Searching for the Next Intifada: Exercises in Queer Muslim Futurism
/This is not an article about Palestine; this is not an article just about Palestine. This is not an article about the Middle East; this is not an article just about the Middle East.
This is an article about searching for the next intifada or perhaps simply imagining the next intifada – predicting, revealing and manifesting the future uprising through a nascent art movement called Queer Muslim Futurism. The Palestinian Intifadas were two popular uprisings in 1987 and 2000 led by the Palestinian people against the Zionist occupation.[1] An occupation that for the past fifty years prior had been stealing their land, committing genocide, and pursuing aggressive expansionist policies that sent hundreds of thousands of people into exile as refugees. The response to both Intifadas was brutal; the Israeli Defense Force killed thousands and injured tens of thousands.
Violence is inherited, whether we like it or not. Muslims and non-Muslims alike living in Asia and Africa must constantly come face to face with it, whether it is in the form of occupation, imperialism, or a ruthless war on terror that has resulted in the death of an estimated 1.3 to 2 million people since 2001.[2] Progressive, secular and socialist endeavours in these regions have either been usurped by internal entities or intentionally toppled by countries like the United States. In recent decades the face of the enemy to Western civilization has turned into that of the Muslim: aggressive, inherently violent, and lacking moral competence. Historically speaking, these are attributes given to the Oriental subject in general and have paved the way for the European colonisation of much of the Asian and African continents in the 18th and 19th centuries. A rational form of racism was birthed and it was called Orientalism.[3]
Orientalism is now Islamophobia; the Muslim in the imagination of the West has become racialized and Islam stands in isolation as a problematic and oppressive faith.[4] However, Islam has never and will never stand in isolation: it is the product of many other traditions, belief systems, and cultures that it continues to come into contact with and absorb everyday.
Like Islam, Queer Muslim Futurism does not exist only within the confines of the faith; it is a way for artists, writers, and thinkers to be able to look back into our histories to see what shaped and made us and to find ways to build bridges of solidarity.
How do we express resistance as it exists in the Muslim world through a queer understanding? What does the Arab, Pakistani, and Iranian fighter and revolutionary leader look like when read as femme or even simply homo/trans-welcoming instead of homo/transphobic? As a visual and performance artist this was precisely what I attempted to create for myself.
I grew up in a highly political family; my father was killed by police when I was six years old, my grandfather was executed by a staunchly religious military regime in 1979 before I was born, my uncle was poisoned and killed by the same regime in 1984, and my aunt was killed in 2007. Political rebellion ran in my family and it did not scare me, but inspired me to break the chain of blood that forcibly connected one martyred relative to the next. However, in my context, revolution came with the narrative of a heterosexual family structure that as I grew up became harder and harder to grapple with. I wanted to be politically motivated but in a different way.
I wanted to see a flamboyant, faggy, and high femme revolutionary leader. Someone with as much contour as conviction, eyeshadow that stood for egalitarianism, and heels to stamp out heteropatriarchy, but make it Muslim.
I decided to create her and she is called Faluda Islam. Faluda was a warrior drag queen, branded comrade by some and terrorist by others. She was part of a band of bearded Muslim queens who roamed the world, striking fearing into American and European-backed regimes and rebel groups. She was killed in the Great Queer Revolution but has been resurrected through wifi technology and comes back to this earth and time to tell us of the future and what it is we need to brace ourselves for.
She came out of a creative need to see more queer Muslim representation in both the arts and in nightclub culture in the Bay Area, especially at a time when Muslims have become, in the imagination of the West, a monolithic group of people. The fact that queer Muslims exist is surprisingly mind boggling for many.
The artists who I will discuss through the length of this article play with perceptions in many different ways; these include Laylatul Qadr, Saba Taj, Hushidar Mortezaie, and Jassem Hindi. Their work cannot be fit into strict binaries or rigid methodologies. While writing, I was at one point tempted to cite José Esteban Muñoz’ Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) as a source of theoretical investigation, specifically employing his theory of queerness as a utopian future ideal – defined by Muñoz as “an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility of another world.”[5] His writing is inspiring and will come up again in this article, but is far removed from Islam and anything outside of the Americas and so it became apparent that this was not the best resource for this essay.
