{"id":1277,"date":"2013-08-04T23:18:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-04T23:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/08\/being-black-lesbian-and-muslim-in-the-south.html"},"modified":"2013-08-04T23:18:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-04T23:18:00","slug":"being-black-lesbian-and-muslim-in-the-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/08\/being-black-lesbian-and-muslim-in-the-south.html","title":{"rendered":"Being Black, Lesbian, and Muslim In The South"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Black. Muslim. Lesbian. I get the same look now that I did eight years ago when I say those words together. I might easily have said purple, polka-dotted unicorn. People pause and reflect. Their eyes become serious or confused. The contradiction in terms just does not settle well when most people hear it.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know there was such a thing\u2026\u201d is a fairly common response. I don\u2019t blame them.<\/span><\/div>\n
When I saw the words together for the first time, I was equally as stunned. Not because I held some narrow notions of what a Muslim was, or could be, but because I thought I was the only one.<\/span><\/div>\n
I left the mosque in 2002 shortly after I left my husband. I wasn\u2019t sure if there was some policy on homosexuality that would apply to me. I didn\u2019t know if there would be some kind of public punishment for my supposed sin. I didn\u2019t know if I would walk through the doors and everyone would know that I had met a woman and I loved her, but I wasn\u2019t going to wait around to find out. When I stopped going, I disconnected myself from the very core of my existence. My spirituality had been a fundamental part of my daily life and I had become a woman, alone, thrust into a world where I was a perpetual outsider even in the most familiar places. I was embraced by my new community. I was loved and fed and groomed in feminist pedagogy and historical subtext. I became a part of a thriving community that shaped and formed me into a new and powerful being: a Lesbian. For a while, that was all I was and I was OK with that.<\/span><\/div>\n
At a lesbian retreat in Malibu, I met a woman who invited me to come to New York and work on her video project. Standing in a Brooklyn brownstone, re-enacting a 1950s lesbian house party, I realized that three women in the house were also Muslim. It hadn\u2019t even occurred to me that Hanifah Walidah was a Muslim name. I stood still in that moment. I was not alone. There were\u00a0four<\/em>\u00a0of us. I found them, my people. We hugged and laughed and talked about our shared experiences. That day in 2005, I was whole and in community with my sisters. That was the last day I was in a room with all of them, I went back to Chicago the next morning.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black. Muslim. Lesbian. I get the same look now that I did eight years ago when I say those words together. I might easily have said purple, polka-dotted unicorn. People pause and reflect. Their eyes become serious or confused. The contradiction in terms just does not settle well when most people hear it. \u201cI didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBeing Black, Lesbian, and Muslim In The South<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Black. Muslim. Lesbian. I get the same look now that I did eight years ago when I say those words together. 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