Islam’s story went like this: Four thousand years ago, the Prophet Ibrahim (known to Jews and Christians as Abraham) was asked by God to bring his Egyptian wife (some claim slave) called Hajjar (Hagar) and his firstborn from her, Ismael (Ishmael), to the barren deserts near Mecca. Ismael’s name means “God will hear.” Clearly, God had heard the need for Ibrahim to have progeny. What he might not have heard were Hajjar’s presumably unstated (because they are not well documented) desires not to be an abandoned mother and spouse.
We were told that the Jews and the Christians believed Hajjar was dumped in the desert because Ibrahim’s first wife, Sara, wanted to get rid of her. For the Muslims, Hajjar is allowed to understand her own misery because as Ibrahim is leaving her and his infant firstborn basically to die, he informs her that it is God who has commanded him to do so. And this is supposed to make her feel better. Many Muslims also believe that both Hajjar and Ismael are buried right next to the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest place on earth.
Hajjar is central to Islam and, for my adult self, is one of the most sacred, compelling, and mysterious figures in the faith. However, she is conveniently left out in many narratives and in our childhood stories. Her only purpose is that she gives birth to Ismael, who crucially would father the tribe (the Quraysh) that would give birth to the Prophet Muhammad. But her legacy is vast.
When first dumped, Hajjar ran between two hills called Safa and Marwa, desperate for water to save her suckling infant’s life. After the seventh run, a sacred, life-giving spring called Zamzam appeared. The story is told in many different ways, but this is what I was taught. Zamzam flows to this day, and the Saudis have with great fanfare brought in global “experts” to testify its purity and “extraordinary” mineral content.
Only as a young man did I learn that Hajjar was in fact “the Mother of Islam.” One of Islam’s greatest Shia scholars, Ali Shariati, even exclaimed, “See how special she was. God chose a black slave woman from all humanity to be buried next to the Kaaba! Not even our Rasool (messenger) gets a place there. God gave one of his most humiliated and weakest creatures a room in his house. Never forget her!”
In Mecca, I would realize that some of the primary rituals of the Hajj are a memory of Hajjar’s difficult life. The word hijrah (“migration”—the Islamic calendar begins with Muhammad’s hijrah from Mecca to the city called Yathrib, later Medina) has its root in her name, as does the word mohajjir (“immigrant”). It was even claimed that the Prophet said, “The ideal immigrant is the one who behaved like Hajjar.”
But it was mostly men who wrote the canon of Islam, like its two predecessor monotheisms. It helped these misogynists that Hajjar was not directly mentioned in the Quran. They were constructing a patriarchy. They have tried to diminish her. In truth, this woman is the very center of Islam. To obliterate her is impossible.
If women wrote the history of Islam, Hajjar would get credit for what she really is: Islam’s matriarch, a monotheistic first. If Ibrahim’s behavior were analyzed in present times, many would say he was a deadbeat dad and a sadistic husband.
Ibrahim was also an authoritarian father, who never took no for an answer. He forced Ismael to divorce his first wife but was happy with the second. He was an absentee parent. Yet, when commanded by God again, as he often seemed to be, it was this son he ordered to help him build a cube-shaped room right next to his well at Zamzam. That room, the Kaaba, would become the center of a flourishing trade capital called Mecca and today the central point of my religion.
Ibrahim famously dreamt that God had commanded him to sacrifice Ismael. He recognized the urgency, because only prophets received divinely inspired dreams. Even Shaitan (Satan) attempted to dissuade Ibrahim from carrying out this brutality. Ibrahim hurled seven stones at him thrice, driving him away. The pious Ismael agreed to be sacrificed. Just as Ibrahim raised his knife to kill his own firstborn, God intervened in very timely fashion. He told father and son that they had aced this test of faith, and Ibrahim could sacrifice a goat instead.
This father’s readiness to murder his son was heartbreaking to me as a lonely child, craving parental affection. This mental image, alongside the bloody streets, contributed to my anxiety before and during the festival of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, that commemorates this act.
For so many men who control the narrative of Islam, a Muslim woman’s body is a contested space. The women who shaped my life and my mind at different points in my life tried in their own limited ways to reclaim their bodies from the men who claimed ownership over them. In this, these women were all rebels. But in the ridiculous logic of the Wahhabis, for example, there is nothing more dangerous and distracting to the obedient (male) armies of the pious than an exposed strand of female hair.
In the early eighties, the center of my favorite Eid al-Fitr was a distant aunt we called Khala, which literally means “aunt.” She was wise and wrinkled and funny and really thin—her bones would peek out of her modest and plainly colored clothing. In this quality of an almost emaciated, bony scrawniness, she was the opposite of my voluptuous mother, whose curves were never quite hidden by any dupatta (a long, multipurpose scarf) she would drape over them as a nod to propriety. And this, perhaps, in my mother’s case, was by design. There was little about my mother that was not a carefully considered detail.
Khala is the greatest storyteller I ever knew. She brought a world of adventures and brave (Muslim only) heroes alive to the motley crew of kids sitting around her. On top of that list was the Rasoolullah—that’s what she called Muhammad. We knew already that this meant “Messenger of God,” and this is how we were respectfully to mention him, avoiding the utterance of his name. And then we were to append the tongue-twister Salallahu Alaihi Wa’salam (“Peace be upon Him”).
