The kitchen is for cooking up both turmeric and cumin-laced polos and acid theological debates about feminism and free will—that was my experience growing up Muslim in the Midwest. Reading Lamya H’s new memoir, Hijab Butch Blues (2023), decades later sank me back into that space: the warmth, the fight, the edge.
Chapter to chapter, Lamya’s story unfolds through those of the prophets—which, in H’s recuperative reading of Islamic scripture and practice, include women like Maryam. Rather than set up a dichotomy between religion and queerness, the teenage Lamya accesses their queerness through faith. The virginal mother, she realizes—H uses both pronouns—wasn’t impregnated by a man in part because she was uninterested in heterosexual breeding in the first place. Queerness becomes part of the miracle. Growing up with South Asian parents who immigrated to the Gulf for work, Lamya faces colorism and racism that are intertwined with homophobia. Arriving in the U.S. for college, they navigate the Islamophobia that grows in the American soil of hate. As an adult, after years of fearless living that include the tireless fight to “invite in”—H’s alternative to coming out, after the writer Darnell Moore—and the self sabotage of crushing on straight women, they come into her own. They write. They find community. They even find love.
Since publication in February, the book’s already made waves in both normative Muslim and queer communities, forcing each to confront its prejudices against the other. For many queer Muslims, it’s a breath of fresh air. For me, whose relationship to faith now looks little like Lamya’s, it was the rare chance to step into someone else’s journey, a gift.
In conversation with me this summer, H further unpacked the pages of their story. From creating boundaries around the queer vernacular to reframing “coming out” to “inviting in”; from grappling with how to read the Qur'an to reading the text itself, we discussed the struggle to author oneself. Whether secular or spiritual, that’s a quest we all share.
Mariam
I saw this book as a practice in ijtihād. Compared to orthodox jurisprudence, it arrives at some quote-unquote controversial conclusions. Take “Maryam is a dyke”—I thought that was great. What were your methods?
Lamya
I think one of the coolest things about Islam is that we do have this intimate relationship with the Qur'an—it’s accessible. Anyone can pick it up and read it. There are scholars who try to limit interpretations of the Qur'an, but a lot of people are engaged in the process of ijtihād, and of really reading and understanding and interpreting the Qur'an for themselves and by themselves. I find that to be really empowering. It makes it feel like I can engage with the Qur'an as if it’s written to me, as if God is talking to me.
For me with this book, it was important to really think through some of the passages and the stories that I grappled with, and to figure out why I was grappling with them, and what alternate interpretations could be that weren’t filtered through the heteropatriarchy. I’m not a trained scholar. But I am someone for whom the Qur'an has been a part of their life for a very long time. I looked at stories I draw inspiration from, or am puzzled by or confused by, and tried to get to the root of some of that. And then I looked at stories from my life in the same way.
Mariam
Right, it’s all a kind of reading. Reading the text of your own life, reading a novel, reading the Qur'an. How do you think about the act of reading?
Lamya
The different kinds of readings that you’re talking about—reading the Qur'an, and reading books, genuinely reading the text of your life—to me, those are all in place. They’re ways of seeing the world, and they all teach each other. It can be harder to read the text of your own life, in the sense that it’s really easy to be hard on yourself. But to have empathy for the characters, to think of them as complicated people with flaws, and deserving of love and empathy—reading other texts has allowed me to do that with myself. To think of myself as a flawed character who also deserves empathy and love.
Mariam
By your telling, figures we might think of as almost mythic figures growing up in a Muslim household become complex characters, and become relatable. It’s so different from this image of a hardened, sculptural, infallible prophet. I find myself coming back to that idea of infallibility; what you’re doing is such a different spin on that idea.
Lamya
One of the earliest models of infallibility that I learned about was Prophet Muhammad. There’s this idea that he made mistakes, and God talks to him about those mistakes in the Qur’an. That always stayed with me.
Mariam
How so?
Lamya
When I was younger, my parents were supposed to be infallible—whatever decisions they made were the right ones. That was how it was framed. But the story of Prophet Muhammad making a mistake when this poor disabled man approached him and he was meeting with leaders of his tribe [Qur’an, Surah 80], that had a way of breaking down the narratives around accountability that my parents tried to inculcate. I learned all these lessons about questioning power from the Qur’an.
Mariam
I grew up with parents who had this social justice bent to how the Qur'an is interpreted, so that really resonates with me. To switch gears to another text, I’m assuming that the title is a reference to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993)?
Lamya
Yeah, it is.
Mariam
Could you talk a little bit about your relationship to that work? Why that title?