These artists who come from Muslim or Muslim adjacent backgrounds invest their creative energies into what can be described as “fucking shit up,” or, in other words, creating the framework in order to imagine or write a different history all grounded in the reality of today and using the tremendous generosity of the future. They have all done their own research, deep investigative studies into the lives of political figures, writers, stories, and quotes from Islamic texts, such as the Quran and the Hadith – sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – Pre-Islamic ritual and belief, as well as the writings of scholars and researchers that do not address futurism directly.
I will be looking at the work of these four artists through “categories” only for clarity – the work will find ways of blending them together as time becomes a traversable road going back and forth and modern scholars intertwine with ancient gods. Linear time, as Muñoz states, is straight time and in this article I reject it as it sets up the queer subject for failure. These categories include poetry, global revolution (an intifada that eventually leads into an apocalypse), hybridity, and lineage. Inevitably, the work also becomes collaborative and the visions manifest in our creative works all come from histories of war, resistance, as well as continued resilience. Solidarity building is key.
Jassem Hindi, a Syrian artist based in Berlin said to me,
Any solo project of futurism, their discourse in the end was reused by architects and politicians and all those in places of power to destructive and corrupt ends. This includes the Italians in the 1940s and modern day Dubai, which is futuristic, which means it shouldn’t exist now. Futurism should be a collective effort in order for it to be a positive one.
I met Hindi while he was in San Francisco, working on Future Friend/ships, a collaborative project with Keith Hennessey. Presented at Counterpulse in 2016, the performance opened with a parade of photos of the Ancestors of Arab Futurism, figures from Edward Said to Donna Haraway and Octavia Butler. Later, Hindi asks that after all has been taken away, “What is left for us to offer? Our storytelling capacities,” a lament of the relentless destruction inflicted on the Arab people, who are forced time and time again to recover. There is not one apocalypse in this story but many.
Hindi and Hennessey’s Future Friend/ships bring the audience into a post-utopian future. The two performers take on characters within this world, first greeting you with baklava as you enter the theater. Two huge floral fabrics stitched together come down once the audience has taken their seats: Hennessey and Hindi are wearing costumes made from the same material obscuring their bodies and making them barely visible in the sea of printed flowers. As the piece progresses there is no narrative arc but moreso a deeper descent into this world, heightened by spectacular lighting and sound elements. All spoken dialogue is delivered to the audience and movement scores accompany buzzing drone sounds, high pitched poetry readings. Poetry and lyrics are the main driving force of the piece and used as “political practice.”[6]
Documentation: Jassem Hindi, Future Friend/ships, CounterPulse, San Francisco, 2016. Image courtesy of Robbie Sweeny.
Throughout the performance, the audience is not really given any clues as to where this takes place: is it Syria, Yemen, Iraq? This kind of geographical ambiguity permits Future Friend/ships to avoids any narrative concerned with victimization through playful movements that flow into more serious verse. Two of the more prominent cultural figures quoted and referenced in Future Friend/ships, Lebanese band Mashrou Leila and Lebanese writer Etel Adnan, support this article’s argument.
There is a beautiful merging of these two personalities towards the end of the hour long piece. Hindi begins to squirm on the floor, moving slowly as Mashrou Leila’s song Marikh(Mars) is played alongside a poem from Etel Adnan’s book The Arab Apocalypse.
Marikh centers on the struggles of daily existence – the wanting to be lifted to another planet to escape the cycles that we are forced into. The lead singer of the band, Hamed Sinno, is the only openly queer Arab musician still living in the Middle East and the band has received both praise and backlash in the region.
Adnan’s book The Arab Apocalypse puts into poetic verse the absurdity of the political turmoil in the Arab world. Divided into Roman numerals, Adnan’s poetry goes deep into Arab history, resurrecting popular figures such as Gilgamesh: “we crucify Gilgamesh on a TANK Viking II reaches Mars.”[7] Adnan uses language to beautifully render the disturbing.