“But why do we want to wish him peace every time, Khala?” I asked.
“Because he would wish the very same for you, Parvez.”
And then, “Khala, what did Rasoolullah look like?”
A question that has created much worldwide mayhem. But it was safe to ask Khala. Each time she would add newer, magical details until, for my childish imagination, Muhammad became real. A rather handsome man—even in my pre-sexual mind these descriptions of him would evoke a forbidden longing I could not explain. I somehow knew that any articulation of this complex longing was forbidden enough to conceal, even from Khala.
Khala’s descriptions of the Prophet began with her reminding us that Islam was the best religion because, amongst so many other good things, it also forbade us from any kind of idol worship. (This idea of Islam being the most superior religion creates dangerous duality worldviews when in hands not quite like my childhood Khala’s.) We were forever forbidden to depict Muhammad, the Rasoolullah, pictorially. The consequences, she would emphasize, were divinely dire. Ironically, ask most devout Muslims, and they will be able to describe what Muhammad looked like in great, often poetic detail, but they know the line that can never be crossed. So we children often drew pictures of Khala’s stories, but never of Muhammad.
Once Khala was convinced that we would not attempt to draw any pictures of the Prophet, she would begin. “Rasoolullah, peace be upon Him, was tall. He had a sturdy build with long, muscular limbs and tapering fingers. The hair of his head was long and thick and wavy, just like your curls, Parvez.” When she directly referenced me in these stories, a thrill of recognition and blissful affirmation rushed through my body. This proved that I was better than the other children.
“His forehead was large and prominent, his eyelashes were long and thick, his nose was sloping, his mouth was large, and his teeth were well set. His cheeks were spare and he had a pleasant smile. His eyes were large and black with a touch of brown. His beard was thick, and at the time of his death, he had seventeen gray hairs in it. He had a fine line of hair over his neck and chest. He was fair of complexion and altogether was so handsome that Abu Bakr, peace be upon him, composed this couplet about him: ‘As there is no darkness in the moonlit night, so is Mustafa (Muhammad), the well-wisher, bright.’ Now, children, who is Abu Bakr?”
I would raise my hand before she had finished asking the question, informing everyone that Abu Bakr was our first khalifa (“caliph”), and he was also the Prophet’s father-in-law and one of his senior sahaba (“companions”). Khala would smile approvingly at me. And in an instant, my Eid was made. In just a few years, I would know that my version of Islam’s history was heavily influenced by Sunni (Hannafi) ideology, and for the Shia there is a completely different line of Muhammad’s inheritors.
In her little sessions, Khala made sure that we understood that the Quran was divided into chapters called Surah and each chapter was made up of verses, which were called Ayah. This was hardly Quranic study. I was just being taught the basics and the eight essential Surahs. Khala’s Quran came heavily edited.
I now hope she might even have been proud of the man I have become. She made sure I would never forget her. I never have.
In 1998, I set forth on my first pilgrimage to what I would now probably call the land-of-the-not-so-free. We couldn’t make the connection to JFK, our intended destination. After some commotion, Kuwait Airways put us in a hotel near Kuwait International Airport for a night’s unanticipated layover.
So on June 17, 1998, I set foot on foreign Arab soil, the soil likely once trod by Prophet Muhammad. It was only my second time out of India. Looking back, I feel this was no coincidence. The airport was a surreal display. Glitzy marble and brass columns, glistening so clean you could eat off the floor. Kuwaiti sheikhs in their flowing white robes glided around as if floating on air.
A stern-looking official took our passports and told us we could collect them in the morning. I didn’t know it then, but this would not be the first time an authoritarian Arab regime would confiscate my passport. We were herded into an air-conditioned bus, drove through the barren desert, and there it was: fancier than anything I had seen. The oil-rich gulf monarchies’ endless thirst for tall towers had begun. In the not-so-distant future, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and the Kingdom Tower in Mecca, the world’s third-tallest, would prove that Gulf Arabs loved their skyscrapers, given that they didn’t really have much else for topography. The former provided enough glam to draw the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in as they gamboled around Dubai in a future season finale. Kuwait had similarly tall ambitions but could never really catch up to Dubai.
My room was a nouveau riche wonderland of gold faucets and a massive shower. In my Delhi apartment, I’d used a bucket to wash. Within a few minutes of entering the room, I used the glitzy shower with all manner of controls and settings. I also saw my first Jacuzzi bathtub and bidet. I had no idea what they were. The wonders of Google and a laptop had still not arrived in my life.
Faux-gold carvings with arrows pointing toward Mecca had been engraved on the bed-stands, so the faithful would know where to direct their daily prayers. I was not a supplicating Muslim at the time, so I paid no heed to the calls for nighttime prayers that rang out from several mosques around my hotel.
I flipped channels on an enormous TV. The new Al Jazeera network was hosting an interview with the Saudi “jihadi” Osama bin Laden. At the television channel where I worked in Delhi, Al Jazeera was monitored constantly and that network was almost single-handedly making Osama a global celebrity. His fame rested on what he called his “jihad” in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, which was long over. In a sense, he was a jobless terrorist. His movements between Afghanistan and the abhorred Pakistan provoked much fearful debate among the hardly neutral senior journalists at my channel. And jihad was a few years away from becoming the most famous word on the planet.