Lamya
The book was originally titled Maryam is a Dyke, which I really loved, because it’s so unapologetic, and so in your face, but ultimately, I decided that I didn’t want to alienate people who would pick it up otherwise. That includes more traditional Muslims and older lesbians—“dyke” used to be a slur used in violent ways. I also didn’t want straight people saying “dyke” like that. I found myself really thinking about the books that changed how I write and were models for how I write. I read Stone Butch Blues in my early twenties, and it blew my mind. One of the things I love best about it is that it’s a very personal story about the character, Jess, but at the same time, it’s also deeply, deeply political. It uses day-to-day stories to build complex political arguments. That’s something I really wanted to do in my book, to speak to something bigger in people.
Mariam
There’s a real sense that the personal is political here.
Questions of community come up a lot. One of the real challenges you face in the book is feeling alienated—facing Islamophobia in the queer community, and facing anti-queerness in the Muslim community. Of course, those lines aren’t clear—in the porousness, there’s a kind freedom. How did you imagine your audience or think about the book’s mission?
Lamya
When I was writing this book, I thought about audience a lot, about what sort of book I would have wanted to read around queerness. And not just when I was younger, but also now. To me, it was really important to write a book that felt unapologetically Muslim, unapologetically queer, and unapologetically queer and Muslim. I hoped that it would reach all of those communities.
Based on the messages that I get on various social media apps, it’s reached people who are queer and Muslim, and I feel like it’s also reached a lot of [other] queer folks. But what’s been harder is reaching the more traditional Muslim community. Community, honestly, saved me. It taught me how to live, especially as someone who didn’t grow up with models for how to be Muslim. You know, none of us do. We don’t grow up with models. That can be really hard, but being in community with other people who were also figuring these things out, you could be messy and flawed. You could figure out how to navigate this thing called life together.
Mariam
Are there ways that the message has been misinterpreted?
Lamya
It’s about six months since the book’s been out in the world. Most of the negativity that I get is from straight Muslims, or presumably straight Muslims—that’s been pretty heartbreaking and intense. These are people that I would pray next to in the mosque.
Mariam
That’s very difficult.
Lamya
It’s sad. But for all the people who say negative things, there’s also been this incredible outpouring of love for the book. That’s been really, truly worth it. And I know that even with the negative responses, that spreads the word to people who might need to read a book about forgiveness—I’m hopeful for that.
Mariam
That’s a very generous way of looking at it. As a writer, I was curious what your experience of the publishing process was? Was there resistance to hearing this story?
Lamya
I got really lucky with both an agent and an editor who understood the book and what I was trying to do with it. But when we were on submission, we had some responses that pushed back against both my anonymity and the story itself.
Mariam
Can you talk about that boundary? How is your anonymity productive for the work?
Lamya
Most of the pushback that we got was more in terms of [this question]: will the anonymity create distance between the reader and the author? That’s such a bizarre concept, because a memoir is so intensely personal. The writing is what creates the connection between the reader and the writer, not being able to see the writer’s face. The last chapter is about newness, and having boundaries and choosing your battles and figuring out how to fight—writing that really reinforced for me that I wanted to publish this anonymously.
Mariam
Feel free not to answer, but I was wondering if there’s something to the pseudonym “Lamya.”
Lamya
Oh, I can talk about that. When I was growing up, my mom would always tell me and my brother stories about what she wanted to name us before she got shot down by my grandmother. The name that she wanted to give me was “Lamya.” So I grew up imagining an alternate version of myself that was named “Lamya”—who would I have been? How would that have changed my life? When it came to picking a pseudonym, it felt like this name and this persona had always been there.
Mariam
That’s beautiful. In my family, too, there were these unused names with a real sense of loss around them. There’s a reality to this version of yourself that’s in the name “Lamya.”
Lamya
Or uncanniness. This person that is you that you recognize, but also don't recognize.
Mariam
I imagine that really opened the door for the writing process. This name has been lingering there; it expresses a part of you.
Lamya
Yeah. Before this book, I wrote essays under the same name. It’s an extension of this writing persona, and an alternate version of me.
Mariam
One of my favorite paradigm shifts in the book is the reframing of “coming out” as “inviting in”—I just wanted to invite you to speak to that.
Lamya
I first came across this idea of “inviting in” in Darnell Moore’s writings [like his July 12, 2012, post in the Feminist Wire and No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America (2018)]. It fundamentally changed how I think about telling people about my queerness. Instead of coming out of this dark, dank place into a bigger, freer world—which isn’t how coming out has played out for me, or for a lot of people—I liked this concept of inviting in, where there’s a circle of trust that someone is being invited into. [Queerness] doesn't have to be this claustrophobic place with a closed door. Actually, it’s more of an extending-out of trust and love and generosity.