Hennessey and Hindi use one particular poem, XXXIX, partially quoted below:
When roses grow only in cemeteries,
When they eat the Palestinian’s liver before he’s even dead,
When the sun itself has no other purpose than being a shroud
the human tide moves on ...
Why lift from the verses of Mashrou Leila and Adnan? Adnan, as far as we know, is not queer and Sinno is much younger and therefore speaks to a different cultural context. Adnan wrote primarily in French, a colonial language, and spent much of her life in Sausalito, California. To some, she is not considered part of the world of Arab literature. To Hindi, Adnan and Mashrou Leila occupy a “culture of rejects,” important in certain cultural spaces and cited as irrelevant by others, essentially making them both queer.
Hindi prefers to call himself an artist dealing in Arab Future Fiction, which serves as a more generous predecessor to Queer Muslim Futurism. It is for one not exclusively concerned with Islam specifically; to be Arab is to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Druz, Yazidi, atheist, and so on. For Hindi, the question is not, “How do we imagine a future?” but, “How do we write history in the future?” Within his practice, Arabness is not a static identity but a generous and active one, spread throughout the world in a series of diasporas, from the Jewish diaspora in the 8th century BCE to the diasporas of Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Yemenis of a more modern catastrophe. Islam for Hindi is not especially relevant – for him, it is a small weave in the very thick fabric of Arabness. He continues to collaborate with artists across the world and the diaspora in order to investigate, in his own words, “the resources inside a poem.”
With all this written, why bring in Islam at all? Why use a mainstream religion, not too different to Judaism and Christianity, as inspiration for envisioning a radically different queer world?
There is great deal to gain from understanding Islam through a futurist lens, hence its relevance to these artists. Islam has always looked to the future. Springing from the deserts of Arabia in the 7th century CE, it was created out of a political need to disrupt the economic stranglehold of the Qureysh tribe that controlled nearly all trade in the region. Islam put into writing rights for women, including the right to own and inherit property even after marriage; rights for orphans; and even set regulations for the kind and gentle treatment of animals. Its fight for dominance in the region has aligned the faith with constant resistance. The beliefs of Shia Islam in particular pose that every generation has its oppressors, and therefore, every generation must also continue to fight for justice. The Quran, Hadith, as well as imams and scholars explore a tightly connected multiverse of alien prophets, mosques on other planets, and unseen dimensions on Earth. Stories of the day of judgment are filled with demons, dead kings, immortal prophets, and the anti-christ, all battling in what can only be described as THE final showdown.
It must also be noted that Islam has no race, country, or ethnicity. There are white European Muslims who have been Muslims for centuries, Arab Muslims, African Muslims, Latinx Muslims, South Asian Muslims, East Asian Muslims, and the list goes on. There is no monolithic Islam; it has changed, evolved, and left itself open to difference. South Asian Sufism – a mystical interpretation of Islam – is revered by not only Muslims but also Hindus and Sikhs alike, and early Sufi Muslim saints embraced Hindu rituals that continue to this day nearly one thousand years after the arrival of Islam in the subcontinent. Considering the global nature of Islam, Queer Muslim Futurism in many ways becomes a form of queer globalisation, a guerrilla movement on an international scale.
Still from the music video for Jihadageddon, released 2018. Image courtesy Laylatul Qadr.
Of course, there are problems with how Islam has been practiced. Societies that have embraced Islam have interpreted its teachings in ways that are patriarchal, misogynistic, and homophobic. Islam’s quick turn from oppressed faith to global empire left in its wake scores of conquered and oppressed peoples alongside a vibrant and undeniably intellectual culture. This is the paradox that many Muslims contend with today and it is precisely this complexity that leaves so much fodder for Queer Muslim Futurists like Laylatul Qadr.
