Introduction. Multiple Invisibilities: Space, Resistance and LGBTIQA+ Muslim Perspectives

[…] despite identifying as queer for years, I still felt like an outsider within the LGBTQ community. I had naively assumed that no longer keeping my queer identity a secret would help me find my people. In reality, it pushed me further into the hole of isolation. It seemed that no one in the queer spaces I visited—dance parties, art shows, Pride events—was curious about why there were hardly any people of colour—and hardly any Muslims—in their midst. I felt even more invisible. (Habib 2019: 166)

When invited to participate in this special section and write an introduction to it, the above passage came to mind. Samra Habib's memoir, ‘We Have Always Been Here’, is a poignant reflection on the experiences of many people who sit at the intersections of LGBTIQA+ and Islamic identities. We are grateful for this opportunity to bring more of those experiences to the Journal of Intercultural Studies in the form of this special section, comprising of papers written by and with the community, and highlighting the importance of Queer Muslims’ own lived experiences.

The papers bring to the fore the importance of acknowledging all intersections of a person's identity in order to challenge dominant narratives and confront systemic barriers to accessing academic, activist, cultural, health, religious and social spaces and supports. The contributions in this special section represent a record of people's own voices, on how they might be seen as an intersectional whole rather than as a sum of disparate parts. This is in line with Maalouf’s (2000: 2) declaration of ‘I haven't got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in a mixture that is unique to me, just as other people's identity is unique to them as individuals.’ The queer parts of our identities are not divisible and separated from the Muslim parts, with both being a crucial part of the overall construction of identity that affects how we engage with and experience the world.

That said, these are still individual experiences, and we acknowledge that we are a part of an ongoing narrative that has many other voices and stories – there is ‘a necessary heterogeneity and diversity’ (Hall 1990: 235) in experiences, and there is no single defining factor, or identity category, that dominates. We hold space in this regard for other experiences, ideas, and lives, in the hope that speaking our own truths will allow for other voices to speak up and be heard.

‘The Self That Is at Odds with Everything Around It’: Conceptualising the Queer Muslim

While there has been increasing acknowledgement of and scholarship around LGBTIQA+ Muslims (Habib 2019, Habib 2013, Kugle 2014), there is a noted lack of presence and representation in the social spheres of people who occupy the varied intersections of this space. However, given the degree of variation within these identities, plus the ongoing impact of coloniality and patriarchy in LGBTIQA+ spaces as well as in Muslim spaces, it is important to note that there are complex interplays happening within these identities even without their intersections with each other.

For the purposes of this collection of research papers and personal accounts, we acknowledge the dominance of certain groups within the broader Muslim and LGBTIQA+ spaces. For those who already sit at the margins within these communities, being at the intersections of multiple marginalised identities means that even when finding community, there is a lot more to consider than a simple category of ‘Queer’ or ‘Muslim’. It is an uncomfortable truth that there are multiple levels of erasure when using a broad term as ‘Queer Muslim’ to describe this group, and even within our own identities there is significant variation in how we negotiate these categories. Where possible and appropriate, particular distinctions will be made, for example, if the experiences described are of a person belonging to a broader Sunni-normative community, or if the person comes from a minority Shi’a, Ahmadi or other group. However, we recognise that the claiming of Muslim identity by people from these minority groups is also in itself an act of resistance against conservative branches of Islam that would brand these groups as heretical. This will also extend to the category of ‘Queer’, acknowledging that there are many ways to be queer – using the acronym LGBTIQA+ is imperfect, but it is one way of acknowledging that there are multiple groups within this space. However, using the word ‘Queer’ provides a space for that intersectionality between multiple groups (Rahman 2010). Queer in this context is also seen as a political identity, not just in relation to sexuality and gender, but also as a reference to ‘queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live’ as hooks (2015) says in the video ‘Are you still a slave? Liberating the black female body’. As such, the construction of the ‘Queer Muslim’ is also to do with acknowledging multiple levels of queerness – in communities, in societies, as political and academic activists, in health and support systems, and in our own existence. Declaring ourselves as Queer Muslims – no less of one than the other – is an act of resistance.

