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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.