We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir

Seeking a foundation rooted in home, family, and faith, journalist and photographer Habib explores her identity in a sincere debut that’s articulate in its depiction of the immigrant experience but thin as a memoir of sexual awakening. As a five-year-old Ahmadi Muslim in Lahore, Pakistan, surrounded by “women who didn’t have the blueprint for claiming their lives,” Habib witnessed her pious mother buckle under the belief that “Allah hates the loud laughter of women!” When political upheavals escalated persecution of Ahmadi Muslims, the family fled to Toronto in 1991. There, 10-year-old Habib felt “transported to a different planet” with “boys and girls mingling freely.” At 16, she endured an arranged marriage to an older cousin, later annulled after she attempted suicide; a second marriage at 19 offered escape from her family. By her mid-20s, a mentor opened a “window into a queer world.” She divorced her husband and began traveling the world and taking sexual partners who shaped her “experience of how race and desire intersect.” She writes candidly about her experiences: she joined a queer-friendly mosque, started a project photographing queer Muslims, and eventually came out to her parents. Habib’s narrative is brave and unique, yet her most affecting descriptions speak less to sexual freedom and more to immigrant Pakistani culture. This sometimes falls short of its promise. [em](June) [/em]