This construction of the Queer Muslim as an intersectional identity is also to acknowledge the multiple levels of invisibility that we face, in terms of our representation in social spaces. There is a common misconception that these identities that we embody are mutually exclusive, and this in itself sets a dangerous precedent around any politicised, hybrid identities such as ours. This comes to the fore particularly in events where our identities collide in a public, violent way. For example, after the shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, the dominant narrative focused on the shooter being a Muslim man who was allegedly motivated by homophobia to attack LGBTIQA+ people at the club. This was amplified in the US media (Meyer 2020), with ripple effects across the world, including media here in Australia focusing on the homophobia of Muslims in the aftermath of the shooting (Jackson 2016). For one of our authors, Marziya, this was the event that forced them to ‘come out’, in an attempt to defend themselves against the accusations of homophobia, despite their not feeling safe about revealing their identity in such a public manner. This is a form of societal violence, whereby the forced revelation of a queer identity is to safeguard against retribution due to societal Islamophobia, without acknowledging the various forms of queerphobia that also affect Queer Muslims.

Closer to home, this was also seen in conversations around Australia's same-sex marriage (SSM) survey in 2017, where the largest concentrations of ‘No’ votes were seen to come from 8 areas in New South Wales, many of which are home to high immigrant populations. Much of the opposition to the SSM vote came from predominantly religious groups, with a focus on it being a moral issue rather than a civil rights one (Gravelle and Carson 2019: 189). The revelation that the lowest support for the ‘Yes’ vote came from Blaxland, an electorate that had the highest percentage of Muslim voters, as well as Islam being cited as one of the highest indicators of a ‘No’ vote according to data distributed by the ABS (Livsey and Ball 2017), seemed to confirm the stereotype of Muslims as a homophobic group. Anecdotal reports of Muslims being harassed about their voting patterns, including increased Islamophobia in daily settings, seemed to solidify the barrier between them and a broader LGBTIQA+ (and affirming) group, resulting in the complete erasure of LGBTIQA+ identifying Muslims. Despite reports that the lower ‘Yes’ vote could also be attributed to a failure on the part of the Yes campaign itself to link with these communities (Bianchi 2017), the broader implications were clear: there seemed to be a link between religion, particularly Islam, and homophobia; a concept that was amplified by government officials including the Prime Minister at the time, and still remains part of the recognised narrative.

Adding to the issue is the framing of LGBTIQA+ Muslims as anomalies, more aligned with Western ideals, and considered to be in need of ‘saving’ from their Islamic communities and families. This neocolonial narrative does not leave room for the conceptualisation of queer identities away from existing Western constructions, despite there being widespread acknowledgement of sexual and gender diversity across cultures where Islam is considered the main form of religion. This is compounded by ‘historical amnesia’ (Dalacoura 2014) around the existence of homo/bi/asexual and trans/non-binary gender identities that predate colonial incursions into these areas, and a denial of alternative discourses that acknowledge and normalise these identities. The legacy of patriarchy further exacerbates the situation, as a narrow interpretation of the Islamic faith has sadly been used to continue the ongoing oppressions against minority groups, including sexual and gender minorities, that do not conform with the power structure that benefits hetero- and cisgender men. It is our belief that this goes against the very basic teaching of Islam that promotes peace and justice by eradicating oppressions. Yet, the systemic power inequality that has continued to persist means that we are continuing to see oppressions masked as religion, with the silencing of learning and debates that are intended to disrupt and end injustice.

Within many multicultural communities, discussions of homosexuality – and by association, broader queer practices and identities – position it as a largely Western construct (Rahman 2014), considered to be part of the ongoing cultural imperialism of the West on African, Asian and Middle Eastern populations. Rahman (2010) explores this ‘clash’ discourse, that ‘positions a progressive democratic secular West against a conservative, undemocratic and theocratic Islam’ in an exploration of a Gay Muslim identity as a site of intersectionality. The narrative thread of a Queer Muslim having to hide different parts of their identities from family and broader faith communities is an uncomfortable truth. In these contexts, multiple factors, attributed to religious expectations and conservative, cisheteropatriarchal interpretations of the Qur’an, result in faith spaces that have left little room for LGBTIQA+ Muslims to exist. Where there are alternative interpretations, they may not be as well-known or ascribed to a particular situation. Scholars who try to tackle the question of queer relationships in an Islamic framework have sometimes used an essentialist lens to interpret the Qur’an and Hadith when talking about forms of same-sex desire (Alipour 2017). This lens poses issues when talking about constructed queer identities and it does not cater for variations beyond simple same-sex attraction, asexuality, or for various forms of attraction beyond the sexual, such as romantic or aesthetic. It also returns to the pathologisation of transgender identities. Zaharin and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2020) have explored this in how particular fatwas in both Sunni and Shi’a traditions have challenged the dominant interpretations of the rights and responsibilities of transgender Muslims, even as they acknowledge the ongoing oppression and danger that still exists within the broader community.

