Among the Eunuchs

A Muslim Transgender Journey

Leyla Jagiella

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781787387560
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

From an early age, Leyla Jagiella knew that she would be defined by two things: being Muslim and being trans. Struggling to negotiate these identities in her conservative, small hometown, she travelled to India and Pakistan, where her life was changed by her time among third-gender communities.

Known as hijras in India, khwajasaras in Pakistan, these marginal communities have traditionally been politically and culturally important, respected for their supernatural powers to bless or curse, and often serving as eunuchs in Mughal India's palaces. But under British colonialism, the hijras were criminalised and persecuted, entrenching taboos they still battle today.

Among the Eunuchs reveals vastly varied interpretations of religion, gender and sexuality, illuminating how deeply culture informs our experiences. As identity becomes an ideological battlefield, Jagiella complicates binaries and dogma with her rich personal reflections. Her fascinating journey speaks to all who find themselves juggling different kinds of belonging.

1

A TRANSNATIONAL JOURNEY

HOW DID I END up there in 2000, a European Muslim transgender woman in the dera across from the mosque? Dancing, clapping and blessing in Delhi? Beginning a journey that had led me to further explore hijra and khwajasara communities in India and Pakistan and that had eventually also brought me to understand much more about who I am?

I do, in fact, believe that we cannot reach an understanding of our own selves unless we explore the world around us. I believe that very much as a Muslim as well, for in the Holy Quran God tells us: ‘We will show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves, ‘til it is clear to them that this is the truth’ [41:53]. The Quran also teaches us: ‘We created you male and female, and We made you into various nations and tribes, so that you may know each other’ [49:13]. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him and on his family, has taught us: ‘Search for knowledge, even if you have to travel as far as China for it.’ And one of the most revered figures of Islam, the Prophet’s son-in-law Imam ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, reportedly once said that a person who has never travelled is like an arrow that has never left its bow.

In our world of borders and nation states the importance that travelling once held for the spiritual, cultural and economic development of the Islamic world is unfortunately often forgotten today. It still remains visible in one of the most fundamental pillars of Islam, the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Makkah. This pillar asks every Muslim who can afford to, at least once in their lifetime, to leave the comfort of their home and travel across the world to the centre of Islam, thereby also encountering countless other Muslims from all continents and corners of the world. Being able to go on this pilgrimage has always been somewhat of a privilege, of course, and being able to travel has become even more of a privilege in these times. Nevertheless, countless Muslims with lesser means have undertaken that journey throughout the centuries, experiencing a large number of different cultures and contexts. This has contributed to the essentially cosmopolitan character of Muslim societies all over the world for centuries.

Beyond the Hajj, classical Islam also celebrated the scholarly ideal of the rihla ‘ilmiyya, the journey in search of knowledge. The precedent for this journey was set by the Prophet Muhammad himself (p.b.u.h.), who in his youth had been accompanying caravans travelling all across the Arab desert, from Yemen to Syria. The rihla ‘ilmiyya was put into practice by almost every major intellectual figure of Muslim history and, in fact, one was not really taken seriously as a Muslim scholar if one had not left home in search of knowledge at least once. We may here mention Ghazali’s journeys between Central Asia and Egypt or Ibn ‘Arabi’s journey, taking him from his native Spain to today’s Turkey and finally leading him to settle down in Syria. Most famous of all is the Moroccan Ibn Battuta, of course, who traversed the larger part of Eurasia in the fourteenth century, recording eyewitness accounts from places as far apart from each other as European Russia, China and the Maldives.

