Queer Muslim Organizing as Decolonial Praxis

• In Event: Global Queer/Trans Movements

Abstract

Queer Muslims hold identities that many would still consider taboo, a contradiction. The complexity of Queer Muslim identities seems impossible for many, a doubly demonized personhood dependent on social context. Queer Muslims live at “the intersecting and interlocking systems of homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and racism” (Golriz, 2025, p. 82). For Queer Muslims, the principles of queerness and Islam are aligned—both grounded in the necessity of community, care, and working toward liberation.

Often, dialogue around Queer Muslim identity and community is centered around the pessimism of finding peace within heteronormative and colonial logics. Instead, this paper extends Queer Muslim inquiry to examine how Queer Muslim organizing is decolonial praxis. This autoethnographic paper maps the experience of Queer Muslim organizing in New York City, answering the following questions: What decolonial practices are employed in internal community organizing within the Queer Muslim space? How do these practices shape how Queer Muslims present themselves and the Queer Muslim community as salient members in both Muslim and Queer spaces?

Across varied geographic and political contexts, Queer Muslim organizing emerges as a response not only to exclusion within religious communities but also to marginalization within mainstream Queer movements. Situating Queer Muslim organizing within social movement scholarship reveals theoretical gaps. Religious activity has often been excluded from social movement studies as apolitical. This shift is particularly relevant for Queer Muslim movements, which operate at the intersection of faith, racialization, and sexuality, resisting incorporation into dominant Queer paradigms shaped by homonationalism (Puar, 2007) and the global exportation of Western gay rights frameworks through the Gay International (Massad, 2002). This paper not only offers an expansion of Queer Muslim literature, but also challenges the way Queer Muslims are positioned within intersectional social movements.

Author

• Toomi Al-Dhahi, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity