We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

by Samra Habib

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him—he may be forced to—but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. —JAMES BALDWIN

I’d only ever been surrounded by women who didn’t have the blueprint for claiming their lives. There were my aunts, who would never be caught socializing without their husbands present—certainly not publicly. They couldn’t drive their cars without their husbands, let alone ride a motorcycle. And there was my mother, who was notified of her own name change only when her wedding invitations arrived from the printer. She stared at one for a few moments, wondering if my father had changed his mind and was marrying someone else instead. Without consulting her, he had decided that Yasmin would be a more suitable and elegant name for his wife than Frida. It was one of the first signs that her identity was disposable. Her free will was up for grabs, available to be stencilled over by my father and perhaps even by her children. Her role was to be a pious wife and an attentive mother. Being a sacrificial lamb meant a place would be reserved for her in heaven. Even if it meant that her life would be hell, surely Allah would see her sacrifice and allow her into jannat, the prized heaven.

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.

The best thing about being taken out of my regular class—besides the temporary relief from being bullied—was the field trips we took to familiarize us with the city we now called home. We would go to the art gallery or venture out to High Park and watch morning joggers run by the ravine. Once, during the holidays, we went to a big shopping mall downtown. But outside of ESL class the humiliations abounded, whether I was teased for being Paki, as the girls in gym class liked to remind me, or for looking so malnourished and skinny, or for using the British English I’d picked up in Pakistan.

Three months in, Ms. Nakamura declared that I no longer needed ESL. My English was strong, and I was perfectly equipped to attend regular classes. She assumed that such an evaluation would be a badge of honour for a new refugee kid dying to be accepted, but what she didn’t realize was that ESL class was my safe haven. I was terrified of the wickedness that awaited me outside its doors. There was no predicting what might set off girls like Lisa, Tara, and Angie.

When I got home from school that day, before I could even consider telling my parents what had happened, my mom asked me if I could help her with her ESL homework—she was enrolled in a mandatory class so that we could collect our welfare cheques. I sat down beside her on our hand-me-down couch, took out a pencil, and showed her how to use an adjective in a sentence.

The truth was, I didn’t know much about Nasir or my father. Getting to know men was not something the women in my family were encouraged to do. They were to be avoided at all times, like attack dogs without muzzles.

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. I had inherited the fate met by all the women in my family who came before me.

When I showed an interest in writing and feminism, my teachers nurtured my thirst for knowledge and recommended books by Noam Chomsky and Virginia Woolf. I was determined to get a post-secondary education and have a career, even if I was destined to be married to Nasir.

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.

And so, at sixteen, I was a teenage bride, and the nikah was the chastity belt I wore to guard me from the temptation of teenage rebellion in a country that had given me my first taste of freedom.

In contrast to my parents’ newfound leniency, Nasir had begun to police my behaviour. One of the ways he did so was to closely examine the books I borrowed from the library and piled high on my nightstand. Nasir wanted to make sure that nothing was polluting my mind, encouraging me to be a kaafir, a disbeliever. He was threatened by my education and its potential to create a power imbalance between us. Literature in English made him particularly wary, as it might instill in my head ideas he had no control over. Unlike my mom, he didn’t see any benefit in my getting an education, and he made his views known.

Growing up as sheltered as I had, 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. My dad would have to force me to stop reading at night so that he could turn off the light and let my sister, whom I shared a room with, finally sleep. Once he was gone, I would take my book out from under the covers and squint to make out the words by the light of my digital alarm clock.

I loved being surrounded by books so much that I started working at the school library. After my summer job at the bargain store had ended, I needed pocket money to pay for clothes and makeup I would see in the magazines I browsed during lunch hour: YM, Seventeen, Sassy, Tiger Beat. With my very first library paycheque I purchased a white latex trench coat from Le Château. I would wear it year-round, even when it was scorching hot out. I figured if I had to dress modestly and cover myself, I might as well look chic doing it. I loved the compliments and attention I received when I wore it, pleased I hadn’t purchased something safe or boring. During slow days at the library I even painted my nails with Wite-Out so that they matched my coat.

I was in disbelief. Here I was getting in trouble, not for staying out late, hanging with the wrong crowd, or doing drugs, but for reading! I felt as though the window to the outside world I so treasured was being boarded up. After that day, I made sure to hide the books I brought home, and I took them out only once my bedroom door was locked. Books became my dirty little secrets, my illicit, hidden contraband.

By my late teens I’d witnessed many violent arguments between my parents. Years after moving to Canada, my father’s inability to provide for our family financially remained a hotly contentious issue. Whenever they fought I would lock myself in my room, holding on to my little brother tightly and covering his ears. If I was alone, I would drown out the screams and shouts by putting on headphones and listening to soothing music. Philip Glass or Mozart would provide the soundtrack as a war waged outside my door.

