Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

Hijab Butch Blues is the memoir of a Queer Muslim woman writing under the pen name Lamya H. I majored in middle eastern history when I was in college. I’ve been wanting to read this memoir for a while now. I’m glad that I finally picked it up.
I appreciated being invited into Lamya’s writing as she shared her personal journey through her faith and coming into her identity as a queer person and a person of faith. Those two identities are not always compatible and sometimes are a recipe for misery, oppression, and self hatred. I don’t especially consider myself a person of faith, although I do sort of identify as a witch. I think this book was a fantastic example of how faith can exist alongside queerness and be a source of joy and comfort instead of a tool of oppression. I think Islam is hugely misunderstood by most American as we conveniently ignore all the violence done in the name of Christianity and the massive shared roots that Islam and Christianity and Judaism all share.
I loved getting to see how Lamya came to understand herself and where she fit into the world. My heart breaks for the fact that she can’t be as completely open with her family about her queerness in the way that my intersectional privileges have allowed me to be with mine. There’s a definite push in America for queer folks to always come out to their families and that they must live “openly and authentically” or else they’re doing queerness wrong. And that is a shitty and dangerous narrative to express, especially to younger queer folks and queer people of color.
Pick up this book to learn more about our queer Muslim community and to maybe learn to be a better ally to them as well.

I found learning about her culture and experiences coming to the US interesting. Although I was interested in learning about the Muslim religion, there was too much of it in the book for my taste.

audio nonfiction/memoir (7.5 hours) - genderquestioning hijabi she/they who likes women writes about her life before/after immigrating to the US, along with retold Quran stories (semi-familiar because of similarities to Old Testament stories) and thoughts about religion.

very readable, with excellent narration.

I thought this would be interesting but it is powerful and beautiful. Lamya H not only addresses the challenge of being butch as a Muslim, but also being a person of color who deals with racism, xenophobia, and yet who chooses to live in love and justice.

[Hijab Butch Blues] is a memoir by a 30-something year old, writing about her gender identity, her life as an immigrant, her Islamic faith, and how it all fits together. In some ways, it's fascinating. Lamya is devout, but questioning. She uses the stories and lessons from the Quran to frame her own questions, doubts, and observations about her life as a non-binary Muslim immigrant to the U.S.

However, somehow I just didn't connect to her story. The author jumps around a lot in her chapters, sometimes as a child in an Arab country, sometimes at various points in her life as a young adult in the U.S. And the jumping around made it hard to see a trajectory of her life and thoughts and growth. I also wasn't sure who her intended audience was. (I'm using she/her because she never specified her pronouns as anything else and did for others in the book) I think her audience, in the end, was herself. And I'm not generally a fan of that sort of highly internalized writing.

This book is getting a lot of positive press. For me, the topic was fascinating and I liked a lot of the message she was trying to get across, but I just didn't think the writing made it very successful.

I hope some others around here read it - I'd love to hear some alternate viewpoints!

TW/CW: Racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, domestic abuse, talk of suicide

RATING: 4/5

REVIEW: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and am voluntarily writing an honest review.

Hijab Butch Blues is a memoir that is the story of a Southeast Asian Muslim who has to navigate the world between her religion and her queerness.

This is a good book. It made me think in new ways and gave a perspective that isn’t heard from very often. The ways she wove together parts of the Quran with her life was interesting and gave a lot of insight into how she was feeling. I’m not a very religious person myself, but I still found this somewhat captivating.

My one problem with this book was that it jumped around a lot and was sometimes choppy. It isn’t told in an linear fashion and it’s sometimes difficult to understand what came first, or how old she is, or exactly what is going on.

Nonetheless, this was a good book, and I would definitely recommend it, especially to people of (any) faith.