Unfortunately, women were often much more restricted in their movements than men. We do, however, have numerous accounts of travelling women from the Muslim world as well. They extend from the elite royal journeys of such women as Mughal Princess Gulbadan, who wrote a detailed account of her Hajj, to Awadh’s Queen Mother Malika Keshwar, who, for the sake of petitioning Queen Victoria, travelled from Lucknow to London, passing away in Paris where her grave can still be found today. But there are also the numerous accounts of humble female travelling ascetics, such as the sufi mystic Fatima Sam who journeyed from Syria to Delhi. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, European women who had converted to Islam joined these female Muslim travellers. We may here mention Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss-born woman of German, Russian and Armenian heritage, who crossed the Sahara Desert multiple times and joined the Qadiri sufi order and Lady Evelyn Zainab Cobbold, a British aristocrat who performed the Hajj, all on her own in a motor car and wrote a best-selling book about it in 1934. For many of these women their journeys were also an exploration of gender and womanhood, a way to reflect upon the constraints that their native societies had put on them and, equally, to compare them to the constraints of other societies.

In many ways I see my own journey as undertaken within the tradition of these travellers, both the more recent European female Muslim travellers and the classical rihla ‘ilmiyya. Long before I actually began this physical journey, however, the roots for my quest to understand myself, my faith and my gender had already been planted in the small rural German town that I grew up in.

Imagine a little queer kid of maybe six years old. At that age it is hard to tell whether the child is a girl or a boy, but they are a beautiful child, nevertheless. Their mother always wants them to cut their hair short, but it is a struggle each time; the child prefers to keep it long. Imagine a scene in which the child, covered in multiple transparent veils, has a scarf bound around their hips. Music plays in the background. It is a birthday party and other children are standing around, watching the queer child. The voice of the Egyptian-Lebanese singer Farid El-Atrache plays in the background. A bouncing Arabic tune. The child is waving his or her hips and arms, dancing. Belly-dancing, as the other children call it, who are half admiring it, half laughing about it. This is how it started…

It has nowadays become uncommon and despised amongst trans people to talk about what is called one’s ‘dead name’. That is, the name that was given before gender reassignment, corresponding to the gender assigned at birth. I have to admit that I have a very uneasy relationship with my ‘dead name’ as well. It is necessary that I mention it here though, because it played such an important role in my sense of cultural identity and how I became the person that I am now. I was born in a rural German community in 1980 and I was named Nikos Jagiella. Back then, it was a slightly confusing name for the almost monolithically white community I grew up in. It was a name that was definitely not considered German but whose origins people were unsure of. A first name very immediately identifiable as Greek by most who heard it, and a Polish family name that, nevertheless, still seems ambiguous to a lot of people. Only people well-versed in Eastern European history can usually identify its origins correctly. In any case, my dead name was a name that, right from the beginning, marked me as very different from the community that I grew up in.

Another thing which marked me as different was my gender expression. I had been assigned male at birth and was brought up as a boy, but I was never very happy with that label. I cannot say for sure whether I always identified clearly as a girl, but I did identify with the girls and women around me and was attracted to doing things that were labelled ‘feminine’ by society. I preferred to play with dolls, for example, and loved to try out my mom’s make-up. However, the social expectations surrounding my body were in conflict with how I felt about myself. My parents and grandparents worried about my unusual preferences sometimes, but they loved me, wanted me to be happy, and at that stage they tried not to be too perturbed with my choice of games and toys. I was lucky in that respect.

Nevertheless, conflicts surrounding my queer behaviour were ever present. Neighbours, the kindergarten staff and, later, primary school teachers often commented negatively on my mannerisms and behaviour. Other boys treated me quite badly at times, and other girls sometimes did not want to play with me because, to them, I was a boy. I remember on several occasions I begged my mom, tears running down my face, not to send me to school or kindergarten because my experiences there were sometimes traumatic. It was not only that the other children could be quite cruel but the teachers and parents as well. I cried a lot as a child and felt horribly lonely at times.

My story is a rather familiar one in that regard, close to the script. I would caution people not to generalise my experience; playing with dolls does not make one a girl, neither does experimenting with make-up. But in my case, and in the case of many others, these things are often seen as cultural markers of femininity. And they were part of the puzzle that led me to explore my own gender identity.

