Interview
[INTERVIEW] Queer and Muslim: Azeenarh Mohammed blurring the parallel lines of LGBTQ+ and religion
Azeenarh Mohammed is an accomplished woman. She is an upper-class Fulani lady that has made a name for herself in the legal profession, as a human rights activist, as an author and in the tech space.
Despite these; her biggest win she says is coming to terms with her sexuality.
“I used to be a full covering hijabite,” Azeenarh says, reminiscing her time growing up in a conservative northern Nigeria.
“Despite the fact that I knew early I was queer, I thought I had to live my life and be a good Muslim girl, marry, have kids and all of that”.
Having won her impostor battle and coming out as a lesbian, Azeenarh used the voice afforded by her class privilege to speak for the Nigerian queer community. She also provided legal services for those who got into trouble with the Nigerian government.
Today, Azeenarh is still an activist but she has left the legal practice and while making her paycheck in tech.
In this interview, she tells NewsWireNGR’s Oladele Owodina what it means to be queer in Nigeria, the declining rate of homophobia and the intersection between LGBT and religion.
“Being a lesbian should not preclude me for example from fasting. It should not preclude a gay man from leading prayer”
Azeenarh Mohammed
LGBT activism dominates much of your description on the web, briefly tell us more about Azeenarh
I can’t believe that in 2021, I still get tagged with only the LGBT cap. I wear so many caps. Fundamentally, my formal training has been as a lawyer. I actually started out as a lawyer from like 2007 to 2011, all I did was practice law.
From the practice of law, I slowly moved into human rights and gender rights. That eventually grew a little too boring, especially in Nigeria where NGOs are not as political or radical as they can be but there’s a general lethargy for lack of a better word, it’s just about girls’ rights.
They only want to end suffering women and not actually dismantle the structures that are holding us back. So I think more and more out of women’s rights and humans’ rights, so I decided to go back and concentrate on tech.
So actually, what I do now, what pays my bills is actually working on tech. I currently work as the Africa Programme Manager for a tech programme. I’ve been working in digital and holistic security since 2013 and that’s what actually pays most of my bills. I’m always surprised when people ask me when they tell me that it’s always the LGBT that comes first. I’m just like I’m more than that. I’m a lot more than that.
What were your aspirations as a child?
As a child, I had very cliche aspirations. I either wanted to be a footballer or a pilot. My third choice was being a lawyer. So I guess I still ended up in the top three, but my first one was that I absolutely wanted to be a football player.
I was like if I get paid for enjoying football; I want that. So yeah, it goes with other things that I wanted to do while growing up.
I felt like if I was a pilot, I would just have a claim to my name and I could fly anywhere that I wanted to. You know the dreams of kids, but those were my top two.
Then I thought, if I eventually become a lawyer, look at that, I would be somebody who would stand up for my rights and the rights of others.
What does life mean to you?
The meaning of life to me is enjoying the diversity in which we have found ourselves. So for the longest time, I’ve been raised in a typical northern Muslim household.
This means that there’s very little individualism and more of a collective. You’re expected to do everything, not for yourself, but on behalf of your family. Everything you do, at the back of your mind, has to have an incline of how this would reflect on your wider extended family, on your culture and on your society.
So, that’s how we were raised. But I’ve grown to learn to remove the shackles and expectations of not just family, but society and I feel like more people have to.
I feel like life is too short, too unpredictable to live via the dreams of other people. I take it very personally. How do I see my life as a fulfilment of my own dreams and my own needs, not of others, not of society and I wish more people thought of it that way.
Our lives are a collective of moments, what specific moment led you to fight for LGBT rights?
Well to be honest, as you said, it was not a one-time thing. It was small little bits of things to get me to where I am today. I grew up in a house that even though it was a Muslim and it was conservative, it was also a very political family.
We were aware of our rights and the realities of what Nigeria is and how those involved heavily in politics. So I grew up around a ton of activists.
The discrimination basically based in northern Nigeria has always been a thing that has been in the back of my mind which was why I started working within human and women rights.
So within human and women rights, I slowly started varying more towards LGBT rights and this was deliberate. I felt like I needed to put my energy in where people were not putting their energy.
