and gender.
There continues to exist a massive tension between navigating activist radical queer spaces and being a Muslim who calls to Allah every day. I continue to have debates within myself on what it means to incorporate Islam in my life and to be a part of a community that I deeply care about and believe in as well.
Christelle, Paris
People question how I can be queer and Muslim or why I don’t have a Muslim sounding name or don’t cover myself. I’ve even been asked how I can be black and Muslim because of how Arabs treated Africans during the Arab slave trade. People want you to think your whole identity is haram but hey, it’s just between me and Allah.
I grew up in a family that is half evangelical Christian and half Sunni Muslim. Some of my non-Muslim family is really Islamophobic. My Muslim family members had to practice Islam secretly because they didn’t want to be rejected by my non-Muslim family members. I recently saw some of my family members after 15 years because they didn’t want to have anything to do with us.
I’ve only felt ready to come out to the Muslim side of my family, not the Christian side. What made me feel ready was how the Muslims in my family express their tolerance towards queer and trans folks. I’m glad that I finally came out because they accepted me.
Growing up in Paris as a teen, I felt lonely for a very long time. I feel part of the black community and the black womanhood community but I don’t feel part of the LGBT community in Paris because it’s really, really white, mainstream and dismissive of non-conforming genders and other sexualities.
Leila, Berlin
I am a blackarab, meaning that my mum is North African from Algeria and my dad is Caribbean. I didn’t grow up Muslim, as we were practicing Buddhism with my dad. My mum used to fast during the month of Ramadan and it’s the only time we practiced Islam.
I got to know a bit more about Islam was when I was 16. I was in the library and picked up the Qur’an and read the French translation. I read it in three weeks. I talked to my Muslim aunty about it and she gave me some books about the life of our beloved prophet Muhammad. I fell in love with Islam.
When I was 20, I decided to become a Muslimah. I started wearing the hijab when I was 25. That was a big decision, especially in an Islamophobic country like France. I am a social worker and a special needs educator and it became a struggle to find a job in Paris. My life in France became hell on earth. As time passed, my hijab was more than a symbol of faith, it became a symbol of resistance and a political symbol.
Since a young age I knew that I was queer and it never caused me any problems, maybe because I didn’t mention it. I started asking myself questions growing up in my Muslim community. When you hear things from people that you share the same faith with who reject a part of you, it hurts.
Being queer and Muslim is not a disease. We are lacking a safe space for us. We are meeting up a lot in really small groups but it’s still not enough. Some of us are scared and it’s not easy.
I have three kids and they know Islam, the same way they know about the oppressive system that we are living in. They know the queer community, the anti-racist community. They come to all the protests with me and their dad, who is my ex-husband and is the best ally that I could dream of. He knows about my queerness and has always been supportive and protective.
Shima, Toronto
I was born and raised in Shiraz, Iran. My family and I moved to Canada about three years ago after living in Malaysia for a while. We left Iran before my brother was forced into military training and to escape the increasing pressure my father faced from the Islamic Republic government. Aside from being a defence lawyer, my father held workshops teaching human rights. Because of him, I developed an awareness and sensitivity towards social injustice around me.
Growing up in Iran was a contrast of happiness and anxiety. I had sunny days in gardens eating pomegranates and reading poetry with my large and colorful family, all of whom loved me dearly. But I also had mullahs lecturing me on how I should be covered when I was a child.
I was brought up mostly secular and encouraged to think for myself. I slowly came to terms with respecting and being fond of some aspects of Islam while being critical of others. I knew my Islam wasn’t that of my teachers. Like most other Iranians who have a hard time with Islamic governance, my family’s relationship with Islam is a complicated one. I remember my mum giving my dad the stink eye when he’d say blasphemous things. To him God is in everything but my mum had a more traditional view of the religion.
Today, Islam is a source of solace for me. An identity I get to define on my terms. At 11, I picked up the daf and studied under a great master. Exploring Tasawuf has been the spiritual introspection I yearn for.
As a kid I daydreamt of being suited up and kissing my wife goodbye like the white couples on TV did. As a preteen, I cut my long hair short to look masculine because I thought of masculinity as being synonymous with having power and liking girls.