Bin Laden was framed off-center with carefully placed Kalashnikovs. Despite being in what appeared to be a cave, he had a carefully controlled media persona. His thoughts seemed disjointed. At one moment he railed against the wrongful occupations of Muslim lands by infidels and then moved to boasting about his father’s renovation work in Mecca, in “the Prophet’s holy site,” meaning Medina and at Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. He spoke of the injustice of “that” Jewish occupier (deliberately not naming Israel) of Jerusalem, of Palestine, and of the torture of hundreds of thousands of innocent “Muslim Palestinian lives.” And then there was familiar anti-American and anti-British rhetoric.
I had followed bin Laden’s story with interest ever since it broke on Indian television. He seemed always to be giving interviews. Osama bin Laden’s soothing voice lulled me to sleep that night.
“What brings you here?” asked the black border agent once I made it to New York. I had never seen a black person, growing up in racist and classist India. My first visit to my mythical America was beginning!
“To visit my family and vacation,” I replied.
“Welcome to America. Enjoy.” It was like she was serving a massive ice cream sundae. She stamped my passport. Strangely clad men in long black coats and tall hats stood at the baggage carousel. The Kuwait Airways bags were coming out on a carousel shared by the Israeli airline El Al. I had never seen orthodox Jews or met anyone who was Jewish. The irony of the shared carousel is only in retrospect.
In later years my cousin who picked me up said, “You came out and bent over to kiss the soil.” I always say I have no such recollection, even though part of my brain thinks I might melodramatically have. It was the soil of Bill Clinton’s America: I hope history will not remember him merely as the president who was impeached for getting a blowjob.
“F-O-B—that’s what you are,” said my cousin. “Fresh Off the Boat! Knows nothing! We will even have to get you new clothes! And some deodorant to make you smell better!” he laughed.
New York dazzled me. And if the central thesis of the uber-phenom The Secret is true, I must have put a super-strong intention into the universe because it would become home. Manhattan, years later, strangely felt like an island that trapped yet protected me.
The next night, I was taken to my first-ever gay club. My straight cousin and his straight friends joined. They were comfortable enough in their sexualities not to be threatened. I stuffed dollar bills into two butts gyrating on the bar. All of my gay activity in India had happened while my mother lay dying and thus was furtive, fast, and, to my mind, filthy. She’d always told me sex was shameful in her indirect conversations on the subject.
I followed an unattainably handsome black man into what looked like a back room with heavy curtains. Inside it was my mother’s definition of sex. Filth.
The evening after that, my cousin and I schlepped to the Bronx for a game at Yankee stadium. America was large, floodlit, and filled with giant colas and heaping baskets of fries and Coke. I bit into my first hot dog and then in shock asked, “Is it pork?” My cousin confirmed it was kosher, the Jewish version of halal.
I could not follow the game. My cousin explained the rules, but my mind wandered back to my earliest memories of the Eid of the Sacrifice and how they were mixed in with India’s favorite sport: cricket. Cricket for me was a blood sport. The crack of the baseball bat could only send my mind back in time to the cricket games of my youth, where my childhood effeminacy evoked reliable bullying. Children can be cruel like no one else.
I recalled the rivers of blood that ran through my childhood neighborhood as goats were slaughtered during Eid al-Adha. Then my mind brought up a memory of another bloody annual—exclusively Shia—ritual on Ashura, the tenth day of the Islamic calendar’s first month, Muharram: Bare-chested Shia men self-flagellating to commemorate the martyrdom of one of their greatest ancestors, Imam Husayn, who was killed in the Battle of Karbala in what is now present-day Iraq. Little boys, many my friends, played cricket in the bloody soil, caused by the procession. I joined them hesitantly, aware of my fear and the trauma of ridicule at my inability to excel in the national obsession. Shirtless Shia men, sinewy and drenched in sweat, walked past us in their annual Tazia (“mourning”) procession. I watched them, fascinated, perhaps feeling my first sexual arousal. They had metallic chains in their hands, which they called zanjeer (a type of chain), and they repeatedly and rhythmically whipped themselves. As zanjeer hit skin it left a trail of blood, which was oddly arousing. Trying to focus on my cricket and failing miserably, I could only stare at these muscular, hirsute men. Sectarian Shia-Sunni riots during this time often broke out.
For a moment, I was back in the baseball game. My cousin cheered the Yankees on, and I noticed how big and sexy some of the players were. He had generously kept us out of the bleachers.
I was back in India. Hindu-Muslim raged again. The dots connected in my nine-year-old mind. Some Hindus, as in years past, had left the carcass of a pig—that unholiest of unholy animals—for the Muslims in the local mosque, and the enraged Muslims had set fire to the homes of a Hindu community of primarily lowest-caste cobblers. My fear of cricket and my fascination with these men and the violence they created mingled and formed the momentary tapestry of an unusual childhood mind. Cricket was the one supreme religion both India and Pakistan shared. One particularly violent riot had erupted near our school when it was discovered that the Muslims had celebrated with sweets and firecrackers after the Pakistani team defeated India. “Katuas”—(circumcised) bastards—my school friends would spit out. Katua for them was the racial slur for Muslims.
