LITMIR.BIZ

       AMROU

       The Queer Prophet

      I was very excited when asked to contribute to this book, largely because I once actually thought I was a queer prophet. I’m not being ironic. At the height of a nervous breakdown when I was twenty-four, I believed, quite literally, that I must be a prophet.

      Some context: growing up in Bahrain, I was taught in the school’s daily Islam lessons to count sins on my left shoulder and good deeds on my right, and to ensure that my left side wasn’t heavier – because if it was, by the time that I died, I’d end up in a cesspit of flames and torture for eternity. Cute, right? Unfortunately, by the age of eight, I had a massive crush on Robin Hood – the cartoon fox – and by eleven, I had formed an attraction to an actual male human – Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. My homosexuality, as I was taught by instructors (not by the Quran, I should add), would result in an infinite number of sins that would be insurmountable.

      The punishments of hell were described to us in intimate detail. While water in heaven was a redemptive, cleansing element, in hell we’d be forced to drink and bathe in boiling water. ‘Close your eyes and imagine the heat on your skin and in your stomach,’ our teacher would tell us. I fully internalised the belief that Allah was a force who would want me to burn for who I was, and this seeped into every part of me. So, by the age of thirteen, I fully renounced Islam and stopped speaking Arabic, because I felt that these cultures would be inhospitable to my queer identity.

      Home life with my parents became so traumatic that I looked for ways to leave early. At the age of sixteen I applied for a scholarship to boarding school; by the time I went to university, I was barely in contact with my family. When I started as a student at Cambridge, it was the first time in my life that I was finally, completely, outside any form of parental surveillance, and it gave me the freedom I so yearned for throughout my teenage years.

      As if the part that lay dormant inside me was acting on autopilot, I almost immediately organised a student drag night, where I began to form a community of fellow queers that allowed me to find a sense of self. Being in drag was the most powerful I had ever felt. Everything in my life that I had been taught to see as my weaknesses – such as my femininity – suddenly became my strength. I had never felt more like myself – I was totally and utterly hooked. Upon graduating, I decided to try and make it as a drag queen in London, a decision which catalysed a crisis among my Muslim relatives, who said they would denounce me if I continued. According to my mama, I was ‘the source of [her] life’s unhappiness’. As my drag profile grew, so did my family’s resentment, and they turned their backs on me for bringing ‘nothing but shame’ upon them.

      While my family tried fervently to suppress my queerness, the London drag scene was its own kind of hyena pit, particularly because it was dominated by white queens; this was accompanied by the endemic racism within the gay community (get on Grindr and it’ll take you around thirty seconds to find a profile that stipulates ‘No Asians’ as a sexual preference). I began to feel as if my queer identity could only operate alongside whiteness, and hence I held the assumption that my being a drag queen was a gift offered to me only by the West (in my early drag career, I only ever dressed as white women from Western pop-cultural contexts). And so I fragmented – my queer identity was severed from my Arab heritage and my racial identity felt erased in the queer spaces I operated in. I was too gay for Arabs and too Arab for gays. I split. The floating parts of my unstable identity could find no singular root, and so I stumbled straight into a nervous breakdown. And one that was alarmingly trippy in character.

      The first panicked episode took place on a double-decker bus in London, which I had boarded at 3 p.m. for absolutely no reason. I sat on the top floor by the middle, and there were only a couple of other people on the bus with me. To my left was a young female, headphone-wearing student, sleeping against the window, her jaw half open. A few seats behind me was a large man who I realised was snorting a bit of cocaine on a key – he saw that I saw and gave me a ‘whatever gets you through the day’ look. No judgement here, hun. As the bus started its route I felt a slight tingle around the rim of my face and my head felt very light, as if it might float off at any point. My stomach went fluttery; less like butterfly wings and more like a million locusts flapping their way out. The visual field around me became distorted and eventually, my entire surroundings looked flat, like a 2-D drawing on an extremely thin piece of paper which could rip at any moment. It felt so real that I became panicked that this tear was going to suddenly appear and in an instant there would be no one and nothingness. As my panic intensified, I was eventually thrust back out of the matrix and into the 4-D world I had almost evaporated out of. When I looked around me, I realised that the comatose student and the highly alert businessman were gone and that I was in Penge, the final stop of the London bus I had aimlessly taken.

      The frequency of these ‘visions’ grew rapidly, and with little else keeping me tied to reality, I began to take to heart what they were trying to tell me. It was as if my feelings of displacement and not belonging were being actualised. I felt an acute sense of comfort that whatever ‘it’ was that had been guiding me towards these experiences knew that I didn’t belong in this world either. It was as if every instance of not belonging had culminated in this very simple solution – of course I don’t belong in this world. It isn’t real. This rip in the surface of life, whatever it might be, had to be a wormhole to the real, to a site of new dimensions where my belonging could not be called into question. I just had to get to it. I tried closing my eyes during these episodes, hoping that when I opened them I would no longer be me, but a different kind of being in a different kind of place, perhaps even a starfish or an octopus, or something fluid and teeming with multiplicity.

      These holes in reality, if I could only find them, seemed to open up the possibility of parallel universes living right under our noses, and I felt a physical pull towards them, as if they were caressing my hair, whispering in my ear a secret I couldn’t quite make out. Maybe this is Allah trying to tell me something? Maybe this is some version of Allah I’d never known about, ushering me towards a path that would provide the solution to all the world’s woes? In a period of my life where I felt so rudderless, this quest to find the rips gave me direction. I began to assume that I must be a prophet who had been gifted with some semblance of a key that would unlock the truth.

      Unfortunately, no such key presented itself, and I eventually had to seek medical attention to help me out of my dissociation. The whole episode forced me to acknowledge just how separate my queer identity was from my Muslim heritage, and what the consequences were of having identities so at war with themselves. This intense fragmentation caused me to question the very fact of my being real. And so, to avoid another month of believing I was a prophet – and one with absolutely no clue what their prophecy was – it felt essential that I try to bridge the gap between these disparate parts of myself.

      On my re-readings of the Quran, I came across this passage about Allah. It says that Allah is the ‘One who shapes you in the womb as He Pleases’ (Quran 3:6), and that ‘of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the differences of your tongues and colours’ (Quran 30:22). When I read this, it was the first time in my life that I felt connected to the Quran without having an urge to repel it. I could just hold the book as though it was meant to be in my hands, like a calm, sleeping kitten. There it was, in this ancient ‘evil’ text, the idea that variance and difference among human bodies was all part of Allah’s plan. Perhaps Allah views human beings in the same way I used to think about marine aquatics – as a collection of ever-changing, different bodies, all coexisting as a formless mass unified by light and love. I had only ever pictured Allah as a fascistic punisher who built the world on strict, rigid lines – but the more I discovered about Islam, the less this seemed to be the case.

      Rather than being the autocratic religion it has often been painted as, Islam is much

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