When I was younger, the narrative around queerness was that you have to come out because that’s what we do. That’s how we increase representation. That’s how you’re engaged in activism. But none of that rang true to me. I feel like the conversation around coming out has really shifted from ten, fifteen years ago. There are more nuanced takes now, and people aren’t telling kids to come out because it’ll get better, like Dan Savage did [in the “It Gets Better” movement].
Mariam
One line that I just loved, that stayed with me, was: “When it comes to my family, my hijab is my beard.” There’s this sense that religion can be a form of passing.
Lamya
That’s actually one of my favorite lines too. I can’t believe no one has asked me about it before. It was a little bit like, did no one get it?
Mariam
It’s such a strong punch.
Lamya
There’s this way in which concepts like modesty—or even friendship—can hide queerness. But “hide” feels like the wrong word here. I don’t know what the right word is, but there are ways in which things can be visible and invisible at the same time. I really love that interplay. I sometimes get frustrated by the way that wearing hijab means that I’m not read as queer in the same ways, but what I do love about it is that it’s allowed me to navigate my queerness in ways that feel comfortable to me without being easily readable to those who might miss it. Definitely with my family, not just hijab but also my angry feminist rants —all that allows me to choose whom to reveal my queerness to versus not.
Mariam
To ask a question that I think a lot of people have on their minds, why not give it all up? What keeps you tethered to the work of reinterpretation?
Lamya
A big part of it is just really, deeply personal. I can’t imagine this life with all its beauty and all its darkness, with all this incredible joy and sadness—I can't imagine any of this would be worth it if there isn’t a creator or God, if there isn't like a sense of justice at the end. I don’t believe that there’s only one path to God, and I believe that God can be different things to different people. It doesn’t have to be this idea of a creator and originator. Islam is what works for me in that it allows me to live a life that feels intentional and thoughtful. I think that’s what God wants of us. Living a life that’s not rote.
Mariam
There’s a moment on page 140 that seems to accept the good Muslim/bad Muslim opposition that normative American culture is so invested in. That divide often serves the interests of power more than it serves us—we need to learn how to have solidarity and understanding among Muslims who didn’t arrive at the same conclusions—so I wanted to ask you about it.
Lamya
I first came across this idea of “good Muslim/bad Muslim” in Mahmood Mamdani’s work, where he writes about this dichotomy in which good Muslims are “civilized” and “modern” and collude with the state in terms of rooting out the bad Muslims—the “terrorists” whom we must be saved from. I was in New York when the NYPD was spying on Muslim Student Associations, infiltrating halaqas and white water rafting trips, noting down things like how many times people prayed as proxies for whether or not they were threats to the state. I think about this a lot. Who is seen as the “right kind of Muslim” and how that changes based on where [you are]. At mosques and a lot of the Muslim spaces I grew up in, not practicing in recognizable ways was seen as “bad,” as not Muslim enough. It’s hard—it’s so hard—to exist in ways that feel true to yourself, whether your practice—or lack thereof—is being policed by the state or the mosque or your community. I wish there were more genuine solidarity and expansiveness around that.
Mariam
In the book you set up a parallel between colorism and the legacy of colonialism in the Gulf, where you grew up, and racism in the U.S. As someone who has experienced both of these societies, could you speak to the specificity of institutionalized racism across these contexts as well as its globalized structure? The legacy of plantation enslavement and violence against indigenous communities has shaped the American story.
Lamya
When I came to the U.S. at seventeen, I had to learn what racism looked like here, and how differently it played out because of the specificities of slavery and genocide. In the Middle East, where I grew up, there’s all this talk about Muslims being one ummah, and how racism isn’t a thing in Islam and how God doesn’t see skin color. There’s very little talk about race or racism, even though it’s clearly there: it’s present in the [treatment of] migrant labor; in who gets paid the highest salaries; in who’s seen as an authority. When I came to the U.S., I only knew how to recognize [such inequalities] by feeling the injustice in my bones. I didn’t know how to talk about race. I learned how by reading Black writers—Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, to name a few. These histories are both specific and contain themes that are universal.
Mariam
At its heart this book is a love story. We not only see you fall in love with Liv, but also see a character who learns to love herself. Writer to writer, did you consider writing a novel or why a memoir? Why did you choose to tell the story this way?
Lamya
I actually toyed with the idea: do I want to write this as autobiographical fiction? The big reason why I wanted [Hijab Butch Blues] to be a memoir is because this is a book that was written out of an attempt at telling a story that felt true. And, going back to that idea of creating a connection between the writer and the reader, I wanted to make that connection feel close. But there’s a lot of blurring [between genres], and memory’s fragmented and imperfect. Truly, a shout to all the fiction writers. Conjuring up entire worlds—that’s sorcery.
