I wrote my dissertation on Queer South Asian Muslim women and intersectional dress in 2013. It means I have previous reading about the validity and multiplicities of experience of being Queer and Muslim. I am Muslim, even though I grew up with a mother who was always questioning what it meant to be Muslim, and to have Muslim heritage/ancestry. She believed being Muslim was incompatible with being a feminist and supporting women. She ran away from religion to the UK so she could have an independent income and be independent financially from any man, including her first and second husband (who she only married the second time, because I was born).
It meant I grew up learning about all religions, she didn’t want to force me to be Muslim, but to come to my faith, to Allah, in my own journey. It was more imperative to learn to be spiritual, to understand the world as something within us and bigger than us, how faith could take many forms, and it was about liberation and freedom. But it also meant there were gaps in my grasp on Islam. I didn’t learn Arabic like my other Muslim peers. Me and my siblings felt a loss of a cultural connection to Islam as well as a rooted sense of faith.
It wasn’t until I attended the Inclusive Mosque initiative, which was set up in 2012 that I felt I was allowed to engage with my Faith. I first went to a meeting in 2013, and met other Queer Muslims, from all backgrounds, races and genders. It was a liberatory moment, where I had been given access to a world which I had felt would reject me certainly. And this wasn’t the case. I later introduced my mother to the inclusive mosque initiative, to give her a space to practice her faith in a feminist environment that was safe for queer trans people, and women. After years of saying to her yes there was a space to be queer and muslim, and feminist! A space that didn’t gender us, when so much of that customary gendering was cultural sexism, rather than spiritual mandate. It also was a space that meant you didn’t have to be part of a specific diasporic community to attend, which can deter people from entering spaces of faith linked to a specific cultural connection – which are important for that community but not everyone is afforded to be a part of a community.
“The Inclusive Mosque Initiative is an intersectional feminist mosque dedicated to creating inclusive, safer places for marginalised Muslims and their families, especially non-traditional families. We are committed to reviving a rights-based Islam that challenges all forms of oppression. We call ourselves a mosque to demonstrate that a mosque is made up of a community, not bound by a building.” IMI website.
The Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI) was founded in 2012, in London, UK. It is a grassroots activist organisation which works toward promotes the understanding of an intersectional feminist Islam.”[1] In practice this means that IMI spaces and events are organised to be as inclusive as possible; unlike many existing mosques and religious organisations, IMI is not divided along linguistic, sectarian, political or ethnic lines. The organisation makes every effort towards providing disabled access to and within its venues, including British Sign Language (BSL) within its services,[2] and giving translations of Arabic words when used
A quote from IMI’s wikipedia page
From the Religion, Belief and Faith identities UAL website by UAL which is a Community of Practice page that “brings together academic and support staff to share practice and ideas about how we address religion, belief, and faith identities through teaching, learning and research at UAL. The group will consider the intersection between faith identity and other social identities (e.g. gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class).”
I came across Angela Drisdale Gordon’s pen portraits and thought this was a really useful entry point to addressing faith and inclusion practices in teaching. It is an ice breaker excercise that allows students to learn and answer questions about each other that do not bring up conflict or tension. I went on to read her interview with Shades of Noir and read about her journey of being a Black academic of 32 years at UAL. Her practice of listening to every each and one of her students and tracking their progress, and how it was fundamental to her that she practiced learning through conversation. This is so important. Students need to learn from each other and speak to each other. And as teachers we learn from them if we listen to them also. I really appreciated it, when she said when students come to her with a technique she wasn’t familiar with, she said would make the effort to research it and learn about it herself.
I remember writing my dissertation in 2013, on Queer South Asian and Muslim dress/fashion cultures, and the tutors had nothing to say to me regarding my work, I had to do it all alone. It wasn’t until I found a friend in the shape of PhD student Lipi Begum, who was queer and Bangladeshi like me, that she looked over it and gave me proper advice.
Later Lipi Begum and Rohit Das Gupta, would commission me to present this work at a conference at LCF with Professor Reina Lewis, and the photo essays would be published in a book Styling South Asian Youth cultures. They originally wanted me to write something, but the essay kept coming back with edits that took out my politics, or was too grammatically incorrect – I felt like I wasn’t good enough at writing and in the end my ideas were condensed into an interview, that summarised all my ideas.
On the Religion, Belief and Faith identities UAL website I also watched the conference of Reina Lewis speaking on faith and fashion at UAL.
Professor Reina Lewis. Dress, Politics, and Belonging post-Brexit, 30 November 2016
“What does it mean to be a visible minority in a post-Brexit Britain given the rise in racism, anti-semitism and anti-Muslim prejudice increasingly evident in the West?” Lewis in the conference talks about the intimacies of dress cultural knowledge in faith communities. How we read each other in a secret knowing, which is only shared by those who had grown up with those cultural dress codes and signals are able to decipher them. She attributes this skills akin to queer people’s notion of ‘gaydar’ where we learn to read people, read their queerness, their dress and cultural ethnic markers. It is a language that you learn when part of the Jewish faith, or Islamic cultural upbringing, we notice these codes linked to identity and gender.
