My life has largely been defined by talking about ‘not being a man’. I am a transwoman. That means I was born with what society normatively calls a ‘male body’. But I define myself as a woman; and am usually seen and treated as such by people around me.
Longform
There exists a substantial group among Muslim men who hunger for simple answers. These men suffer from an acute inferiority complex regarding their religion and are perpetually engaged in proving the superiority of Islam over all other religions, ideologies and worldviews. They are devoted to a special type of popular literature known as ijaz, or ‘scientific miracles of the Qur’an’.
On a summer’s day last year, I entered the park and saw a group of young Muslim men, in their early to late twenties. One of them was listening to hip hop music on loud-speaker, while his friends were pre-occupied, watching something on a phone. What they were watching clearly excited them.
As a teenager I used to squabble with my sister over things we both wanted to possess. Sometimes, it would be as trivial as a small basket made up of palm tree leaves to keep dates, at others, it would be as loveable as a small plastic ‘camera’ through which you could see pictures of the Ka’aba, the black stone, the green dome and the mosque of the Prophet.
Official pre-modern histories of Islam typically tell the stories of prominent men and their lives. Unofficial chronicles and literary sources, however, muddy this picture for us – occasionally, they preserve for us accounts of prominent and not-so-prominent women who made a difference in the life of their communities and without whose contributions the Islamic tradition would not recognisably be the same.
Standing in front of the Cordoba Mosque, Muhammad Iqbal, the celebrated twentieth-century poet and philosopher of the Indian Subcontinent, had a transcendental experience.
I am a fan of ‘Sota Terra’, a programme on TV3 in Catalonia. A few months ago, one particular show caught my attention. It was about an archaeological excavation in Balaguer, a town in the north-east of Spain. The purpose of the programme was to determine if Balaguer had been an important city of al-Andalus during Muslim rule. That struck me as a bit odd.
One balmy evening last summer, hundreds of ecstatic Muslim teenagers, many in headscarves, throbbed and swayed to the lyrics of Islamic pop singer Maher Zain at the sedate Garcia Lorca Theatre in Madrid’s working class suburb of Getafe. The Lebanese-born star sang mostly of peace and love in English and Arabic, and referred to ‘my brothers and sisters’ from Palestine, Morocco, Syria, but also Madrid and Barcelona.
Al-Andalus represents a pinnacle of Muslim social and cultural achievement commonly invoked in contrast to current Muslim predicaments. What is not acknowledged, or indeed widely known, is that the openness and tolerance of Muslim Spain applied equally to women.
The musical culture of Baghdad was a product of frequent contact and cultural exchange with other civilisations. One of the main characteristics of Arab culture during the pre-Islamic and early Islamic period was the primordial importance accorded to poetry as the basic support system for the music.