Generations of Indians had grown up obsessed with cricket, and there was nothing more exciting than an India-Pakistan match. Some Muslim families in the neighborhood distributed sweets when Pakistan won, while my parents told me to “be secular.” We were to root for the Indian team, because not doing so is unpatriotic. But I always secretly rooted for the Pakistani team, admiring their taller, and in my eyes more masculine, physiques.
Besides my homosexuality, I would also grow up ashamed of the part of me that was Muslim.
Years later, as a journalist in Delhi, I had befriended a cricket-obsessed hack whose theory was simple: the reasons the Pakistanis sometimes did so well against the Indian team was that they had the focus that can uniquely be instilled by Islam alone. The Hindus, he told me, just did not have that dedication. I challenged him with the names of Indian Muslims in the national team. But the question remained. Does the discipline of a good Muslim life make a Pakistani cricketer superior to a Hindu, Indian one?
“Isn’t this just the most fun thing you have ever done?” yelled my cousin over the din.
I smiled and nodded my head. I could not bear to tell him that none of it made any sense and therefore my mind was busy visiting other places.
The intense intersections of ritual violence—sexualized in my pre-pubescent mind—with the real inter-religious violence I experienced and many insecurities of a lonely childhood never went away.
I asked myself: Implausible as it sounded, was the discipline of Islam and indeed of jihad partly a genetic trait passed on from Muslim to Muslim, through blood ties?
The blood of animals and humans flowed and swirled in my mind’s eye when the Yankees hit yet another home run.
“Awesome game!” shouted my cousin. “This is the best of American sport that you just saw! Even better than cricket!”
During that same 1998 trip, my cousin bought me a special ticket to San Francisco, which I fast realized was hardly the capital of Planet Gay. My pilgrimage to the fabled Castro Street revealed just a short city block. A theater, a few restaurants, a gay bookshop, a coffee shop, and that was it.
Pride arrived and so did I. The enemy nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh mingled here in a single tent. They were South Asian LGBT’s in this label-loving land. Or Desis (“from back home”). Growing up in India, it’s rare to meet a Pakistani or Bangladeshi, unlike in NYC, with the yellow-taxi cabbies who would be so abundant in my future home.
San Francisco was a fast education in everything that lay between twink, bear, and dyke. Did this endless bacchanalia and exposed behinds, with some floats sponsored by corporate giants, really herald anything prideful?
Night fell and brought with it a return to the sexual abandon of the shadowy, sweaty back room I had experienced at NYC’s Splash. This one was called the Power Exchange and was advertised as a bathhouse. I had never been to one. Rooms upon rooms spread out before me. Their doors ajar, naked men waiting, usually with their butts in the air. All you needed to do was walk in. I came upon a nude man in a leather sling—he was positioned such that his legs were up in the air. There was a line of semi-naked men waiting. It was dark but it was clear that this leather bottom was in it for the long haul. I did not join the line. No condoms were in sight. By day, I imagined these cubicles could easily transform into a call center for a tech company.
Leaving, I wondered aloud to my friend, “What is there to be proud of?”
I killed my mother when I was twenty-one. She lay dying of a painful cancer in the Indian city of Calcutta. I was busy coming out in far-away Delhi. Horny and thoughtless. Eager to experience the shabby kind of hedonism that a young, gay lifestyle could offer in third-world India, I traveled to what was billed as India’s first gay conference in Bombay despite her protestations. I barely saw her those last few months. And I never got to say goodbye.
She had once spoken longingly of unmade pilgrimages, unfulfilled resolutions. And a place she called “God’s House,” where sins could be prayed away. I wondered if I would ever fulfill her dreams. I wondered if we would reconcile in earthly physical space or in the afterlife. I wondered if I could get her Urdu poetry published in a land more receptive to her language, in Pakistan, where it was their lingua franca.
I did not cry at her funeral. I felt that the shame of my sexuality killed her. I knew that she died angry. The guilt of murdering a parent is an immense burden to carry. Mine felt particularly heavy.
New York’s Columbia University had granted me admission with no financial aid for the first year. I entreated the film department chair for a scholarship and his firm no meant I just couldn’t afford it. So I fell back on my second option, DC’s American University. In that town I could even stay for free with extended family. But they were daily reminders of my unfinished business with grief.
By 2001, I was on triple duty. I was a full-time graduate student, an adjunct professor at American University, and a part-time employee in the media division at downtown DC’s World Bank. It was there that I had front-seat views to the smoke pouring from the Pentagon. I called my cousin. In a few minutes, cellphone reception would stop.
“You have to come home right away,” he said. “We remember what went down in school in ’79.” Of course everyone remembered the Iran hostage crisis, which predictably generated hate in America. My school-going cousins had been mercilessly bullied for appearing Iranian, just because of their skin color. Children can be particularly cruel. “Just get home. Your beard and your skin color don’t help!”
Rumors flew faster than fighter jets. George W. Bush and gang had disappeared. Hijacked planes were flying all over DC. One would hit the Capitol at any moment—a Capitol that was uncomfortably close. Another was well on its way to flying into the White House. I thought of thousands of TV-segment producers struggling to place accurate lower third infographics on a live calamity unfolding on cameras in real-time. Soon we were in split-screen mode—Towers and the Pentagon. I knew it was he. To date I don’t understand my prescience.