‘Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education.’ Stimulus paper (Modood & Calhoun, 2015) I read three headings and responded to two things I learnt about Religion, faith and education settings
- Multiculturalism “not just anti-discrimination, sameness of treatment and toleration of ‘difference’, but respect for difference; not equal rights despite differences but equality as the accommodation of difference in the public space, which therefore comes to be shared rather than dominated by the majority. Instead of creating a sharp distinction between the public sphere of rights and civic relations and a private sphere (of male–female relations, sexual orientations or religious beliefs), we acknowledge that the public sphere reflects various norms and interests of, for example, masculinity, heterosexuality, Anglophones, Christians, and that equality therefore requires the abandonment of the pretence of ‘difference-blindness’ and allowing others, the marginalised minorities, to also be visible and explicitly accommodated in the public sphere.”
Here Modood explains that dominate public spaces are can be categorised as hegemonic white cultural and heterosexual spaces, where queer and visibly muslim people, or people occupying any state of difference is seen as ‘out of place’ Puwar (2002) These hegemonic spaces include workplaces and educational settings as well. Some work I mentioned earlier that I had done, with Queer South Asian Muslim participants – In/visible space – looked at how we can complicate ideas around faith, and the public/private spaces of worship, and private white queer spaces, that can become racialised. A way to visualise intersectional public and private geographies. Who is comfortable to be visibly muslim in a white queer space? Who is comfortably visibly queer in a Disaporic culturally muslim space such as a Mosque? My photographic work asked those questions about the body, difference, and feeling out of place, and subverting ideas around what could be public queer muslim space, as well as private spaces created into be inclusive of gender, faith and sexuality.
I think I could use these works, that look at fashion and subcultures of queer Muslim and South Asian dress identity to give a workshop on faith and inclusion and intersectional identities, to fashion students at CSM? I know a colleague there who is a future academics tutor who has asked me to do some work with her department. It could be an exercise in looking at cross cultural dress, identity, and expression of faith and ethnicity, and codes of difference. What is it about cultural space and the experience of moving through white spaces that makes it harder for people of multiple marginalised experiences to moves through these space.?
2. Religion and dissent in universities
Calhoun in this section of the paper covers several areas where religion comes into cross hairs at University and educational settings, from the PREVENT requirement of the university to report students they think might be extremist or too radical. To issues of gender segregation and the presumed incompatibility of sexuality and religion. The practice of gender segregation is not only the practice of Muslims Calhoun notes, and helpfully he affirms what I mentioned earlier in this post, that this practice is not a religious requirement but one that comes from cultural customs instead. “Gender and sexuality are challenging issues for universities that struggle to combine respect for religion with clarity that a lack of respect or denigration based on gender or sexuality cannot be countenanced. ” Here Calhoun mentions that Universities trying to balances religious tolerance and still be open to LGBTQ discussions and support on campus, misrepresents the students who are both religious and of LGBTQ experience. Universities need to take a further inclusive approach, and not just assume Religious societies on campus are homophobic, and assume that all LGTBQ societies would reject Muslim students and other students of faith, purely on the basis that they believed their existence to be against their religion. There is space between these questions and debates that allow for plural identities to co exist AND support each other. As I mentioned with the Inclusive Mosque Initiative. Feminist and Intersectional approaches to gender, sexuality and faith exist, and we should be encouraging this open dialogue and scholarship with students in educational settings.
The Reith lectures by Kwame Anthony Appiah – Mistaken Identities – Creed
Listening to Kwame Anthony Appiah, he talks about how our families shape so much of who we are. I mention my family background as I don’t know any other way to really think about the way I do things, possibly because of the way they do things. But also gender, nationality, race, class, they inform everything we do, as professionals and educators.
How does identity work? “Religious identities so often connect us with the oldest stories” Appiah states that religion is not simply about belief, but is so much more about praxis, action and the action of community. Is it possible to belong to a religion without believing in God. I see myself and my family as culturally Muslim, even thought the older we get we practice Islam in different way than when I was younger. Faith doesn’t have to be a performance, the ritual the ceremony, without the true engagement. So much of religion is to believe what is in the scripture, and to “practice” what it says. But when we have illiteracies of communities told to practice religion in a language they will never begin to read – it is more about control of one person/group/political voice over other communities. My mother asked me how I could be Muslim and be Queer? She saw in the culturally Bangladeshi practice of Islam as a deep conservatism, where questioning the book was not possible. But as we see in the IMI project, how coming together to the action of practicing our faith with other Queer muslims, we can question and read and take from the scripture of what is in our hearts. Appiah states that so much in the scripture is utterly irrelevant and communities ignore out of date lessons, so in the future we should be able to accommodate queerness and gender difference as being a part of our faith communities. Because being connected to faith is so much more than piousness, it is about being connected to others we love and share in a collectivity – to feel part of something bigger than yourself. I feel connected to my ancestors, my grandma and aunts, who are no longer with us. I cannot believe that Allah doesn’t love us, as Allah is the universe. Doctrine of control means these spiritual interpretations are not accepted. But so much of religion and Scripture is interpreted through heterosexual and dominant cultural groups. It gives us allowances that as queer communities of faith, we are also legitimate in interpreting scripture with a feminist and intersectional gaze too, and our interpretation to take what is needed and what isn’t, is also divine.
Puwar, N. (Ed.). (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. New York: Berg.
Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education June 2015
Stimulus paper Tariq Modood Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy University of Bristol Craig Calhoun Director and School Professor of Social Science London School of Economics and Political Science
Kwame Anthony Appiah Reith lecture on Creed – BBC Oct 2016