Yet, explorations of the Qur’an and Hadith that discuss the complex identities of non hetero- and non-cisgender Muslims, and our space in the Islamic world, are sparse and often hijacked by religious conservatives who are intent on dehumanising those who do not fit with the hetero- and cis-normative imagery of Islam and Muslims, even if it means rejecting God's own creation: an essential teaching that we were taught not to do. This shows that religion is not static or neutral; faith is open to interpretation based on the power that exists at a particular time and in a particular space. Hendricks (2010) explores some of these alternative interpretations, reminding us that much of the conversation around homosexuality in Islam is in direct contradiction to the messages of equality and freedom found in the Qur’an. For many Queer Muslims, our journey of retaining and reconciling our queerness and our faith is to go against the tide of conservatism and question the cisheteropatriarchal interpretations that pervade the space. At the same time, we also need to fervently defend our faith in the face of global Islamophobia as a byproduct of Western coloniality, which can be a complicated endeavour.

It is when this is the only narrative that is made available, and particularly when it is shaped by broader spectacles of coloniality and kyriarchy, that we have to look for and amplify other narratives, many of which exist beyond existing academic discourses. Intersectional spaces that are explicitly addressing the reality of being queer and Muslim do exist: figures such as Nur Warsame, an openly-gay Imam in Melbourne, as well as queer-affirming Islamic organisations such as Sydney Queer Muslims and the Muslim Collective, have provided a public counter to the ‘you can't be Muslim and queer’ narrative that is perpetuated from both Muslim and LGBTIQA+ communities. These spaces exist as ‘borderlands’ (Anzaldúa 1987), sites where multiple identities can overlap and exist, and allow for critical interrogation of dominant narratives. What is crucial here is they are led by and home to those who are the embodiment of the mestiza, as they incorporate both conflicting and supporting elements of these multiple identities in a way that acknowledges the importance of experiences beyond the dominant narrative and works against the invisibility that we face.

Decoloniality, Intersectionality and Queer Muslim Experiences

Scholarship around LGBTIQA+ Muslims often comes from Western academics with little acknowledgement of those with lived experiences, with findings restricted due to the existing gatekeeping structures of academia. Habib (2019: 175) states that ‘much has been written in academia about Queer Muslims, but often the ideas and findings are disseminated by scholars who have far more privilege than the subjects of their work.’ Queer Muslims are often considered as objects to be studied under Western eyes rather than having the agency to tell our own stories. The articles in this special section aim to trouble this idea, with approaches that take into account decolonial perspectives, autoethnography, and intersectionality as core components in addressing the ways in which LGBTIQA+ Muslims navigate social spaces and access key health services. As Queer Muslim academics, researchers, and activists, we often have to fight for holistic consideration of our identities, and are constantly facing structural barriers to scholarship.

A decolonial framework is not an option – it is essential for us to privilege voices and experiences that break away from preconceived ideas, and colonial norms and structures. At the same time, we face structural and systemic barriers in our activism and scholarship, and require support and solidarity to navigate these spaces. Our co-authors, Maria, Reem, and Sekneh, become ‘accomplices’ and ‘co-conspirators’, using their privilege and positioning in academic, cultural, professional and social spaces to create opportunities for minority voices to be heard and to lead. Part of being an accomplice or co-conspirator is to take on ‘the difficult work of enacting change among their own privileged families and communities’, and this is what we request of those who collaborate with us – to not just acknowledge their privilege, but address how it might be used in destabilising dominant narratives (Edwards 2020: 5). This has enabled us, Queer Muslims, to focus on creating a community of belonging, where we share our strengths, engage in a lively and respectful conversation about our faith, and most importantly, banded together in solidarity as we navigate our intersectional self in a world that has been designed to oppress us, so we can provide safety to each other without having to explain ourselves, over and over again.

In writing this introduction, we also reflect on our own positionality and complex identity as Queer Muslims residing in Australia, a land that was colonised by the British Empire at the cost of the genocide and oppression of First Nations people, and with a long history of Christianity as shaping its societal norms and values. We acknowledge our presence as sojourners and settlers on this stolen land, interrogating our own complicity and presenting our stories as resistance and solidarity with all those who are yet to be heard, as part of decolonial practice. Through sharing our stories we hope this allows for other voices to come forward.