Clearly the Feds, Langley, and Foggy Bottom were either glued to Osama bin Laden’s most melodramatic attempt to live in worldwide infamy forever or busy rushing home or to government bunkers. Osama bin Laden had pulled together the greatest show on earth, without resources like the US had. I wondered if he, too, watched it live and what his preferred network was.
People had spilled into the streets from all the office towers. What was eerily common: cellphones to ear, almost everyone had eyes peeled to the sky. I was in hyper-sensitive mode, my nerves probably as frazzled as anyone else’s when I boarded the Red Line on the Metro, which miraculously was still working. Were all these panicked people looking at me? Did that blonde woman just move away from me deliberately? To readjust my position on the impossibly crowded train, I put my backpack on the floor for a moment. A murmur arose from all corners—or was I imagining it? I hastily retrieved the backpack and put it back where it belonged.
By the next morning it was official. It was Muslim hands that did this. America would never be so safe to so many ever again. 9/11, they would call it. History would forever be divided into a before-and-after narrative.
Almost a planet away from the Muslim neighborhoods of my childhood that ricocheted with calls to prayer five times a day, I realized: Islam had American blood on its hands. And just like that—in less than twenty-four hours—I had no choice: I “came out” as a Muslim.
“Fuck you, Arabs!” a group of white boys yelled from across the quad of American University. “Go home!”
It was as if the word Muslim was branded on my forehead. The beard and skin color didn’t help. The fuss of coming out gay in India seemed a lifetime away. Xenophobia was hip. Beards, unlike today, were not. Ignoring the daily stares and comments, I focused on very special pleasures like seeing snow for the first time. I stuck out my tongue to taste a flake. It tasted like magic. Did it smell as pure as it looked?
“I don’t feel sorry for y’all,” my friend Katy had said. “See what black people go through every day. Intolerance and racism? We have known it for decades.” We agreed, though, that Muslim was the new Black.
It was only a year since I had moved to DC in 2000 to do double duty as an adjunct professor and master’s student. One of my friends, Fayaz, was a natural leader and told me about the group he headed of what he called “LGBTQI” Muslims, provocatively named after a chapter in the Quran. An interesting and dangerous choice. At the same time, I needed a thesis film. Osama bin Laden was Islam’s spokesperson. My thesis film, I grandiosely thought, would offer an alternative. Islam’s unlikeliest storytellers, gay and lesbian Muslims, were going to tell the story of the faith. And I started filming for what was called In the Name of Allah. Every chapter in the Quran begins with the phrase Bismillah (“In the name of Allah”). I, too, wanted to be a provocateur, and this could be the perfect vessel.
A filmed silhouette said, “You have to understand what life is like growing up as a gay person of color in this country.”
None of these LGBTQI types wanted to show their faces, so I was making a film of darkness where shadows talked. And pretty soon it would start feeling like a bad idea.
“What do you mean, ‘person of color’?” I said. It was honest, because I had no idea what he meant.
“You don’t know what a person of color is? It’s an appropriation of identity in a majority-white society. The rest of us are persons of color. There are entire movements based on this principle. I am surprised you don’t know,” said the silhouette condescendingly. In my opinion, white was also a color.
My subjects, the label-loving gays who were born and raised in the West, continually presented themselves as warriors of an “inclusive” Islam. They loved having all manner of conferences, funded perhaps by the same patrons who sponsored me. I became a familiar face. I attended conferences in DC, Toronto, and London. I filmed it all. Endless panels about “queer identity,” about “gender,” about “liberation theology,” about “a gender-neutral reading of the Quran.” Hours of wasted footage and money.
Whatever their behavior in their daily lives, these LGBTQI Muslims seeking newer labels every day became super-religious at conference time. Many, like me, consumed alcohol at gay bars after Isha (the final mandated prayer of the day), but during the day, conference time meant a daily performance of at least four or five communal prayers. Optics mattered to these conferencing Muslims. I filmed it all. Did they hook up? Frequently. In fact, I doubt that any were sober to wake up for Fajr, the dawn prayer. I certainly wasn’t. It was a strange rainbow utopia built in a suburban outpost of a cheaper hotel franchise. Anybody could be an imam (a leader of prayer), and then there was something I had never dared to conjure up: Men and women prayed together! This was a gay Muslim Disneyland that most Muslims on the planet would never recognize and would reliably condemn. Did these LGBTQI types know this?
What particularly turned me off was that some of the women would not even cover their heads while praying, and I remember being shocked and turned off too by the many visible female butt cracks of these devout Muslimahs decked out in tank-tops and tights. A part of the yoga-like praying in Islam involves bending down and resting your head on earth. The supplicants form neat lines behind each other. The Islam I had grown up with, at the very least, demanded a state of purity and the covering of the head as a sign of being in sacred space. Dressing modestly was ordained for both men and women. These people were like Muslim hippies! Perhaps I was too naïve or judgmental, as an FOB (“Fresh off the Boat”).
My thesis film, as expected, was a film about silhouettes and panel discussions. It would never have a life in the real world. I needed to be a real filmmaker. And I needed to make a film about the kinds of Muslims I would recognize with greater ease. That other film is what became A Jihad for Love. I had narrowly escaped being lost in the endless jungles of identity-politics-created acronyms like LGBTQIFOBPOC.
