We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

by Samra Habib

So my mother came of age knowing abandonment and neglect intimately. Her experiences taught her that as a woman, fertility, purity, and beauty were the only currencies she could exchange for a better life. She understood that any hindrance to my ability to find a suitable husband made me as undesirable and disposable as her stuttering mother. She lived in a country where countless women are found dead in alleyways and on the sides of dirt roads, their bodies discarded because they were not able to conceive children, particularly boys.

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.

Through practice and experience, I developed an eye for identifying the kind of people who wouldn’t pick on me: smart and nerdy types who were more interested in learning about Meso-American civilizations than picking on a Pakistani girl who wore the hijab. People who devote themselves to learning have always been my people, my pockets of safety.

as a woman in this world it’s important to take up space and make yourself heard, even if it intimidates and offends powerful men.

Maybe home was simply any place where you felt seen and welcome.

being queer, I learned, is so much more than who you sleep with. It’s who you are, whether that means rejecting traditional gender roles or embracing non-normative identities and politics.

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.

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

“I get it,” she said. “You’re trying to make Muslims who are treated unfairly feel like they are part of Islam. That’s very Muslim of you.”

sexuality, gender, faith, art. Basically, everything. 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.