We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

by Samra Habib

(I would spend years amassing an impressive collection of perfumes and body oils, as if no amount was enough to mask the stench of my shame.)

Azaad is a funny word in Urdu. In most instances, it means “freedom.” Freedom from your captors, war, and oppressive regimes. But when used to describe a woman, it is meant to imply that she is too wild to be tamed by those who have the right to tame her: her parents and all the men in her life whose honour it is her duty to prioritize before her desires.

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.

They released the pent-up loud laughter that at home made Allah so unhappy.

“Our safety, our survival, is routinely threatened in the name of some hypothetical greater safety that does not include us,” she told me. “What they are trying to keep safe is white supremacy, what they are trying to protect is their own power.”