For sexual contacts online I also upsold myself as “Middle Eastern” since Indian, to me, meant unattractive. Surprisingly, Arabs were now hypersexualized anyway and the flavor of the month. And I looked like them!
I got my degree and I was done with DC. It seemed like a small town where racism and Islamophobia reverberated louder. My fellow graduates all seemed to be getting jobs in nonprofits and lobbying firms. This was not a future I had imagined for myself, even though it offered the security of a paycheck. I could have gone back to journalism, but I did not desire to be a mere interviewer. I wanted people to interview me. It was time to move to what had always been the Mecca of my dreams. The megalopolis that had teased my tongue with freedom, hope, and desire during my first US trip in 1998. I was New York–bound like millions before me had been for two centuries.
I’d received a job offer as TV producer for Democracy Now! It was a New York–based, leftie, “progressive” public TV and radio show, flush with post-9/11 and Bush-bashing rhetoric. We hosted people like Norm Finkelstein, Arundhati Roy, Michael Moore, and Cornel West.
Democracy Now!’s anti-“neo-con” harangues were familiar. The music of Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti filled newsbreaks (no sponsors or commercials). The staff was made up of mostly white do-gooder Brooklyn hipsters. The kinds who would later perform their designated roles in what I can only call the 99-Percent Show near Wall Street. I was their proud acquisition. A Muslim immigrant POC gay man. A diversity hire! This crowd became tiresome quickly.
My long-distance Parisian boyfriend allowed me to occupy a tiny, musty room in his rent-controlled East Village garden apartment (for free), which he “shared” with a painter called Paul. In truth he visited only twice a year, and Paul (and now I) had it mostly to ourselves. In retrospect I cannot believe my fortune. Only a chosen few get to live for free in a private garden apartment in one of the most desirable NYC neighborhoods for almost three years. And it didn’t matter that my room was barely more than a hole in the wall.
Paul was HIV-positive, and I always had to remind him to take his daily cocktail of pills. I was not just his part-time caregiver and roommate. I cared deeply for him, emotionally. Paul finally succumbed to AIDS-related illnesses. My heart was broken. My soon-to-be-ex Parisian boyfriend lost the coveted lease. In New York losing a rent-controlled East Village apartment such as this was like losing the keys to the Taj Mahal. But then I had a new boyfriend named Keith and we moved in together.
My new job included filming protests. I heard familiar angst such as, “Dictator in Chief,” “Bush out of Iraq,” “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” The anger was palpable. But it lacked one basic cause, a rallying cry, and it’s a mistake the American (presumably Democratic) left makes all the time. These were disorganized leftie-warriors. Thousands gathered for a march on the East Side of Manhattan, many of them leftovers from the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of 1999. Many were rag-tag revolutionary anarchists, smelling of weed and body odor. This is why the right is dominating in this country, I thought, and even said as much to colleagues. They put on power suits and lobby and schmooze with DC power brokers. How could anyone take these lefties seriously by comparison? The DNC tent was big, but with these types, it could easily collapse. Years into the future the “Left” remained a disorganized cacophony, undisciplined and leaderless, slogan-poor and without one singular cause, allowing Donald Trump his win.
I hated my job and was lucky to find both a producer and a seed grant for the film I truly wanted to make. So I worked hard at making myself completely unnecessary at the station, and they did exactly what I wanted. They fired me.
I jumped headlong into shooting A Jihad for Love. My first stop was Egypt, via France. It was not my first time in either country. Filming began haphazardly. There was no script and the subjects took years to find and convince. I remember meeting Ziyad, an escapee from a Cairo prison, who talked about the comfort the Quran gave him while he was imprisoned. Incongruously, we sat at Le Depot, a sex club near the Marais in Paris, talking about Islamic verses.
I filmed a lesbian couple, Maha and Maryam—the former a hijab-wearing second-generation French Moroccan who is one of the most devout Muslims I’ve ever met, and the latter her veil-less, less religiously inclined partner—in Cairo. Maha opened my mind immeasurably when she said, “People feel that a woman wearing hijab is either an extremist or oppressed, but for me, it sets me free.”
Maryam would become a prominent woman’s voice during Egypt’s revolution, though she never revealed her sexuality. Maha, in the early days, had told me she couldn’t even allow the word “lesbian” to slip past her tongue. Her shame and the spiritual violence she experienced was profoundly sad. It would take two years till Maha allowed me even to set up a camera.
Pretending to be a tourist, I filmed them surreptitiously in one of Cairo’s many tourist traps, Mokattam Hill, famed for its Saladin or Citadel mosque. They were more loquacious when I recorded interviews at a friend’s apartment in downtown Cairo. Maha yearned to go on Hajj but believed she couldn’t without somehow finding a mahram.
I challenged Maha with the 34th verse from the Quran’s fourth chapter, An-Nisa (“The Women”). This provocative Surah has been used by both Muslim scholars and Islamophobes. Referring to how husbands were to treat their wives, it in part said, “Beat them lightly.” Maha pointed out how dharb, the word that meant “beat,” was used in various other ways in the Quran, so it was contested. She was hardly the first Muslim I had met to use semantics and the context of the seventh century, which is when some Sunni Muslims believe the business of putting the scripture together, pen to paper, allegedly began. Using their own lineage, Sunnis say the third Caliph Uthman oversaw the completion of this enormous task two decades after Muhammad’s death. For the Shias, within six months of Muhammad’s death, his son-in-law and caliph number one, Ali, had a complete physical transcript of what until then had been entirely oral revelation to Muhammad. I told Maha how I felt the book needed to be immutable.