Qadr is lead singer of punk rock band The Muslims that formed shortly after Trump was elected to the US presidential office in 2016. The band likens Muslims to an invading army of aliens, foreigners who are dangerous and aggressive in all the right ways. To her, a global revolution is imminent, informed by a ten step process of small actions, skirmishes, and sparks. The Muslim’s latest album Jihadageddon is a critique of both practices around Islam, an Islamophobic white society, and white moderates. The video for the album’s namesake track features a woman — Layla’s partner and artist Saba Taj — wearing a bright pink, floral burqa, wandering around a mall in North Carolina, occasionally window shopping and banging her head to music with lyrics such as,
You see us walking by, you think we’re going to blow.
The song and video imagery expose the fears and doubts that inform Islamophobia in the US. In another song, Confess, they tell a story of the kidnap and torture of white supremacists, asking for reparation using insurgent strategies.
Laylatul Qadr, Devouring Becky, digital collage, 2018. Image courtesy of Laylatul Qadr and The Muslims.
While The Muslims is a multiethnic and diverse group of people, Qadr’s work is informed by her experiences of being black, Muslim, and coming out. She investigates what it means to have those identities intersect and be in the middle of cultures that have complex relationships with queerness, culturally, spiritually, and socially. In the United States, Islam and black identity have not been so separate. In the words of curator and writer Yas Ahmed, “The first Muslims in this country were enslaved black folks.”
In more recent history, The Nation of Islam among other Muslim sects from the 1940s to the contemporary, present Islam as a way out of the oppression of black people and reject Christianity because it had been used as a tool of colonialism and slavery. Bringing in queer identity creates an incredibly potent mix of resistance to the status quo.
Islam has been treated as an enemy by the government of the United States, similar to communism, homosexuality, and black liberation. The use of punk rock to express these junctions should come as no surprise. Punk has
a do-it-yourself mentality, taking control over what isn’t working and setting it right, deconstructing culture, and challenging long held beliefs and ideas. It is a way out of rules, the very rules that oppress so many.
Prejudice has made Islam a religion of protest: to be a practicing Muslim in the United States is to challenge the status quo, as punk culture also does. Qadr states, “It could be argued, though, that Islam fits so perfectly within punk ... because again, it is a system and structure of rules to be bent — to be made right for the generation and people it speaks to. Like Yuletide to Christianity that created Christmas, I experience queering Islam as the correct bastardization that’s so necessary to keep it true for the people that live and experience it today. And that’s fucked up. It’s rebellious and awfully sinful to do. It’s punk.”
While cultural hybridity is a part of the work of Hindi and Qadr, artist and activist Saba Taj utilizes its other facets: the queer femme creature, an evolved post-human able to survive the toxicity of this world and emerge triumphantly in the next. While speaking over the phone, Taj said to me, “In our histories, violence has been such a present component of change, an inevitable part of transformation.” Her parents are both Kashmiri and her visits to the region were marked by the ever present Pakistani and Indian militaries as well as the various insurgencies that mark daily life for Kashmiri people. Inevitably, this leads to life spent indoors, and Taj would mark this time by reading science fiction, where entire worlds were constructed, good and evil were interchangeable concepts, and humanity was not at the center. The apocalypses came in the form of zombie epidemics, fertility issues, and the evolution and destruction of humanity through hybridity. “It reminded me of Islamic stories you were told as a kid,” Taj recalls.
An image of Buraq from Yusuf and ‘Zulaykha’, a 19th-century Judeo-Persian manuscript, The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary.
Saba Taj, Interstellar Uber, dimensions variable, Elsewhere Residency, 2017.
Her series Creatures From the Earth illustrates a post-apocalyptic Earth of amorphous creatures with strands of different animals in order to survive and fight in a world so heavily polluted. This work is inspired by stories from the Quran, in particular “Dabbat al-ard” – “Beast of the Earth” – whose horrifying monstrous appearance signals the Day of Judgment. But, more importantly for Taj, it has another purpose: “the way we’ve been de-humanized, how often that has been communicated through comparisons to animals, putting humans lower in a hierarchy of humanity.”[8] This reflection also comes up in Monster, Terrorist, Fag by Jasbir K. Puar and Amit Rai: the human monster has been created by society to set up a distinction between the normal, law-abiding citizen and a potentially threatening one.[9] In effect Taj’s work both challenges and embraces these stereotypes.