Marziya comes into this space through a practice of reflection and activism. As a Shi’a Muslim, they grew up with traditions of azadari (mourning and lamentation) and collective commemorations of resistance, informing their worldview and cementing a belief in the importance of always standing against oppression. Being part of a minority group within the broader Muslim community means that they are all too familiar with the intricacies of negotiating with dominant narratives and what it means to be on the margins of the margins. This has also informed their own understanding and construction of queerness, as they navigate being asexual and panromantic in highly sexualised queer spaces, being non-binary in heavily gendered faith spaces, as well as other intersections of culture, class, neurodivergence and education. They draw from cultural and formative experiences across South- and South-East Asia, East Africa and now Western Australia, creating a space that weaves together several understandings of faith and queerness. It is an ongoing process of reflection and identity construction that is not always easy to bring together, while also having to contend with lateral violence and erasures from Muslim and queer communities.

They are an artist, activist and academic, with all three of these practices being intertwined as a way of engaging in resistance, reconciling seemingly disparate parts of the self, as well as an expression of their complex, hybrid identity. In their practice as a protest photographer, Marziya takes an empathetic approach, grounded in decolonial, feminist and queer ways of looking. Engaging in this practice is a way of amplifying the voices of ‘the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard’ (Roy 2004). As such, they reflect on their practice as a visual representation of resistance, actively reclaiming the right for the marginalised to be seen and heard. This hearkens back to both the stories of resistance that are central to their faith, and as a way of addressing the multiple invisibilities they face as part of a queer minority.

Budi, who came to Australia as an international student in 1998, went through their own journey of embracing all aspects of their intersecting identities, including their sexuality, gender, and faith. For Budi, their journey of reconciling their faith came with the pain of silencing their spiritual self for many years, as they tried to find a place for themselves within the predominantly White-Anglo, Melbourne's LGBTIQA+ communities. The desire to be accepted resulted in years of not knowing how and where to position their faith, especially with the rise of conservatism in the Islamic world that punishes those who dare to ‘deviate’ from the convention of heterosexuality and cisgenderism. It was a recurring dream of praying that brought Budi back to their spiritual self, and it was through a long process of questioning, researching, wondering, and reconciling where they finally felt that they were able to exist as the way God created them: a person of faith, who is non-binary, and attracted to the same-sex.

In their journey, Budi's positionality also meant that they are privileged in many ways. To be assigned male at birth and continued to be granted privileges in patriarchal societies, the ability to live safely in Australia with the legal protection of LGBTIQA+ communities, to obtain university degrees with the loving support of their family, to be embraced by their family, and to work in an industry where they can disclose their intersectionality to influence change, have not been taken for granted. Yet, Budi has to also constantly navigate their intersectionality to maintain safety, connections to their family, and relationships with their ethnic, national, and faith communities. Navigation is key in Budi's survival, both in Australia and overseas. For Budi, embracing their intersecting identities does not mean imposing it in all spaces and at all times. Budi's intersectionality and positionality mean that they find ways to locate, relocate, connect, reconnect, and build relationships with people and communities that matter to them the most. Faith has reminded Budi to be compassionate, understanding, fighting for justice, and humble in front of God and humankind. The seemingly distant, contradictory, and conflicting universes are coming together, not disjointed, but complementary to one another for Islam believes in the soul, and it is our soul that is cherished in all of its wonderment and complexity.

As for Aisya, it felt like a ‘reincarnation’ when she successfully changed her gender marker to female for all official documents as she started her PhD in Australia in 2012. This change could not be made possible in Malaysia because being a transgender is considered illegal under the shari’ah law. When it comes to decoloniality, she experienced post-colonial effects firsthand as she realised how Eurocentric an Australian university can be. A then supervisor advised that her de-westernization approach to the local understanding of Malaysians’ journalistic social responsibility practices is ‘worthless’ and furthermore, told Aisya that there are ‘reasons why all the greatest universities in the world are from the west’. Today, Aisya locates herself as intersectional progressive Muslim feminist, promoting cultural relativism, intersectionality and decoloniality as she reflects on how we can restore justice in a world that is profoundly full of injustices.

In this special edition, we take a glimpse into Aisya's academic-activist world, the use of practices that reflect intersectionality's origins in BIPOC feminist thought, as well as through analyses that reflect intersectionality's commitment to reflexivity, structural critique, and understanding the complexity of LGBTQIA+ and her religion. As a Muslim transgender woman of colour, Aisya lives at a complex intersection of race and religious oppression that hinders her ability to enjoy freedom and equality. However, coming from a place of socio-economic privilege, Aisya acknowledges that she has had educational advantages through access to learning and healthcare that further assisted her transitioning. Through these privileges and discrimination, she recognises the importance of intersectionality as an analytic tool to challenge and expose complex social inequalities rooted in multiple systems of oppression and privilege, including race, gender, sexuality, social class, nation, age, religion, and ability. She comes to this academic-activist realm from her lived experience of being a progressive Muslim, in addition to having faced enduring oppression due to transphobia throughout her early transition in Malaysia. Narrating her story through critical autoethnography, she challenges the differences in pre- and post-colonial narrative, between religious progressivism and conservatism, and centralising unrepresented (BIPOC transgender) voices that are often silenced and deemed insignificant.

