To the Shooting Stars of My Spiritual Journey:
Queer Muslims and the World’s They Create
It’s Shab-e-ghadr (laylatul-Qadr, in Farsi). My friends and I have just left the prayer room of our all-girls high school. We’ve just finished the جوشن کبیر Joshan Kabir prayer —calling God with one thousand poetic names,and reciting the same dua after each group of names: الغوث، الغوث، خلصنا من النار یا رب. For the 16 year old me, growing up in a non-religious family, this is the only spiritual practice that happens in community. The chorus of voices who repeat the dua, some crying, some smiling, makes my heart shake on a frequency that feels so divine. So connected to God—whoever she is.
Laying on the ground at the school yard, we’re staring at the sky. The stars are surprisingly visible. And then it happens. We all jump up and look at each other with wide eyes. No one says anything, but the wonder in our eyes says it all: We just saw two shooting stars in the polluted sky of Tehran. The chatter dies. We can hear each other breathe. And on that night, as close as we are to whatever notion of the divine we each hold, a shooting star is a miracle. A sign. A poem. A response from the God we have been calling on all night.
That is my last memory of feeling so close to God. I don’t know where those other girls are in their spiritual journey. I don’t know if they still identify as girls. I know I don’t. I also know that the complicated friendship I had with one of them, the poetic image of me laying on the ground breathless by the sight of a shooting star and yet only hearing the sound of her heavy breathing, the feeling I didn’t have words for at the time, was simply love. It took me eight years to find the word queer. And when I finally did, I had lost all my connections to anything divine. I had left my Ramadan and shab-e-ghadr and Joshan Kabir and my gentle female God behind, in an effort to distance myself from the Islamic Republic and all the trauma that came with it.
I guess it’s not easy to hold on to your personal spiritual connection -in isolation- with a religion when that religion is constantly abused by the institutions of power to control people. To control you. As a 16 years old, pissed at the world and rebellious to the bone as I was, how could I keep that poetic, fragile, connection intact? Alone on my prayer mat, breaking fast alone at the kitchen table, and having no one other than my sweet old grandmas to turn to when my own God felt out of reach. But my grandmas’ god was so masculine, demanding, and too similar to the state’s god.
For a while I took refuge in literary works of Sufis. I recited poems as prayers and drowned myself in giant books about their journeys and their conversations with god. But how long can a closeted-to-self queer keep listening to dudes talk to their dude god, even if it’s the deepest, most meaningful conversation?
I lost it all. The prayers and poems and the duas and the bright Ramadan nights, and, eventually, shab-e-ghadr. That was the last one I let go of. I held onto it as long as I could. Until the air in the mosque became suffocating. Until my thirst for belonging somewhere because of all the incoherent, incomprehensible, sentences that I had to describe myself —and not despite them— won the battle. I left the mosque and made a necklace out of my bright blue tasbeeh.
To this day, 10 years after the last Shab-e-ghadr I spent in community, I haven’t grieved the loss of my spiritual practices and my relationship to my God. I drop off some dates at my queer Muslim friend’s doorstep on the first day of Ramadan during quarantine, and tear up and cringe and get uncomfortable when she posts a story about it calling me her “Muslim comrade.” But how can I tell her the word “Muslim” still feels like the skirts I keep in my drawer, don’t wear them anymore, and yet can’t bring myself to donate them? How do I grieve a part of me that’s still somewhere, waiting for me to work it into the personal liberation I have found in this new language? How do I re-introduce myself to my Farsi and Arabic speaking God, when I don’t have words for who I am in my own language?
I am a queer, non-binary Iranian immigrant in the U.S., working at a Muslim grassroots organization. I have found and built a home in Durham, NC, with other queer poc and some queer Muslims. Reconnecting with God has never felt so possible. I scroll through the ig pages of queer Muslim orgs, I introduce myself with my new pronouns in meetings, I anticipate quarantine iftar events with joy and fear but never join them, and I shiver everytime one of my comrades ends a meeting with a surah.
I can hear my God calling me back to her from a distance.
I thought I’d start fasting again this year. I didn’t. I’m giving myself time. And all through this heart-breaking and hear-warming journey, I’m so deeply grateful to all the queer Muslims who live their lives out loud. To queer poets who offer me a language to re-define spirituality. To a team of coworkers who stumble upon my pronouns but keep trying. To my Muslim friends who invite me to their Iftar events without asking questions. To #DigitalRamadan and ig takeovers and blog posts that expand and complicate and redefine this space.
یا مَنْ اِلَیْهِ یَهْرَبُ الْخاَّئِفُونَ … یا مَنْ اِلَیْهِ یَقْصِدُ الْمُنیبُونَ … یا مَنْ اِلَیْهِ یَلْجَاءُ الْمُتَحَیِّرُونَ … یا مَنْ اِلَیْهِ یَسْکُنُ الْمُوقِنُونَ
الْغَوْثَ الْغَوْثَ خَلِّصْنا مِنَ النّارِ یا رَبِّ