Another work Interstellar Uber is a queer rendering of Buraq, a heavenly creature, described as tall and beautiful, half human and half winged donkey/mule. The Buraq takes the Prophet Muhammad from earth to heaven in a dream. Before heaven, however, they make a stop in Jerusalem at the site today marked by the Dome of the Rock.[10] The Buraq is only mentioned in the Hadith and not at all in the Quran, yet its one gesture of carrying the Prophet Muhammad to meet his creator has become a huge part of Islamic folklore all over the world. The creature is referred to interchangeably as male and female; it is a symbol of the journey and its image is used as a charm to protect all those who travel, from bus drivers to seafarers.
In Taj’s work, its modern queer rendering once again invests the evolution of humanity into queer femme beings. Taj’s Buraq has multiple blue eyes — traditionally used as a mark against jealousy and bad will in the Islamic world — yet for Taj the meaning goes even deeper. It is both the blue eye of white society, occasionally being stabbed into blindness in The Spoils of War, and also as a mark of protection, exposing how unstable binaries of good and bad can be.
It is the very gaze John Berger describes in his Ways of Seeing and the oriental gaze in Edward Said’s Orientalism, the eye of power that must be satisfied. This same eye, however, can also be owned, controlled, and turned back around by the subject who can and does usurp it in order to stare back at power.
Saba Taj, Creatures From the Earth, The Spoils of War, 2016. Spray paint, acrylic paint glitter, ink, gold leaf, rhinestones, graphite on panel, 18 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Hushidar Mortezaie, an Iranian artist based in California, similarly dreams of a genderless future creature and much of his inspirations merge various figures from pre-Islamic tradition through to the modern day, very specifically reclaiming narrative and history. In his installation, Occupy Me, Topping From the Bottom (which will be referred to as Occupy Me), Mortezaie gives power back to the ‘bottom’ or the so-called passive figure, the underdog and subaltern of history.
These inspirations come from Mortezaie’s own childhood life spent in Iran, coming from a left wing family that was active within the more secular aspects of the Iranian revolution, the left wing politics inspired by Marxism and attempts to make Iran a socialist country. As the revolution continued, a vacuum was created and theocracy prevailed, resulting in the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Left wing activists were eventually sidelined and actively put down after Imam Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power. Mortezaie’s family’s move to California sent him as a young adult to San Francisco and New York where he worked in the fashion industry wearing many hats, including as buyer and designer. He fully engrossed himself in the club kid scene of the 1990s and his work reflects the merging of these seemingly different historical and political worlds.
Hushidar Mortezaie, Occupy Me, Topping From the BotTom, SOMArts, from the exhibition The Third Muslim: Queer and Trans* Muslim Narratives of Resistance and Resilience, 2018. Image courtesy of Chani Bockwinkel.
“History is like fashion, it keeps repeating itself,” Mortezaie said emphatically to me after speaking about his many projects in which he merges the worlds of high fashion, performative masculinity, and conceptual art. His installation Occupy Me reflects the cycles of history and its ability to cocoon and gestate only to re-emerge when the time is right.
The installation, which was first shown at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, portrays three figures who became a part of a new canon in queer Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Iranian lineage. History becomes an important lens through which to gaze into the future. The first two figures are Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, who at ages 16 and 18 were publicly executed in the Iranian city of Mashhad in July 2005. To this day, there are debates as to whether they were hanged for engaging in consensual homosexual acts, but the pair nonetheless stand as a symbol of the injustices of the system that tried them. Mortezaie’s third figure is Fereydoun Farrokhzad, an openly gay Iranian singer who was murdered due as many suspect to his political writing infused with demands for acceptance.
Mortezaie does not allow these figures to disappear. In fact, he does not even allow them to die. Asgari and Marhoni are brought back to life by an unnamed power. In this cocoon stage between life and death, they transform into Muslim gay beloveds Malik Ayaz and Mahmoud Ghazni, each one a soldier and poet who marched from the Middle East to South Asia in the 10th century. Farrokhzad is reborn, phoenix-like, as the pre-Islamic androgynous deity Mithra of both Iranian Zoroastrianism and Vedic Hinduism – proof that these two cultures have always collided.