Also, through this Special Section collaboration, Aisya reflects on intersectionality’s foremothers who taught her to unite groups across difference in solidarity against oppression.

In this special edition of the Journal of Intercultural Studies, we would like to invite the readers to come with us on a journey to explore, unpack, and celebrate our unique stories and existence. From Aisya's story of embracing, navigating and affirming her faith and trans identity (Zaharin and Pallotta-Chiarolli, in press), Sekneh's intersectional and decolonising practice to guide her in wondering and exploring her clients’ intersections of faith and LGBTIQA+ identities (Hammoud-Beckett, in press), to Reem's critical analysis of health services and the need to create culturally safe services for Queer Muslims (Sweid et al., in press), we invite you to stand with us and by us. Instead of seeing us from your own worldview and positionality that mark us as ‘different’ and ‘unique’ thus requiring ‘investigation’ and ‘interrogation’, we ask you to see us from the position of humanity; we are humans, just like you. Our identities should not be seen as a marker of progression, or regression, but as an integral part of diverse, complex, and wonderful Islamic communities. We ask you to honour and cherish our stories, and to use the wisdom gained to implement change whereby Queer Muslims are not seen as a rarity, fragile beings that need protecting, but as sources of knowledge, whose bravery, resilience and strengths are guided by our fundamental belief in justice, as we navigate our ways across multiple settings and carry our belief in God with us, wherever we go.

To our beloved Muslim communities, we share our stories not to impose, but to present a narrative that has, for so long, been marginalised, hidden, and presented as deviance, an anomaly, a sin. We ask you to read our journey with an open heart and an open mind, as all of us are navigating our way in this universe, guided by one principle and one principle only: that there is no other God but Allah, and that Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) is God's one and true messenger.

As we write this Introduction, we are reminded of the first 5 phrases given to Muhammad (PBUH) by the angel Jibril (or Gabriel) in Surah Al ‘Alaq: to read, and seek knowledge, and God will guide us in our pursuit of knowledge.

We share our vulnerabilities in our pursuit of knowledge, and we invite you to see a glimpse of our complex, intersectional, and wonderful world. We do not claim to have all the knowledge, nor all the answers, nor be experts in the field. We are not holier than thou, as we have our shortcomings, flaws, mistakes, and desires. We do not claim to be more righteous, and we do not claim our interpretation of the faith to be the ‘truth’. To do so contradicts our invitation to you to constantly reflect, re-construct, and re-examine our faith. We believe in the divinity of the Qur’an, and we would never question such divinity. We ask you to be open to the many different ways that the Qur’an and the Hadith have been interpreted, and to be critical of the power structure that influences interpretations that justify inequality and injustice. We invite you to sit with us, with respect and admiration of one another, so we can question, debate, and come together to develop interpretations of the Qur’an and the Hadith that protect our rights as Queer Muslims. We humbly share what we know thus far so we can construct knowledge together, God's willing.

Lastly, to our Queer Muslim family, we make ourselves visible to show you that you are not alone. We share our pain and joy, and we are connected not just by our faith, but also our desire to exist as we are, free of prejudice and discrimination. We see you, we hear you, and we are with you. We hope that this special edition will provide you with the reassurance that you exist, you matter, and you are worthy of God's love.

May peace be granted to you and your loved ones by Allah, the most gracious and the most merciful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marziya Mohammedali

Marziya Mohammedali is a protest photographer and writer, focusing on narratives of dissent, identity, migration and transition. They are currently undertaking a PhD focusing on identity, protest and photography, looking at how decolonial, feminist and queer ways of knowing and being can support creative activist praxis.

Budi Sudarto

Budi Sudarto is a former AGMC Vice President, the director of Ananda Consultancy, and trainer in intersectionality and inclusion.

Aisya Aymanee M. Zaharin

Aisya Aymanee M. Zaharin sits as one of the Board Directors of Forcibly Displaced People Network (FDPN) while doing her PhD on ‘Negotiating Asian values and press responsibility within Malaysian journalistic practice: a critical ethnography’. She also serves as a committee member on the Australian GLBTQ Multicultural Council (AGMC).