We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

by Samra Habib

His focus on the logistics was its own kind of support—the only kind he knew how to give. I wanted to tell him how much the distance between us had hurt me over the years, and how I believed that his failure to parent me was partly what had led to my relationship with Peter in the first place. 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.

when we were told we weren’t allowed to be. I wouldn’t let the fact that I was coming out of a relationship with a man make me feel that I wasn’t queer enough—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.

Was it possible to be loved without losing myself? Was the absence of a partner I was spiritually and intellectually in sync with the price I had to pay for being uncompromising about needing the space to grow?

my friends—my chosen family—could be the loves of my life. After all, chosen families are a cornerstone of queer culture, especially for those whose biological families don’t accept them. 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. My friends, my soul mates, see all of me—the messy and the tender parts. They know what needs to be celebrated and what still needs healing.

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.

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. The further removed people are from proficiency in that language, the less likely they are to be understood as complex individuals. The audience often fills in the blanks with their own preconceptions.

It seemed as though meaningful dialogue was available only to those with a PhD. In this way, the language is inaccessible to those who need to be comforted most. Queer Muslims who fear for their lives every day—while walking down the streets of Punjabi villages or meeting a potential love interest for the first time in Tehran through a dating app—might not have the tools to understand the language written by academics in Ivy League schools.

A person’s childhood home is the prologue to their story. It contains clues to the inner workings of their minds, their specific view of the world.

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.