Although Peter cared for me, he wasn’t equipped to help me safely exit my marriage. I was starting to entertain thoughts of suicide, which in my distraught state was beginning to seem like the only option. After seeing an ad on a cereal box, I called a youth hotline from a telephone booth. It was as if the counsellor at the other end had never encountered my specific situation—a teenage Muslim girl trapped in an unhappy arranged marriage—and when she suggested I tell my parents how I felt, I hung up on her.

I’m not sure how I summoned the courage to say that nothing could change my mind. I did not want to be Nasir’s wife, and that was that. I no longer felt scared to share what I had been feeling for years. In fact, for the first time in my life, I felt brave. I finally knew how it felt to stand by my convictions, unconcerned about the consequences.

When introducing myself to a person of colour or someone with an accent, I’d say my name in Arabic, how my mother wanted it to be pronounced. To those who refuse to shorten or anglicize their name, I offer mine as an act of camaraderie. But if I’m meeting someone who looks like they’ve never had to correct people three times before being offered a handshake, I just accept whatever rolls off their tongues.

That year, I spent Eid with my family. Eid was the only Muslim holiday I observed at that point in my life, and one of the few times a year I saw my father. I’d started visiting again in my late twenties, partly out of guilt—I felt I had to spend Eid with my parents, and my mom would be disappointed if I didn’t show.

This particular year was memorable, though, because during the car ride he apologized for the cruelty I’d endured from him as a child. I was shocked. I’d never heard my dad apologize in his entire life; everything was always our fault.

My father, with uncharacteristic intimacy, lowered his voice and asked me if I was thinking about ending my marriage. I was thrown off by his intuition and sat silent for a moment, staring at the face that looked so much like my own. In that moment, I recognized that I was a part of him. My eyes welled up as he wrapped his arms around me. He held me for as long as I needed to be held.

CENTRAL, GAY-FRIENDLY, AND CLEAN. The avatar next to the listing showed a black man with a generous smile. The prospect of my host in this foreign land being gay—or at least gay-friendly—instantly put me at ease. I contacted the owner, Loren, and introduced myself, saying I was also interested in visiting Kyoto and casually mentioning that I too was queer—realizing as I typed them that I’d never written those words before. I stared at the screen for a few minutes, the cursor blinking in sync with my heartbeat, before hitting SEND.

Back in Toronto, I began to explore another new frontier: online dating. As I set about the task of filling out my profile, portioning my identity into a series of designated fields, I was confronted with the obvious question: was I interested in men or in women?

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.

I had contacted El-Farouk Khaki, the co-founder of Unity Mosque, after hearing about a prayer space that welcomed queer Muslims.

Our understanding of the interior lives of those who are not like us is contingent on their ability to articulate themselves in the language we know.

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

Our house is filled with books. Nabokov, Baldwin, Didion, Woolf, Plath, Kincaid, Sontag. “Books are where you will find yourself,” my mother would say whenever she sensed we’d lost our footing.

I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of home. I’ll catch myself imagining the childhood homes of people I admire:

Mothers know. It’s frustrating—eerie, even—how easily my mother can sense that a storm is brewing inside of me. Sometimes she even sees it before I do. It’s like having a psychological intruder. For weeks after I came out in a very public way—by writing about being queer in a piece for The Guardian—I kept checking my phone, expecting a call from my parents any minute. Every buzz and beep set me on edge. Although my siblings had known for years, my parents still had no idea that I was queer. I wondered if a relative would send them a link to the piece, sparking a confrontation. The phone call never came.

Finally I just blurted it out. “Mom, I’m queer.” I searched her face for a reaction—or signs of an impending heart attack. We looked at each other in silence while my brother looked on anxiously. “Okay,” she said. “I still love you.” It’s what she said next that I wasn’t prepared for. “So…how do you have sex?”

“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.”

Muslims go through in a world that insists on dehumanizing Islam. “I wanted my subjects to look straight into the eyes of the audience and tell the stories of their struggles, fears, triumphs, love, and courage in their own words.”

a news anchor was announcing that Trump, who had built so much of his platform on inciting hate for Muslims and immigrants, was predicted to win the election. I watched in shock as the results continued to roll in. A reality-TV star would be deciding the fate of the most powerful country in the world. In disbelief, I set my alarm for an hour later and took a nap. When I awoke, Trump’s victory had gone from hypothetical to almost certain: the nightmare was real.

I arrived in Istanbul shortly after Turkey banned Pride events under Erdoğan’s rule. Queer Muslims I met there were understandably disillusioned with Islam, since their rights were compromised by authorities daily.

remember a conversation I had with a young Iranian refugee I met in Istanbul who’d escaped to the city after being targeted by the morality police in Iran. Eventually, he made his way to the U.S. For years he lived in a constant state of fear that he would be killed for being gay.

“Islam in its purest form is simply a way of life,” she said. “From its teachings, I’ve gathered a deep appreciation and respect for the concept of inner struggle, and believe that this is the work every human needs to do to be healthy.”

haven’t photographed queer Muslims in countries where queer rights aren’t protected by law. The one exception is Turkey, which is predominantly Muslim. When I photographed my subjects in Istanbul, they asked that I not show their faces because they feared for their safety.

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.

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.