In my opinion, stigma and misplacement are some of the biggest challenges facing queer Muslims today. Islam is incredibly misunderstood and the queer conversation is only just beginning. We can be rejected by both queers and Muslims. The supposed juxtaposition of Islam and queerness is only made more complicated by the North American hostility towards Muslims in a climate where Muslims strive for acceptance and visibility.
I hope to be able to return to Iran and help make things better for little girls who feel what I felt. I hope to help move Iran towards acceptance and support of its queer people. I dream of the smell of orange blossoms and sunny mountains of Shiraz.
Tarek, Paris
I grew up in a suburb of France where a lot of people of color live. It’s basically a ghetto. My parents were not really practicing Islam while I was growing up but the religion gets more and more present in their lives as they get older.
I try to create my own relationship with Islam and would like to discover Islam on my own. My relationship with the religion is much more complex than following all the rules. At this point in my life, Islam is much more about spirituality. I feel like I’m a blank page and I have to write new stories. I don’t usually talk about my faith because when I try, I feel isolated. It’s definitely a personal thing.
I express myself through poetry. I write about my queerness, my Arabness and my feelings about how I negotiate different parts of my identities. I try to connect all of this stuff in an experimental way. I basically use a lot of repetition, which allows me to create new words in French. I love the complexity of language and what I can do with it. When I first started writing this way, I read the text in front of my creative writing class at university and all the students hated it. Maybe because it was too experimental. But my professor loved it and said, “I won’t leave you alone until you publish your poetry.”
Yunique, Brooklyn
Even though I don’t look like a traditional Muslim, I am still super modest in the way I dress. I’d like to think my style is a bit eccentric but is still influenced by Islam. When Muslim women look at me in my Brooklyn neighborhood, they know I’m Muslim. I want to be able to identify with them and have a desire to say “Peace be upon you” and feel that connection. But I feel like I can’t because of my queer appearance.
Islam was first introduced to me when my mom and her brother would always go to this place called mosque. I was happy for her, she seemed completely submerged in a spiritual happiness I hadn’t seen in a while or ever. It seemed like she found something bigger than herself. She sat me down one day to finally tell me what she had been up to. She told me about the prophet Muhammad and invited me to come to the mosque with her. By letting me decide whether or not Islam was for me and what religion was going to look like for me, she gave me a platform to choose my independence at 12 that has progressed throughout my life.
For a while, I even converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with my mom’s support. But I learned that there is a lack of black identity and inclusion within Mormonism (although I did discover Jane Manning).
Being Mormon was a good segue from being a Muslim. They have somewhat similar beliefs but queerness is what caused me to leave Mormonism and to go back to the Muslim faith. Allah never left me. I never left Allah.
My mother also introduced me to some astonishing black female musicians when I was younger. Tracy Chapman is a prophet to me. Her music gave me critical thinking, made me reflect upon the world as a whole and one self. She made me realize I was gay. She taught me that I’m cool even if others disagree. That I’m black, I’m dark-skinned and I’m good.
As an immigrant queer Muslim woman of color, I feel nonexistent, sometimes even within my queer community. There aren’t many like me who are out there and visible. But for now I’m content with that, I’m still trying to figure myself out first and taking this new collected visibility one step at a time. In Brooklyn, I have supreme people of color around me. I feel like we’re storming through the oppression. We were slaying separately and now finally, we’re slaying together.
Harry, Brooklyn
My mom was born and raised in Damascus, Syria, to a Syrian Muslim father and a Lebanese Maronite mother. My dad grew up in Brooklyn and was born to two Pontic Greek parents from the Macedonia region.
I vividly remember September 11, 2001 being a huge turning point for my mom and her Muslim sisters. In public they went out of their way to look and act as “American” as possible. They plastered American flags all over their cars and lied to strangers when they were asked about their accents. At home though, they became more intentional about teaching my brother and I about Islam, they read the Qur’an regularly, and started to fast and go to the mosque during Ramadan.
I came out to my parents when I was 13. I wrote a note to my mom in Arabic and left it on her bathroom mirror when she wasn’t home, and went to a friend’s house to spend the night before she saw it. I’m eternally grateful for the love, acceptance, and support my family has always shown me. When I was in high school, the only queer representations in the media I remember were white, skinny, hairless and rich, which I obviously couldn’t relate to. I remember wanting so badly to meet other queer Arabs and Muslims, to be able to relate to someone on that kind of level was a huge deal for me. I eventually found an amazing group of social justice-oriented queer Arabs and Muslims after I moved to New York, and it almost feels surreal to look back on the time when I didn’t have that kind of support in my life.