At the Madbouly bookstore near the soon-to-be-world-famous Tahrir Square we bought a thick tome called Fiqh al Sunnah (“Jurisprudence in the way of the Prophet”), surprisingly on the not-religious Maryam’s recommendation. Laudably she found a vague reference to female same-sex activity, and we even found a word for it—al-Suhaq. The punishment was “to let them go.” She squeezed Maha’s hand and said, “See, there is no punishment.” Maha’s reply surprised me: “Sometimes I want to be punished.”
They would later come to New York because they had final-cut privileges. I took them to the historic Malcolm X Mosque in Harlem. I gave them an abbreviated history of the Nation of Islam. I told them why I was not taking them to the $17 million, partially Saudi-funded glitzy marble mosque on 96th Street. Its first imam, Sheikh Muhammad Gemeaha, was an Egyptian who fled the US after claiming that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy, adding, “If it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.” His anti-Semitism went further, blaming Jews for the spread of “heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs.” Anti-Semitism is distilled into many Muslim minds at a very young age. So is the idea that Muslims and Islam are superior to the rest of the world.
My film needed to tell the stories of men like Ziyad, too—people who actually lived with the consequences of their lifestyles. I would seek them out in Muslim countries. I couldn’t ask for government permission. I would film guerrilla-style. I was afraid and yet thrilled to be on an adventure that would take me to twelve countries. I would always hide my tapes in my checked baggage with a prayer. Because this was raw footage, the faces of my interview subjects were not yet concealed. In Egypt, for example, there could be real consequences for Maryam and Maha. Taking even greater precautions, I filmed several minutes of touristic footage at the beginning and end of every tape, in the unlikely event that custom agents in these countries would seize and watch the tapes.
Funding came in spurts. The stories I filmed spanned the many geographies of Islam, different cultures, different languages, and different kinds of Muslims. I would not allow my work to paint Islam as a problematic monolith.
After years of paperwork, US immigration services finally allotted me the coveted designation of an “alien of extraordinary ability.” This was no joke—it was a real visa category that many sought and only a few got. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were aliens of extraordinary abilities just like me! The Brazilian soccer phenom Pelé was one, too.
I started appearing on panels again, categorized as “brown,” “Muslim,” “progressive Muslim,” “immigrant filmmaker,” “queer activist,” “person of color.” Invitations piled up. One panel described me as someone whose work “addresses a critical force field.” I was flattered. They said my work addressed “Muslim sexual diversity, community, voice, and rights” and “raises a number of thorny questions about political representation and commercial support.” Heady stuff.
I was the compliant Uncle Tom or the house-Negro of gay Muslims. I could conveniently be put on display as a last-minute inclusion of “diversity” into leftie events that were still very white. Was the “white man’s burden” a real thing?
I had no particular admiration or patience for the ivory towers of the academy. But I hypocritically basked in the attention coming from them. In truth I was penniless, surviving only on rent-free luck. And I was not even a proven filmmaker yet. I hid my shame by dressing smart in designer hand-me-downs from my DC cousins.
Many labels making me a novelty could be stuck on my back. Thus at the conferences they invited me to, I purposely decided not to use the “academese” that they didn’t know I knew so well. I told stories instead. I happily shared memories about the delights of Muslim festivals like Eid al-Fitr and the Eid I feared, Eid al-Adha, while growing up in my tiny North Indian hometown, which was a twenty-minute ride away from one of the world’s most puritanical schools of Islam.
The hosts were gratified to find the “real thing.” I had actually lived the abstractions and concepts that existed for them only in books and Wikipedia. Major plus! I spoke with an accent! A Muslim Uncle Tom?
We took money kindly provided by Jewish funders and foundations. The “LGBTQI Muslims of color”-types raised questions about my political intent. I was part of a Jewish propaganda machine, they claimed. I was familiar with anti-Semitism. Anyone who grows up Muslim is. And if they claim they have no idea where it comes from, they are either lying or are ignorant of the complex history of our faith’s relation to Judaism. But I was surprised it came so openly from these enlightened lefties who claimed they were fighting the good fight. I was proud of my Jewish-Muslim collaboration! At fundraisers we held for the film, my producer David and I joked, “We are an unlikely Jewish-Muslim collaboration. And it’s mostly nonviolent!” On cue, it always brought laughs and, we hoped, larger checks.
“You are naïve,” said the indignant Muslim LGBTQI. “You will do great damage to the truly Islamic content of your work, because it will be labeled a Jewish conspiracy.” These same people later said the finished film was “too Islamic”!
Imran, one of the conferencing Muslims, did become a close friend. One day we sat sharing our first-time stories. “You go first,” he said, “mine will take forever.”
“I got to choose it,” I told Imran, and in an instant I was transported to the eighties. “It was a class thing. Muhammad was a lower-class Muslim. I loosened the drawstring on his trousers because I wanted to. The pitiless summer sun scorched everything, but our small white room was cool, and there was nothing I wanted more than to take off his white trousers.
