To say that Ramadan is an important month for the Muslim community would be an understatement. 

Ramadan is a holy month for Muslims all over the world. It is a month of fasting, where Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, and is viewed as a month of prayer, devoting time to studying the Quran and spending time with your community. It is a crucial time for all Muslims to be able to crave time for their faith and spirituality. But such an important month doesn’t come without its burdens. 

Ramadan has always held a bittersweet place in my heart, more noticeably so after I moved from India to Canada and lost the intrinsic link that I have always had to Islam. Ever since I can remember, Ramadan has been a large part of my life. Moving didn’t just trigger homesickness and isolation but also the distinct realisation that I was now living in Canada adrift, without a community. 

Although the month will always be special for me, and I will always continue to celebrate Eid with my family, my identity as a Muslim sometimes feels like I am lying to myself and other members of the Muslim community by participating in it. In discovering more parts of my identity, especially related to my sexuality and gender identity, I enforced the idea that I could not be queer and Muslim. 

This idea is enforced in every part of my life as a Muslim, trying to reconnect with my faith, whether in real life or over social media. On TikTok, engaging in Muslim content quickly turns into identity politics. The questions hit me soon once I got onto that side of TikTok, feeling like an indictment of my identity: Are you living in the eyes of Allah? Are you planning to get married within your culture? Are you the right type of modest woman? 

Religion now seems more about how you present yourself rather than your beliefs. People have told me that “if you really care about your religion, you would believe enough to wear the hijab.”

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It is hard to reconnect with an identity when the criteria for belonging, in a community sense, goes against every other facet of your identity. 

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In a conversation with my mother recently, I told her that I struggle with Ramadan and the gender and sexuality divide that Islam bakes into the system. How can I navigate this divide when my other identities of being a lesbian and non-binary go against what my community believes? By being a lesbian, I affirm that I will never be married to a man, something my grandparents hope for and expect me to do. By being non-binary, I go against the idea of gender I grew up with in a Muslim family: weddings separated by gender, different events for ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters,’ not knowing what role I was expected to play. 

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For me, being Muslim seems subversive. I had to create my own identity and ideas of Islam because what was presented within my community did not have any validity in my experiences. Therefore, I was in charge of creating a community, which, at present, contains only myself, the queer Muslim perspectives I read through books and online, and the idea of an alternative. 

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Although my acceptance of my identity is an essential step in embracing my Muslim identity, it becomes difficult to envision without any community members around. 

In my day-to-day life, my connection to my Muslim identity has not been the smoothest. Thinking about joining in events or being vulnerable about my thoughts and fears came with the implicit knowledge that my tentative identity of being Muslim did not belong in this community. I could not and did not want to contort my identity to make myself belong. I did not wish to code-switch between myself, my queer identity, and my Muslim identity just to feel like I had a community in time for Ramadan, especially when my own religious identity was so unsure. 

Ramadan was a month of grief for me in 2024, the first year I experienced Ramadan alone. Back home, it didn’t matter if I believed as strongly as my family. I would still do Ramadan. I would still wake up before sunrise to fast, break my fast at sunset, and do prayers in between. It wasn’t like I was forced to do so; it was natural for me to do it. It was a community. 

Here, I had no community. I had all the freedom to do, go, and eat what I wanted, but nothing tied me down. I had nothing to shape my world around, no stable point I could look at and say, "this is what I belong to. This is where I want to be.” And losing that, after having it for the first 18-something years of my life, was devastating. 

Although Ramadan and Eid are times of celebration, they are still complicated for many Muslims. Whether they had reconnected with their faith or were still as tentative as I am, Ramadan evokes many complex feelings and questions because it is tied to identity. It was the most critical month, leading to many important questions. 

Am I doing enough? Am I being a good Muslim? Am I doing right by my family? 

For queer Muslims, especially, it can be a tough time. Considering that queer communities, especially in Kelowna, don’t have the experience to understand the connections between community and religion, being Muslim in a queer community can be just as isolating as being queer in a Muslim community. 

When identities are limited to one thing, it is difficult to express much of anything because of how much you keep inside. 

I know that there are other queer Muslims out there. I also know that there are so many different ways to be Muslim. I know that religion and faith aren’t limited to these ideas of what being

good is, and that is why, despite the difficulties, I will always be Muslim, in whatever shape or form that looks like, even if that means I grieve a little every Ramadan.