Amrou Al-Kadhi

The first time I read that, it was the first time I could hold the Qur'an without an urge to repel it.

Here it was in this ancient text, the idea that difference and variance was all part of Allah's plan.

Maybe Allah treats human beings in the same way I love to think about marine aquatics, as a kind of collection of interchanging formless bodies that all coexist as one colorful mass.

I'd always pictured Allah as a kind of fascistic punisher who built the universe on rigid lines.

But the more I read the Quran, it kind of seemed that Allah envisioned the universe in the same model of quantum physics, chaotic and full of multiplicity.

The more I read, the more I found.

When I first learned about whirling dervishes, YouTube of all places was the space I could most directly see myself, and I couldn't believe the stuff I was seeing.

Muslims wearing big, billowing white skirts that would outdo Kim Kardashian on her wedding day.

limping their wrists and twirling around to the sound of an imam singing.

I directly identified with the Muslims I was seeing on screen, who were each searching for higher meaning through costume, ritual, music.

I realized that I'm doing the exact same thing every time I'm in drag.

I'm searching for a transcendental connection, which is sort of brought to me through the collective queer energy of the audience.

Now, before a drag show, I actually like to do Muslim prayers, and it helps me to feel really spiritually grounded.

And a show is a kind of religious experience, a room united in the sort of celebration of queerness and difference.

When a show goes particularly well, it gives me a kind of faith, a faith that maybe even Allah's plan was for me to twirl around on a skirt on stage to find not only myself, but Allah, like Sufis Muslims, centuries before me.

So I'm not a fully traditional Muslim in what you would think is the normal sense now, but I found great peace in thinking of Allah as a kind of genderqueer, matriarchal protector, sort of like an aquatic being with the they pronoun.

They flow through me and tell me to embody all the contradicting subatomic particles that make me who I am.

I used to think that I didn't belong in this universe because of contradictions.

Contradictions are now the reason I know I belong firmly in this universe.

So the next time you find yourself battling a contradiction of ideas, beliefs or identities, don't run away from them.