Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues as an Epistemological Intervention

New Books Session

1. Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues (The Dial Press, 2023) is a landmark publication of key methodological significance for the study of gender, sexuality, and women in Islam. Beyond providing rich autobiographical documentation of queer Muslim experiences as a memoir written by a queer Muslim woman, Hijab Butch Blues makes an epistemological intervention in authoritative knowledge production about the Qur’an. Lamya H carves out space for ambivalent readings of the Qur’an, grounded in her experiences as a queer Muslim woman, rather than relying on academic or conventionally authoritative readings of the Qur’an to grant authority to her own knowledge of the Qur’an’s guidance. This epistemological approach to the Qur’an is not a side project of the book retrieved through elaborate literary criticism; rather this overt, deliberate interaction with the Qur’an centrally drives the book and is reflected in its structure. Each chapter is formed around Lamya H’s interaction with figures found in or significantly related to the Qur’an, and her experiential identification with references to them in the Qur’an. Therefore, Hijab Butch Blues merits study as a methodological intervention in knowledge production about the Qur’an which is significant for the study of gender and women in Islam – even if outside the category of books conventionally deemed academic or scholarly. 

2. Hijab Butch Blues is woven around the parallels between the author’s own self-realizations and revelations received by Qur’anic figures from God. These “self-revelations” of the author foreground – but are not limited to – her evolving understandings and acceptance of her queerness. Lamya H’s self-revelations reflect an incisive intersectional analysis, and their scope is broader than realizations about identity. As evidence of her methodological intervention in reading the Qur’an, she writes of performing “not cursory translations, not processed tafsirs chock-full of unacknowledged conjecture, but readings that are my own … Messy readings that allow me to be both enraged and inspired at the same time by this living text, this breathing text—as the living, breathing me.”[i] As such, Lamya H performs a “living, breathing” exegesis of the Qur’an and develops an embodied theology grounded in her gendered experience as a queer woman, neither of which seek a neat coherence between meanings of the Qur’an which are queer-/women-affirming and those which are not.  

3. Lamya H draws on her embodied experience as a source of knowledge in reading the Qur’an. Reflecting on her experiences as a queer woman, she identifies with the Qur’anic figure of Maryam, who like her is “born a girl, born wrong, whose life was never her own.”[ii] Through the insights of her experience, Lamya H detects the queerness of Maryam, who emerges from the Qur’anic text as among those women referenced in the Qur’an who are “uninterested in men” and “rage to God.”[iii] In reading Qur’anic references to Musa, Lamya H understands her queerness as an experience of revelation through his prophetic example, writing of “accept[ing]” her queerness “for what it is: a miracle. A difficult miracle, like Musa’s.”[iv] Lamya H also understands her life through the trials of Hajar and Asiya and the prophets Muhammad, Nuh, Yusuf, and Yunus; in turn, her experiences enable her to read each figure’s story with new insights. Adjacent to these exegetical approaches to the Qur’an, the book also develops an embodied theology in laying out an experiential understanding of God as “genderqueer,” “nonbinary,” and “trans.”[v]

In addition, a chapter on jinn becomes an apparatus for analyzing racism and Islamophobia – a set of reflections later developed into a critical analysis of holding commitments to both Muslim queerness and to Muslim solidarities against racist anti-Muslim tropes doubly impacting queer Muslims. In a bold epistemological intervention, Lamya H challenges boundaries of authoritative knowledge by framing her experiential knowledge of the Qur’an as a form of “revelation” itself, performing “readings where I imagine God speaking directly to me, the verses a conduit for our connection.”[vi] Here she challenges interpretive and theological norms of the tafsir tradition which elide women’s and queer people’s experiences as authoritative sources of knowledge in Qur’anic interpretation.

4. Hijab Butch Blues engages and advances theoretical/methodological developments in the field. First, it reflects what Sa’diyya Shaikh has termed a “tafsir of practice,” which Shaikh defines as a “Qur’anic hermeneutics informed by the full, embodied realities of Muslim women.”[vii] This hermeneutics entails the “transformation and redefinition of traditional boundaries of what counts as Qur’anic exegesis,” a transformation which Hijab Butch Blues enacts.[viii] Second, as a memoir rather than a conventional scholarly book, the book pushes the boundaries of who and what kind of writing can perform tafsir; as Shaikh points out, tafsir is not confined to traditionally authoritative commentators or Muslim feminist scholars, and thus not attributable only to “a scholarly elite” accredited by Islamic ijazas or the academy.[ix] Third, the book breaks new ground by centering the examination of queer experiences, communities, and theologies; thus it challenges the heterocentrism and gender binaries framing the field in terms of analytical territory and method. Fourth, the book performs feminist and queer-affirming interpretations of the Qur’an which offer a way out of the interpretive impasses I have studied in my scholarship, by resisting the construction of a coherence between Qur’anic meanings of gender hierarchy and mutuality. Fifth, the book speaks to source methodological questions in my research on gendered embodiment regarding conventional sources’ silence on experiences of Muslims who are marginalized by gender/sexuality hierarchies, providing an important example of an alternative source which advances our understanding of diverse genders and sexualities among Muslims.

[i] Lamya H, Hijab Butch Blues (New York: The Dial Press, 2023), 212-213.

[ii] Lamya H, 14.

[iii] Lamya H, 23-24.

[iv] Lamya H, 97, 117.

[v] Lamya H, 72, 83.

[vi] Lamya H, 212.

[vii] Sa’diyya Shaikh, “A Tafsir of Praxis: Gender, Marital Violence, and Resistance in a South African Muslim Community,” in Violence against Women in Contemporary World Religions: Roots and Cures, eds. Daniel C. Maguire and Sa’diyya Shaikh (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007), 69. 

[viii]Shaikh, 70.

[ix] Shaikh, 89.