Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

Lamya opens her memoir with a memory of being in class at age 14 and reading Surah Maryam, a portion of the Quran that describes the story of Maryam (known as Mary in English). Having never read the story in English translation, she remembers being struck by the passage that describes Maryam in pain while giving birth to Isa (Jesus), saying, “Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten” (7).

Lamya also wanted to die when she was 14, even though she believed that from an outside perspective, nothing appeared to be wrong in her life. She fantasized about disappearing and “practice[d]” it whenever she could. When she was at dinner parties with her parents’ friends or out at the mall with her friends, she would attempt to disappear by not speaking or hiding from her reflection. Rather than wanting to take her own life, Lamya wanted “like Maryam […] to be in oblivion, forgotten” (13).

Lamya recounts the story of Maryam from the Quran. When Maryam’s mother is pregnant, she assumes that the child will be a boy and promises it “a life in the service of God” (13). Maryam is born a girl instead, but God “accepts” the gift anyway, and Maryam is sent to live a chaste life of study and work in a mosque. When Maryam is a teenager, an angel appears to tell her that she is pregnant with God’s child. Fearing judgment, Maryam sneaks out of the mosque to give birth alone in the desert, angry with God for the pain that she is suffering and “for all the ways in which her life has never been her own” (16).

Lamya realized that she was gay when she was 14, even though she didn’t have the words for it at the time. She developed a crush on an Irish economics teacher in her high school. Lamya began playing pranks on the teacher to get her attention and realized that this feeling was similar to what other girls described feeling for boys. Lamya felt ashamed of her feelings and did not share them with anyone. She “want[ed] to die” (20).

The week after reading the passage about Maryam wanting to die, her class read a passage about Maryam telling the handsome messenger angel to leave her alone because “no man has touched [her]” (21). Lamya asked the teacher if that meant that Maryam “didn’t like men” (22). The teacher responded that Maryam reacted the way she did because she was “pious” and knew that God was watching her, so she rejected temptation.

Lamya believes that “Maryam is a dyke” (23), even though she would not have expressed this idea in those words when she was a teenager. She felt connected to the figure of Maryam because of her rejection of men, thrilled at the feeling that other women could feel like she does. That night at dinner when her mother told her that she would have to get married to have someone who would take care of her, Lamya decided to find out how to create a life for herself without a husband.

Lamya recounts a time when she spent the night at her Asma Aunty’s house when she was seven. Asma Aunty, a cool aunt, told Lamya and her brother about jinn, which Asma Aunty described as “evil” beings that live invisibly around them. Asma Aunty told them about a time when she saw a jinn in the shape of a mud-covered cat that followed her and then disappeared. The story gave Lamya nightmares.

When Lamya was in third grade, she and her brother watched a rich Lebanese girl named Rasha play with a pogo stick on the playground. Their parents encouraged them to ask her to borrow it. They did, and Rasha let them play with her pogo stick and showed them how to use it. One day, Rasha wouldn’t let them use the pogo stick anymore. When Lamya’s brother asked why, Rasha’s brother told them that it was because they are “dirty” “curry people” with brown skin and that spending time with them would make Rasha “like them.”

Someone in Lamya’s seventh-grade biology class asked the teacher why she always wore a hijab even when there were no men around. The teacher explained that it was because one of her cousins was possessed by a jinn one day while in the bathroom without her hijab, so she wore a hijab all the time to protect herself. The story terrified Lamya.

At 15, Lamya’s math teacher assigned her to work with one of the rich Arab girls, Lina, on a project. Lamya explains that as a brown person who speaks Urdu, she was at the bottom of the race/class hierarchy in the country. Lina was not allowed to go to Lamya’s house to work on the project, most of which Lamya ended up completing by herself. After the project, Lamya and Lina remained friendly, although Lamya’s mother believed that Lina was just using Lamya to do her homework. Lina’s family had a “sweet” Pakistani driver, Masood, who drove Lamya home from the mall after she and Lina went out for burgers.

One day, Lamya went to Lina’s house. It was large and opulent. Lamya was shocked to see a picture of Lina and her mother in shorts, which Lamya was never allowed to wear. Lina explained that she was allowed to wear shorts in the United States because there aren’t creepy “kind of rapey” people there like Masood, the driver (45). Lamya wondered if Lina was referring to brown people like Lamya’s father.

At 16, Lamya went to an Eid party with her parents’ friends’ families. One of the other teenagers, Majid, proposed that they tell jinn stories. Lamya was afraid and recited a prayer of protection in her head. Majid told a story about a woman wearing an abaya and full niqab who tried to lure a woman praying into the basement of the mosque. When the woman objected, the other woman disappeared, leaving only her abaya, gloves, and socks behind.

At 17, Lamya moved to the United States to attend a prestigious college. Before moving into a dorm on campus, Lamya spent the week at her uncle’s house in the suburbs. He taught her about aspects of American culture, such as the rules of football. He told her to always keep photocopies of her passport, visa, and student ID on her at all times.

At university, Lamya understood why her uncle gave her this advice, as she was often asked for her ID. She started objecting when asked for her ID by security guards. However, when she was on a Greyhound from New York City to upstate New York to visit her uncle, Lamya did not object when uniformed men boarded her bus and demanded to see her ID. She learned “when not to push back” (55).

Lamya went to graduate school in New York. One afternoon, she was with her friend from the mosque, Rashid, whose parents were Garveyites (Black nationalists). When Lamya complained that white students get better opportunities, Rashid said that Lamya was intimidated by white people because she had internalized white supremacy. Lamya began to study social justice movements and realized that the problem is not her, it’s white supremacy.

One day during Ramadan while living in New York, Lamya read the Surah Al-Jinn. She realized that the scripture says that jinn are not evil; some follow God, and others do not. They are different but not necessarily “dirty.” She identified with the jinn; she recognized that, like them, she is different but not something dangerous. Lamya decided to stop hating jinn and then to stop hating herself.

In a series of fragments, Lamya describes God as being there before the beginning. Then, God created the world and the language used to describe it. God also used this language to teach God’s 99 names that “push the boundaries of our imagination” (62). Lamya lists some of these names, such as “Al-Rahman, the Most Merciful” (62).

At six years old, Lamya had daily Quran study at home with an Islamic scholar, a maulvi saab. One day, she asked her teacher if Allah was a man. The maulvi saab replied that Allah is neither a man nor a woman. Lamya asked why they use the Urdu word mian, meaning “sir,” when referring to Allah if Allah is not a man. The maulvi saab responded that mian is simply a term of respect, but Lamya was not satisfied with this response. She began to wonder if she, too, might be neither a man nor a woman.

At age 10, Lamya enjoyed going to Wednesday religious school in the evenings. She was placed in the advanced classes. Lamya asked the teacher, Uncle Karim, why Allah’s names and pronouns are translated as masculine. Uncle Karim replied that it was simply a convention because “saying she would have been weak sauce” (68). Lamya realized that she wasn’t going to get convincing answers from anyone and that she had to find them herself.

At 23, Lamya was part of a women’s halaqa (religious) study circle in New York. The women were a little older than Lamya with professional jobs, marriages, and children. They often got distracted by talking about things like childcare during their scriptural study. One day, a woman’s cousin joined the group who used female pronouns for God as an act of feminism. Lamya argued with her that it would be better to use “it,” “ze,” or “they” because God is nonbinary. The cousin responded, “[T]hat’s what the transgenders use,” and Lamya suggested that “maybe Allah is trans” (71). The host quickly changed the subject, and Lamya felt that transness was “erased from the space” and did not return to the study circle (71). She decided to use “they” for God because God “transcends gender” and to explore her own gender identity, too.

In fragmented paragraphs, Lamya describes the creation of Adam and Hawa (Eve). She cites the scripture from Surah al-Nisa that states, “Be mindful of your Lord Who created you from a single soul, and made from her, her mate” (73). Lamya interprets this as Adam being “both masculine and feminine, created holding both, by a God who is neither” (73). When Adam and Hawa are banished from the garden of Eden, their punishment is “the rigidity of gender” (73).

When Lamya was a child, Lamya’s mother wished that she was more feminine and less of a tomboy. One day when Lamya attended a family wedding, she wanted to watch cricket with the boys, but her mother took her into the room where the women were getting ready. The women put makeup on Lamya, and when she saw her face done up, she burst into tears. The women felt that she was ungrateful for their efforts to make her look pretty.

Lamya recounts times when her gender was seen as ambiguous. Once on the street in New York, a man spit at her and asked if she was “a man or a woman” (77). Another time, a Transportation Security Administration agent called her “sir,” and she worried that she would get in trouble for being deceptive while going through the scanner and experienced a panic attack. Another time, Lamya’s six-year-old cousin gave her a drawing that she had done of Lamya that she labeled “girl” “so that no one gets confused” (79). When Lamya told her that some people are nonbinary and that boys get treated better than girls, her aunt and uncle objected to her “feminist indoctrination” of their child.

One day, as an adult living in New York, Lamya was waiting in line to buy clothes bought online. Her trans masculine friend joined her. He asked if Lamya used chest binders or thought about top surgery, and Lamya was embarrassed. Later, he asked her if she had ever thought about transitioning. Lamya found the question absurd because she had thought a lot about her gender presentation and knew that she was nonbinary. She ignored the question.

Lamya describes how the language that God created is full of power and notes that “gender is nowhere within these concepts that define the Divine” (82). She notes that God created Adam, whom she interprets as “man and woman and neither and both and not a mistake” (83). Lamya asserts that she is likewise not a mistake but rather a divine creation.