We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

by Samra Habib

I’d only ever been surrounded by women who didn’t have the blueprint for claiming their lives.

By the time their third daughter was born, family members and neighbours were in mourning. They would drop by unannounced and express their condolences to my parents for having yet another girl. Being parents to daughters meant mounting burdens; it didn’t guarantee the prosperity that having sons did.

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She was raised to believe that control was not something granted to women. Even with a tiny bit of control, there is always a caveat: you cover yourself up when conducting business with men; you get your husband’s, brother’s, or father’s permission before you travel; and elders are always right, even when they aren’t.

I found it unfair that women were expected to leave everything behind once they married, as though their lives before that point had never existed.

When my father took longer than expected to return from a meeting to buy some land, I was terrified that he’d been conned into meeting with extremists who would kill him. I would cry in a panic until he returned home safely.

Feels like de ja vuu

I wasn’t used to anyone asking me how I felt, and her question made me pause and wonder why.

In my world, you weren’t asked how things felt.

I’d never imagined there was an alternative, that I would ever have the opportunity to make a case for what I actually wanted.

Grown-ups, who are supposed to protect their children, are limited by what “best” has felt like to them, based on the circumstances they grew up in and the privilege they did or did not have. The lines between grown-up and child were often blurred between me and my mom.

Her “best” did not look like mine; in fact, it looked like danger. It felt like surrender.

My mother had failed to give me a better life than hers because she didn’t have the blueprint to show me what my best could look like.

In my family, grudges are held for a very long time. Brothers, sisters, mothers, daughters, sons, and cousins don’t speak to one another for decades over simple miscommunications, things taken a little too personally, sentiments uttered harshly, and bruised egos.

Hmmm kayak kenal nih cerita siapa sih…

books provided a much-needed window into worlds I would never experience. They could afford me the comfort, safety, adventure, and glamour that I didn’t have access to but so deeply craved. I could travel anywhere in the world, even if in my real life I was barely allowed to leave the house.

I wanted a different kind of life. A life where I wasn’t afraid. A life where I didn’t have to ask for a man’s permission to read, to go to university, to drive a car.

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But I understood that my need for closure with my father was a product of the culture I grew up in that placed so much emphasis on it. He didn’t have the tools to understand the psychological impact his parenting had on my life—I couldn’t expect him to acknowledge his wrongdoings. So I let him reclaim his parental role in his own particular fashion.

Closure, for me, would mean accepting my circumstances rather than trying to alter them to serve me best.

As we grow into ourselves, we amass a network of friends who embrace us as we are and nurture us in ways we never were while growing up.

Being surrounded by great people isn’t a fluke. It’s almost like solving a math problem, finding variables, adding and subtracting to figure out a formula that works. Being surrounded by people who fuel you is intentional.

I’d been swiftly shunned by the mosque aunties, who, taking on the role of spokespersons for Islam, ruled that my actions made me a Bad Muslim. Suddenly there was no place for me in that sacred place of worship that had once been a source of comfort and stability. Worried I’d be a bad influence on their daughters, the aunties watched my friends like hawks to ensure that none of them would so much as respond to my “Assalam-o-Alaikum” greeting. Worst of all, they made my mother feel as though she’d done a bad job raising me. My rebellion had been a direct challenge to that central tenet of Muslim households: parents and elders know best.

Why always the aunties arghhhh elah

I still felt like an outsider within the LGBTQ community. I had naively assumed that no longer keeping my queer identity a secret would help me find my people. In reality, it pushed me further into the hole of isolation. It seemed that no one in the queer spaces I visited—dance parties, art shows, Pride events—was curious about why there were hardly any people of colour—and hardly any Muslims—in their midst. I felt even more invisible.

Representation is a critical way for people to recognize that their experiences—even if invisible in the mainstream—are valid.

as Muslims, we’re used to being exploited at the hands of others.

“We have always been here, it’s just that the world wasn’t ready for us yet.

Re-parent yourself is another of her favourite mantras for me.

She asks the child Samra to come out and say whatever she needs to say to me. She even had me write a letter to her as an exercise. At first I thought it was an impossible task, but after a few sessions and my therapist’s insistent coaxing, the terrified seven-year-old me—shaggy short hair, blue shalwar kameez—started following me around like a shadow.

She wants to make herself heard, she wants to be comforted, and she wants to know that I will protect her. She wants me to tell her that she doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to. And she wants to tell me to not be upset with my mother. To forgive her. Whenever a feeling of anxiety or fear creeps into my thoughts, I gently console the seven-year-old instea...

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Being Muslim is one of the only absolutes about myself I can be sure of. It serves as an anchor when I’m lost at sea. It helps me come back to myself, and it leads me to others who’ve struggled to reconcile seemingly disparate parts of themselves. For me, it’s not something I can put on and take off, like a garment.

Not everyone is equipped for activism in the traditional sense—marching, writing letters to officials—but dedicating your life to understanding yourself can be its own form of protest, especially when the world tells you that you don’t exist.