I think one of the biggest challenges facing queer Muslims in America is decolonizing our mindsets. There have been more than a few times where I’ve seen or heard other queer Muslims regurgitate some very disgustingly racist and Islamophobic rhetoric against visibly religious (and presumably straight) Muslims under the guise of “protecting oneself”. How can you claim to fight against racism and all the other -isms on behalf of others when you perpetuate it against your own?
Roo, New York
The only Muslim community I’ve ever been a part of is my family. My grandpa grew up in Glasgow, from a Pashtun (now Pakistani) background, and my grandma grew up in London, from an Ashkenazi Jewish background. My dad grew up just south of San Francisco, and my mom grew up outside Philadelphia, from a white European American Methodist background. My mother and grandma converted to Islam when they married into the family, and I was raised Muslim.
That connection was broken after I moved away to go to college in 2001, and my grandfather died soon after. I’m still not sure what I believe but I know that I am Muslim. It is difficult to exist as genderqueer when the only Muslim spaces that exist are gender segregated.
I would describe my family’s relationship with Islam as religious and faithful, but explicitly non-dogmatic and distrustful of organized religion. My dad and grandpa prayed five times a day, but we only went to group prayers on Eid al-Fitr. We kept pretty strictly Halal in the house, and mostly Halal when eating out. We were proud to be Muslim, but with an inclusive attitude toward our Christian and Jewish family.
With the mixed religious and racial makeup of my family, I grew up with a very strong sense of who my family was, but had difficulty knowing who I would turn out to be. I had several experiences of being singled out for looking noticeably different from the rest of my family, once to the point where my family was stopped at the Canadian border because the guards didn’t believe I was my parent’s child.
When I was 10, my family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, so that my dad could go to medical school. This, to be blunt, sucked. Being the weird new nerdy kid, combined with the arrival of an unwanted puberty left me feeling rather disconnected. I retreated into the newly available world wide web and my academic pursuits.
I think that the biggest challenges facing queer Muslims in America are violent fear, politically normalized bigotry, laws specifically designed to exclude us, and a culture that would declare us as “other” no matter how assimilationist we may be.
El-Farouk Khaki, founder of Salaam Canada and co-founder of Unity Mosque
I was born in Tanzania. We fled because of my father’s rebel-rousing political profile. We lived in England for three years and came to Canada in March of 1974. My mum did not like the snow or the concrete of Toronto, preferring the blooming flowers that greeted us in Vancouver, BC. My father was a committed humanist and activist. The Islam they taught me was one of justice and love that embraced diversity and liberation. It was an Islam heavily influenced by a variety of Muslim traditions especially Sufism.
One of the things that’s happened in Islam, especially post-oil and post-Iranian revolution is that Islam has been reduced on many levels to a simple list of dos and don’ts. It’s devoid of any spirituality or any intimacy with the creator. LGBT people have always been around. The fact is that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks have always been accepted into Muslim societies. It wasn’t a question of whether they were Muslim, it was more about whether they were transgressive. Today, people’s Muslim identities are being denied and robbed, taken away from them.
I practice refugee and immigration law. These days, my clients are mostly refugees. The majority of my clients are LGBTIQ people fleeing persecution. I also represent many women fleeing gender and domestic violence. About 20% of my clients are HIV positive and fear stigma and discrimination in their countries of citizenship as a result.
When I started Salaam (Queer Muslim community of Canada) back in 1991, it was about trying to create a community space. In those days, I don’t think I was ready to reclaim a religious space but it became apparent to me that there was a need for it. Six years ago, my partner Troy Jackson, Laury Silvers and I decided to start a Friday mosque space with the intention that it would become more than a Friday space and it would be beyond Toronto. Which is what’s happening: we have seven active communities.
What’s really significant is the fact that we have triggered people’s imagination with the notion of an inclusive mosque space that’s gender equal and queer affirming. It’s a place that doesn’t ask you if you’re a Muslim or what kind of Muslim you are. Where everybody is welcome. People are embraced in the fullness of their authenticity.
More photographs can be seen on Samra Habib’s Tumblr page
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion