Pride 2024: First UK Muslim event to ‘choose joy over rejection’

“My sister burst in behind him and grabbed that bottle of cleanser and said, ‘What are you doing with this? This is for girls’, and then she threw it hard against the ground and with such force that the bottle broke.”

After going downstairs, Ferhan was told to sit down in front of the family who sat with crossed arms and received a “lecture” from the brother-in-law. “All I remember was him saying that I was ‘raping this house’,” they say.

Despite remaining tensions, Ferhan does have a relationship with their parents and stayed with them this week for Muslim festival Eid ul-Adha.

Ferhan says their mother said she had enjoyed “the best Eid ever” after meeting and cooking for their queer friends, who she loved “to death”.

Muslim Pride is important, Ferhan says, in challenging the assumption that the faith is “inherently queer-phobic”.

“This is an assumption that’s not necessarily based on fact, because if you read the parts of the Quran that supposedly condemn homosexuality, it’s not as clear cut.

“And what this serves to do is actually invalidate the notion that you can be both queer and Muslim and for a lot of queer Muslims, this is a difficult one because they might want to retain their faith.

“They might want to simply be in a space where they are validated for being both queer and Muslim, and that’s what Imaan is doing, is serving up a space where you can be… validated for that choice.”