Hushidar Mortezaie, Occupy Me, Topping From the Bottom, SOMArts, from the exhibition The Third Muslim: Queer and Trans* Muslim Narratives of Resistance and Resilience, 2018. Image courtesy of Chani Bockwinkel.
There’s a fierceness to Mortezaie’s figures: they are masked yet confrontational, and bear the marks of the worlds and lives they once inhabited — a hanging noose in the case of Asgari and Marhoni, for instance.
But Mortezaie does not want to satisfy the Western liberal’s need to believe that their world is perfect. Behind these figures we see symbols of Western capitalism, the destructive powers of the Ku Klux Klan and the injustices of Zionism on the Palestinian people. This imagery suggests that things are not always as they seem, and that the oppressive systems around gender and sexuality present in the Muslim world are not always homegrown.
Queer Muslim Futurism complicates narrative, protesting against rigid binaries that construct East and West and reaffirming that queer identity is neither static nor apolitical. Violence is a key aspect in these stories but only because it is what we know, it is how we see change, and more importantly, it is a way to destroy in order to create again, to make rubble, then rise from it. Hindi’s work playfully explores different realities and looks at poetry not for what it reads on the page but for the potential each stanza possesses. He is currently working collaboratively to rewrite Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and looking deeply into the work of poets in a genre he calls Death Poetry. Qadr, Taj, Mortezaie, and Islam (me) are currently collaborating on a performance night at The Stud Bar in San Francisco for an evening of soothsaying, interplanetary video communications through static airwaves, and Muslim aliens.
While I call Queer Muslim Futurism a genre, it is hard to tell at this stage how it will evolve, with South Asian, Desi, and Arab Futurism also utilizing similar histories and inspirations. The next intifada is on the rise. There are those in Palestine that continue to resist Israeli apartheid through active protests and other forms of cultural resistance including artistic expression. However, there is a word often missing in the conversation: resilience, the fact that the fight continues and the Palestinian people alongside other occupied peoples have not grown tired and continue to resist despite the odds. Queer Muslim Futurism sees this and it writes into history a victor yet to be seen.
Nami Nasrallah, ’The First and Second Palestinian intifadas,’ in David Newman and Joel Peters (eds.), Routledge Handbook on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56. ↩
Brett Wilkins, “Doctors’ group says 1.3 million killed in U.S. ’War on Terror,’” Digital Journal, 25/03/2015, http:// www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/study-1-3-million-killed-in-usa-war-on-terror/article/429180. ↩
Edward Said, “Islam Through Western Eyes,” The Nation, 04/26/1980 https://www.thenation.com/article/ islam-through-western-eyes/. ↩
Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press: New York, 2009), 1. ↩
Keith Hennessey and Hindi, Jassem, “Future Friend/ ships,” Circo zero performance, 2015, http://circozero.org/ friendships/. ↩
Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press: Michigan, 1989), xliv. ↩
Quran, 27:82. ↩
Jasbir K. Puar and Rai, Amit, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 3 (2002): 117–148. ↩
Sahih al-Bukhari, 5:58:227. ↩
Mitra Rastegar, “Emotional Attachments and Secular Imaginings: Western LGBTQ Activism on Iran,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–29. ↩
ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO is an artist, performer, zombie drag queen and curator of mixed Pakistani, Lebanese and Iranian descent. His work explores complex identities formed by centuries of colonialism and exacerbated by contemporary international politics. Bhutto unpacks the intersections of queerness and Islam and how it exists in a constant liminal and non-aligned space. Bhutto was curatorial resident at SOMArts Cultural Center where he co-curated The Third Muslim: Queer and Trans Muslim Narratives of Resistance and Resilience and is a fall artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Bhutto is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (2016). Today he works as a teaching artist, community arts facilitator, and part-time unicorn in San Francisco.