“There had been an argument at home and I had driven the ten kilometers on my father’s Bajaj scooter to the Nau Gaza Peer, a Sufi shrine. The heat and the dust clouds were overwhelming. Only a few sickly and dehydrated pigeons had dared to venture out with me.
“Nau Gaza Peer was a mystic’s mausoleum. Legend had it that the mystic was nine meters tall. Another said that the grave’s size changed every time it was measured. The mystic was a magic man of infinite wisdom, my mother told me, because he was both Hindu and Muslim. I was a sickly child, and my mother, with her head carefully covered, would bring me to the shrine often so that we could observe the ritual of covering the mystic’s grave with a piece of fabric, which she hoped would cure my bronchitis!
“But then there was Muhammad, the hirsute and handsome caretaker of the shrine. He knew me.
“‘Your mother has not come with you,’ he said. I said I was alone because I was angry. Muhammad gave me some water and we chatted.
“‘Khuda Baksh is what my parents call me, but you should call me Muhammad, because that is my proper name,’ he said. I giggled, telling him that doing that in English this would become ‘Muhammad, Forgive Me God.’
“‘Oh, I am always asking God for forgiveness,’ he said, and then, ‘You go to St. Mary’s school, don’t you? Will you teach me English, Parvez?’ I promised him I would if he would allow me to see the small room where he lived a few hundred feet away from the grave.
“What we did in the room involved pleasure and pain. At thirteen I did not know how to distinguish between the two. But I knew that I wanted Muhammad with every fiber of my young being. I did not know his age, but I knew the feeling was mutual. I had never kissed a man before and as we lay in the room, spent and wordless, he caressed my face and kissed me again.
“Shadows grew longer. I mumbled about needing to leave but he put his hands to my lips as the call to the evening prayer spread across the roofs of the hundreds of mosques in Saharanpur and entered our private little world through the room’s lone window.
“‘We must pray, Parvez,’ he said.
“I told him I did not know how to pray properly.
“‘Well, now you will learn. I will teach you to pray the Namaz, just like our Prophet did, and you will teach me English. Deal?’
“We stepped outside as the muezzin’s voice exhorting the faithful to pray reached a crescendo. As afternoon faded to dusk, Muhammad taught me the proper ways to perform the ritual cleansing before prayer, stressing that because of what we had just done we would need to do the longer ghusl, a ritualized bathing of our private parts, instead of the usual wudu, which was a simpler ritual.
“He unfurled his blue-and-green prayer rug and I sat a few feet behind him so I could follow his lead. Muhammad was leading me in my first complete Namaz prayer. He was thus becoming my first imam, literally, a learned man who knows how to lead Muslims in prayer. I wondered if he was asking for forgiveness. I knew that, for me, the thrill of our afternoon was greater than my shame of it. When we were done, Muhammad held my hand.
“‘Why did you not get circumcised in the Prophet’s way, Parvez?’ In Hindi, the question would have been crude, but Muhammad spoke in the more elegant Urdu using the metaphorical way of describing the mandatory Muslim male circumcision, Sunnat (“circumcised preceding in the Prophet’s way”).
“After that, I would always excuse myself from my mother’s frequent desires to visit the shrine together. Just days after my secret afternoon with Muhammad, the shame of my uncut penis had been discovered at a urinal while at school. I would often return home in tears. I strangely remained ashamed of my uncircumcised penis. In India, you could go either way. But the boys who instilled the shame were circumcised. For them it was confirmation of my ‘girl-boy’ status, and on me they practiced the kind of cruelty only children possess.
“Weeks passed and when I finally dared to tell my mother, she forbade me ever to reveal this ‘uncircumcised’ status, adding again that ‘this kind of talk is dirty.’
“She could have chosen to confront my pain with a different choice of words. But she was bequeathing the legacy of shame and of secrets that she had grown up with. The rest of my life would be marked by it. For example, my notion of sex being shameful came from my mother, and could not be solved by therapy.
“The only way to escape this childhood of shame was to leave home. And as soon as I knew I could, I did. Only years later did I realize that some of us go on journeys hoping that we can be transformed into better selves, but sometimes we discover that we never needed to leave home in the first place. For as long as I can remember, I have always been escaping home. And each time I left, I was searching for it.”
“So basically, your first trick taught you how to pray,” said Imran, laughing.
Those conferencing, label-loving Muslims applauded my thesis film, In the Name of Allah, which we played later that day. Imran hated it.
“You are very brave,” said a white Muslim convert covered in decidedly un-Islamic tats and piercings as he shook my hand. “I saw your film.” I did not tell him that I would forever hide that “film” monologue of silhouetted Muslims. And that he should forever cover his arms!
I wondered what form of masochism made this Caucasian (presumably Christian?) man convert to Islam. There was much I could have said, but I didn’t want to break his heart. I thanked him and sought Imran, telling him about the encounter.
“Do these guys even understand the destructive forms of Wahhabi, Deobandi, and other styles of Islam and how much damage they have done? Their version of Islam would never be taken seriously by almost the entirety of Muslims on the planet!”
“This utopia will remain in this suburban hotel!” Imran replied. “Fools!”
My friendship with Imran was a precious thing. Back home, Pakistan and India were not exactly BFFs.