“My strength and courage come from my unwavering belief in the knowledge that Allah loves me just as I am,” writes Adnan Shaikh in a hard-hitting essay called The Beauty and Complexity of Being Queer and Muslim. It appears in a sparkling anthology edited by Kazim Ali, where prose and poetry exchange glances, memoir and fiction apply henna on each other’s palms, and queerness and faith decide to get a room.Titled On the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South Asia, it is published by Penguin Random House in collaboration with The Queer Muslim Project (TQMP), described as “a digital and cultural platform for diverse LGBTQIA+ individuals” that uses “art, culture and media to challenge harmful stereotypes and norms, build power and visibility of underrepresented LGBTQIA+ storytellers and enable them to shape their own narratives”. The book includes writing from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.Edited by Kazim AliOn the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South AsiaPenguin Random House and The Queer Muslim Project, 2025Ali, who is a professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, has familial ties to India and Pakistan though he grew up in Canada and moved to the US later. Raised in a Muslim family, Ali has found joy and expansiveness in his queer identity. He is known for mentoring younger queer people, and for teaching yoga in Palestine. His work exemplifies what it means to transcend boundaries, and this anthology carries the same vision.In his poem Home, published in the collection Bright Felon (2009), Ali writes, “You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God/ will still welcome you./ My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.” This very spirit illuminates the TQMP’s Instagram page, where one can learn about people who refuse to choose between queerness and Islam. They are figuring out ways to make room for both in their lives.For a person who is both queer and Muslim, it can be frustrating to have oneself characterised as not queer enough or not Muslim enough, depending on the context.In the book Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen (2019), for instance, British-Iraqi author Amrou Al-Kadhi opens up about how being rejected by their own people made them want to escape everything related to their Muslim identity and Arab culture. The “deification of whiteness” in queer spaces and being considered suitable only to play characters like “terrorist, terrorist’s son, terrorist’s relative, terrorist’s friend, something to do with terrorism, mute refugee, violent refugee, nondescript refugee, Indian person, Asian person of some kind” made them wary of incorporating Muslim images of femininity and their Middle Eastern heritage into their drag avatar. Their experience shows how one can end up being cast as an outsider either on account of Islamophobia or homophobia. This book offers a resting place to those who want both identities to be seen and respected.“In my childhood, the absence of characters like me in books and on screen was a glaring void. I never dared to dream that the protagonist of a show could mirror my own identity,” says Shaikh, reinforcing the urgency for queer Muslim representation. Meeting people in online communities made them realise that they were not alone in desiring a deeper relationship with their faith as well as their sexuality, and that there was a vibrant history of queer Muslims before them.This essay is empowering as it advocates for a personal relationship to God instead of allowing oneself to be bullied by co-religionists who condemn homosexuality as sinful and subject transgender people to verbal abuse. “I soon realised that I could read the Quran on my own and form my own interpretations, as no one has sole authority over it,” notes Shaikh, who also finds solace in the Persian poetry of Rumi and Shams that celebrates the quest for “a deeper spiritual connection that transcends the material, even conventional gender roles and societal norms”.When resonance, kinship and role models are not readily available, queer people have to be inventive. In the poem portrait of my body, aged 21, also part of this volume, Ipsa writes, “Neon bright fanfiction sites lead me to the light”. Their choice of the word ‘light’ is striking because the metaphor has been traditionally used to refer to divine grace and guidance. Here, it might also refer to the light of self-acceptance, which is made possible through queer-affirming narratives on fanfiction sites that help one let go of self-hatred and see oneself in a new light.For Kiran Kumar, who identifies as “not a man, but not quite a woman either”, women’s cricket has turned into a space for visibility and affirmation. In their piece titled Darling, they write with vulnerability and tenderness about how “seeing athleticism and queerness so visibly on screen invoked some of the most powerful emotions of gender yearning”. Learning that “nearly half of all women’s cricketers outside the subcontinent” are queer, and that many of them are partnered or married and can express their feelings for each other openly, made them long for the same.This book grew out of two editions of The Queer Writers’ Room, a creative writing residency and cultural exchange held in Colombo. Twenty-four writers from countries across South Asia were mentored by faculty from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, along with TQMP staff. They also participated in workshops, lectures and readings with local Sri Lankan writers. While all of them identify as queer, they are not necessarily Muslim.The South Asian aspect of the anthology is worth emphasising, because there are very few avenues, offline and online, for queer people in the region to discuss the common challenges that they encounter due to shared legacies of colonialism, patriarchy and religious