Too many people were working on a certain thing I was not interested in. I was thinking, where would I be of the most use? And my community at that point, the LGBTQ community was a community that nobody wanted to talk about. We really were taboo and nobody would even mention the fact that we existed.
Around 2006, 2007, conversations started in Nigeria as a whole about LGBT people. This had to do with the rising conversation and organising that gay men were organising around HIV, but it also had to do with the fact that globally, LGBT rights were moving forward.
I think that after Elton John married his partner, there was a whole conversation even within the National Assembly.
As that was happening, my mind was kept on going ding, ding, ding, but why are we stepping back in time if this isn’t a crime and we’re already forward, why then do we want to go backwards and criminalise something that has zero effect on the economy of the country, but will actually clamp down on the rights of people who are full Nigerians and have been guaranteed equality under the law.
So, as those conversations started, I knew that I wanted to speak up, but again as I had mentioned, I was raised in a conservative society where everything you do reflects on your family, on your culture, on the group that you belong to.
I always thought I would never be able to publicly speak about this issue, but again as I grew and became more independent, within my family, I was able to have conversations with them about the fact that I identify as a lesbian and the moment that they knew, it wasn’t a big deal, it was easy to start talking to other people about it.
I started to tell people who were not my family members. I had a general discussion with people.
I wrote an article about how my homosexuality did not change anything about me and I was more than the sum of just being somebody who belonged to the LGBTQ+ community.
It was small moments, but I knew at a point that I had the luxury of, for lack of a better word, class privilege, I could use that privilege to be able to put a voice to the collective struggle of LGBTQ+ in Nigeria, who at that point might not have been able to come out.
There seems to be a lack of depth when Nigerians talk about the LGBTQ community, what should Nigerians know about the LGBT community?
To be honest, I don’t think that they don’t understand and I don’t think that people are necessarily ignorant. We cannot discard the amount of harm that religion does to the conversation about LGBT people.
People go to churches and mosques and preachers and imams continue to reinforce the position of hatred against people who are LGBT.
So it’s not necessarily ignorance, but the active hate that is being put in people’s minds week in, week out. So, one side of it is religion.
The second side of it is culture and the fact that we generally, as a human race, don’t like things that are different from us.
We discriminate based on people that we perceive or feel are different from us and we want to dominate whatever it is that we can in various spaces. So yeah, Nigerians still have very problematic views about LGBT people, but it is actively thought.
They didn’t just wake up and due to lack of reading books or there’s a little bit of that because generally, Nigerians, we don’t read, we don’t find new information. But there is also an active community that is constantly saying LGBTQ+ people are wrong, they are less than you and if you find an opportunity, dehumanise them.
So, that’s part of the harm that is being done, but interestingly, during the discussion around passing the same-sex prohibition act, a couple of really interesting things happened.
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For example, in the past, nobody discussed LGBTQ+ issues completely. Right? It was kind of like a don’t ask, don’t tell taboo topic, but during that whole debate, people started being able to talk about it, right?
It became an opportunity where we normalised the idea that in fact, LGBT people exist. That they are fighting or that we’re having this conversation because they exist and we need to stop them.
So that actually put us on the map as a genuine community within Nigeria and within that also, many people started to come out or in defending the rights of LGBT. It put people on notice that actually, these folks have allies and I might actually be on the wrong side.
I know that in 2013, Pew research overtook worldwide research included in Nigeria and Nigeria polled as I think either the highest or the third-highest homophobic people in the world.
Ahead of places like even Saudi Arabia. There was a 98% intolerance level where they believe that LGBT people should not have access to education, should not have access to health care, should not have access to safe transportation, should not even have access to food and human dignity. That’s a lot of hate. 98% of the society believes that, as at 2013. But as at 2019 when the last poll was done, the numbers had gone significantly lower, even when SSMPA was passed in 2014, I think that 89% of Nigerians were in support of the law, right now, there’s only about 55% of Nigerians who have been polled, who are in support of the law, where almost 100% of people said that they will not accept friends or family members who were LGBT as at 2013.
Right now, over 30% of Nigerians say