God Is Not Done With Us: Turkish Queer Muslims Finding Faith on Their Own Terms

Kadir remembers the exact moment he decided he wasn't going to let anyone take his faith away from him. He was twenty-two, sitting in a mosque in his hometown of Bursa, listening to a sermon that made him feel like a disease. He'd been out to himself for two years by then, quietly, carefully. And he sat there and thought: This is not the God I know.

"My relationship with God didn't start in that mosque," he says now, from his apartment in Washington, D.C., where he's lived for four years. "It started when I was a child, in my grandmother's kitchen, watching her pray. It was something between us and something between her and the divine. That's what I hold onto. Not the sermon. The kitchen."

Kadir is one of a growing number of Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans who are doing something that surprises people on both sides of the cultural divide: they're staying. Not leaving their faith, not abandoning the spiritual inheritance of their Turkish Muslim upbringing, but staying inside it — questioning it, wrestling with it, reinterpreting it, and ultimately making it their own.

The False Binary

American secular progressive culture often operates on an assumption that religion and queerness are fundamentally incompatible — that the rational, liberated choice for an LGBTQ+ person raised in a religious household is to walk away. This assumption, however well-intentioned, erases a great deal of lived experience.

For many Turkish queer people, Islam isn't primarily a set of institutional rules. It's a language of meaning, a family inheritance, a cultural identity, a way of understanding the world. Leaving it isn't simply a matter of updating your beliefs — it's a kind of amputation.

"People assume that because I'm queer and Muslim, I must be in some kind of constant internal war," says Lale, a 30-year-old non-binary Turkish American in Los Angeles. "But I'm not at war with myself. I've done the reading, I've done the spiritual work, and I've arrived at a place of genuine peace. What I'm in conflict with is an institution that has misrepresented my tradition to exclude people like me."

That distinction — between faith as a living, personal relationship with the sacred and religion as an institutional structure — is central to how many Turkish queer people are navigating this terrain.

Reinterpreting the Text

A significant part of this spiritual reclamation involves going back to source texts with fresh eyes — and with the help of scholars who have done serious theological work on LGBTQ+ inclusion within Islam.

Progressive Islamic scholars like Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle and Amina Wadud have spent decades arguing that the traditional condemnations of homosexuality in Islamic jurisprudence are based on specific historical readings that are neither universal nor inevitable. Their work, increasingly accessible in English, has become a touchstone for queer Muslims globally — including many in the Turkish diaspora.

"I read Kugle when I was in college and it genuinely changed my life," says Berk, a 26-year-old gay Turkish man in New York. "Not because he told me what I wanted to hear, but because he showed me that the question of what Islam says about queerness is actually more complicated and more open than I'd been told. There's room in the tradition. There's always been room."

This kind of textual engagement isn't just academic comfort — it's spiritually sustaining. It gives people like Berk a way to remain connected to their faith on intellectually honest terms, rather than through a kind of willful ignorance of what the tradition actually contains.

Building New Spaces

Knowledge is one thing; community is another. And for Turkish queer Muslims in the US, finding spaces where both identities are fully welcomed — not tolerated, not accommodated, but genuinely celebrated — has historically been difficult.

That's beginning to change. Organizations like Muslims for Progressive Values and the Inner Circle (based in South Africa but globally influential) offer inclusive prayer spaces and spiritual community for LGBTQ+ Muslims. Some US cities now have queer-affirming mosques or prayer circles. And within Turkish diaspora communities specifically, informal spiritual gatherings — Quran study groups, Sufi-influenced meditation circles, communal iftar dinners during Ramadan — are increasingly being organized by and for queer people.

"We had an iftar last Ramadan for Turkish queer Muslims in New York," says Dilara, who organized the event. "About thirty people came. We prayed together, we ate together, we talked about what fasting means to us. Some people hadn't been part of any kind of religious community for years. A few people cried. It was one of the most sacred experiences of my life."

These spaces serve a function that goes beyond the spiritual. They're also sites of cultural preservation — places where Turkish language, Turkish food, and Turkish traditions are kept alive within a queer context that honors all of who people are.

Sufism and the Mystical Thread

For some Turkish queer people, the path back to spirituality runs through Sufism — the mystical tradition within Islam that has historically emphasized direct personal experience of the divine over institutional doctrine, and that has a rich legacy in Turkish culture through figures like Rumi and the Mevlevi order.

"Rumi's poetry is full of love that transcends gender and category," says Kadir. "When I read him, I don't feel like a problem to be solved. I feel like a human being reaching toward something infinite. That's what I want from spirituality."

The Sufi emphasis on love as the central spiritual reality — love as a path to God, love as the highest form of human experience — resonates deeply with queer people for whom love itself has been politicized and contested. It offers a framework in which their capacity to love is not a defect but a gift.

The Work of Staying

None of this is easy. Turkish queer Muslims in America often face pushback from multiple directions simultaneously: from conservative members of their own communities who insist their identity is incompatible with faith, from secular American progressives who can't understand why they'd want to maintain a connection to religion at all, and sometimes from within themselves, in moments of doubt and grief.

"There are days when it's hard," Lale admits. "Days when I feel like I don't fully belong anywhere — not in the mosque, not in certain queer spaces, not in the Turkish community, not in American progressive culture. But then I remember that liminality can be a spiritual position, not just a social one. Prophets lived on thresholds. So can I."

What's emerging from all of this wrestling and building and refusing-to-let-go is something genuinely new: a Turkish queer Muslim spirituality that draws on deep tradition while refusing to be imprisoned by its most exclusionary interpretations. It's not a compromise. It's a reclamation.

"God is not done with us," Kadir says simply. "And we are not done with God."