extremism. The weakening of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and political hostilities between India and its neighbours, have also led to a decline in people-to-people contact. The Queer Writers’ Room, and the book that came out of it, will help fill that gap.In Amama Bashir’s story Hassan Bhai, a young girl named Aalia discovers a secret liaison between Hassan, who is a worker in her house, and Kazim, who works in a shoe store. There is a scandal because they are caught having sex in a tuck shop with the shutters drawn down.The author exposes the double standards that society has for gay and straight men when Hassan says, “We live in Mirpur, a city so small that everybody knows everybody; where Asad bhai’s multiple love affairs are an open secret and acceptable to all, but I cannot be allowed to love one man.” His words give expression to the pain and frustration that many queer people live with. Being unable to acknowledge one’s love publicly is a denial of a fundamental human right.It is this erasure that leads queer people to dream of intimacies elsewhere. In Birat Bijay Ojha’s story Darjeeling and Desires, Nabin and Bikash from Itahari in Nepal cross the border and travel to India. They know each other only through Grindr, a hook-up app, but their desire to meet is so strong that they are willing to trust each other despite the risks involved. Bikash takes a few days off from work. Nabin lies to his mother about where he is off to. As the narrator remarks, “The notion of being secretive excited him. It felt adventurous to deceive because something interesting was finally happening in his life. And the cherry on top was that it involved a guy.”This story reflects the lived reality of many queer people in South Asia who, like Nabin and Bikash, can make love only in hotel rooms because they live with their families and therefore do not have the privacy or space to invite someone over. Moreover, queer people who live in rural areas and small towns have fewer opportunities to meet and mingle with others like themselves.Ojha writes beautifully about the healing quality that touch can have. As Nabin feels Bikash inside him, he thinks, “This body, once bullied, now experiences desire.” The closeness that they share makes Nabin feel fearless, light and free of shame. Being away from Itahari is liberating.Thankfully, the book does not idealise queer love. It is presented with all its complications in the epistolary narrative Sorrow Letters by Rukman Ragas. Structured as an email exchange between two lovers – a policy researcher named Mai and a legislator called Laira – it examines the politics of using faith as a tool in the legal fight for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The crumbling relationship between these lovers captures the conflicting priorities of various stakeholders in the queer rights movement. Added to this is the fact that Mai and Laira belong to different socio-economic backgrounds. Mai does not enjoy the financial security that Laira has.Desire takes on a sinister hue in Mesak Takhelmayum’s story Dreading by the Loktak, where a student is frisked by a soldier. The uneasy overlap between pleasure and violence becomes apparent when the student, abandoned by the soldier, says, “I miss him, but I also imagine how he’d tamper with someone else’s young body. The same universal call of flirting through meeting at conflict checkpoints and then being led in to have our body used—this must be his religion.”There is a loss of dignity as the individual is reduced to a body, and made to feel that they can be easily replaced by another that can fulfill the same function: providing pleasure. The touch that once felt electric now feels like a curse. The student wants to be swallowed by the lake. Suicidal ideation comes up in other stories too, holding up a mirror to how alienating queerness can feel.For those who prefer the shocking over the sombre, the book offers a story called Even Shaitan Showers by Begum Taara Shakar. Questioning traditional interpretations, she writes, “Don’t get me wrong here! I always thought God was in love with Shaitan.” Rather than rejecting religion, she offers her own spin on inherited narratives. “God built a whole world for Shaitan instead of vanquishing their existence,” she adds, claiming her right to interpret scripture on her own terms.On the Brink of Belief deserves a place on the bookshelf of any reader who is curious about queer lives in South Asia, and the confluence of faith and sexuality. The only grouse is the excessive use of footnotes and italicisation. In Sara Haque’s piece titled ‘A fever, a djinn and the collectibles of grief’, the word ‘dadi’ is explained away as “paternal grandmother”, ‘jamun’ as “Indian blackberry”, ‘janaaza’ as “Islamic funeral”, and ‘surma’ as “traditional Islamic kohl”.The reader does not need to be spoonfed or infantilised in this manner. After Salman Rushdie adopted chutnification, a style of writing that readily incorporates words from South Asian languages into English, the practice has become more popular and widely accepted. Italicising the word ‘Allah’ seems preposterous. It makes one wonder what kind of target audience is being imagined here. One does not expect this of an anthology that attempts to decolonise queerness.To end on a sweeter note, Reya Ahmed’s cover illustration and Shadab Khan’s cover design are worth mentioning. They conjure up a magical world, drawing on literature, folklore and religious iconography, inviting readers queer and otherwise to imagine possibilities of joy and renewal.Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist, educator, and literary critic. His work has appeared in various anthologies, including Borderlines: Volume 1 (2015), Clear Hold Build (2019), Fearless Love (2019) and Bent Book (2020). He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.