Very early on I sought refuge from the burden of the real world in make-believe, daydreaming and fantasy, especially in books. As soon as I started to learn to read, I developed a passion for exploring the roots of human civilisation. I therefore became determined very early on in life to become either an archaeologist or an anthropologist when I grew up. My first great love in that regard was ancient Egypt, and I developed a fascination for the strong queens of that realm, in particular women like Cleopatra or Hatshepsut. My passion for everything Egyptian was soon to be followed by an interest in ancient India and China. It is quite an odd thing to say about a primary school child but, along with my favourite dolls, some of the best presents my parents ever gave me as a little child were visits to museum exhibitions, or gifts of exhibition catalogues. The treasure of the diversity that ancient cultures seemed to offer made me happy and helped me forget the less happy parts of my life.

Movies were another important opportunity to escape, and offered a source of role models for me as well. Like many queer kids of my generation, I harboured an early fascination with the tragic but strong feminine women on the silver screen. I felt empowered by these inspiring actresses and the dramatic characters they portrayed. Identifying with them helped me to face the bullying and pain that I was experiencing. Two of the first women I learned to love from an early age were Hollywood stars Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh. A few years later I discovered the dancing divas of classic Egyptian movies: Samia Gamal, Tahiya Carioca and Naima Akef. Finally, I fell in love with the alluring stars of early Indian cinema: Nargis, Madhubala, Waheeda Rehman and, more than anybody else, Meena Kumari. These early screen divas were headstrong, resilient, courageous and intelligent, while at the same time very much in touch with a femininity and sensuality that they consciously used for their own empowerment. Indeed, Islamic storytelling has a long tradition of resilient female characters that show intelligence and elegance in equal measure, starting with the famous Scheherazade of Arabian Nights and Dil-Aram of the Hamzanama epic. The female characters of classic Western literature and film, in comparison, seemed to me rather flat and less well equipped to make intelligent decisions.

My choice of Arab and Indian divas as role models was not a very natural one given that I had no Arab or South Asian ancestry. It was certainly a choice that was out of place in the small, very rural German town I grew up in. The town had, at that time, an almost uniformly white German population and most people living there were, to some degree or other, related to each other; their families had likely lived in the town, or at least the nearby region, for the last few centuries. My parents belonged to some of the first people who had moved there from elsewhere. Both of my parents had grown up in the Ruhrgebiet, an industrial, urban region that since the late nineteenth century had been marked by repeated waves of working-class immigration.

The Jagiellas, my father’s side of the family, had originally migrated to the Ruhrgebiet from a small village in the vicinity of Gniezno in Central Poland. Family lore says that they were not natives of that region but had migrated to Central Poland from further East. It has been claimed that the Jagiellas had some connection to the Lithuanian Jagiellonian dynasty that once ruled the Kingdom of Poland. This seems a little spurious, however, as names derived from the dynasty and its founder, King Jagiello, are not rare in Poland at all. Another legend, which had a far more pervasive influence on me in early childhood, was that the Jagiellas may have had distant Tatar Muslim ancestry. There had indeed been a minority of Tatar Muslims in Poland since the days of King Jagiello (around 1400) and while there are still a few Tatar Muslim villages in the East of Poland nowadays, many had, over the centuries, adopted the Catholic faith and become ‘proper Poles’. Despite Poland being today a largely mono-ethnic and mono-religious country, its history has been far more diverse. Muslim Tatars once played a prominent role in Poland; and Islam, as Polish-American writer Jacob Mikanowski once put it, runs ‘like a silver thread’ throughout Polish and Eastern European cultural history. Whether of actual Tatar descent or not, I identify with the diversity of Polish history, the memory of which is increasingly repressed in a nationalist Poland today.

In my recent family history, there was a more tangible manifestation of the entangled histories of Eastern and Eastern Central Europe. My paternal grandmother’s father had, at the time of World War I and in the years immediately after, lived and worked in late-Ottoman Istanbul. He was of mixed German, Polish and Lithuanian origin and came from a part of Europe that was once ruled by the Polish crown, had been under Prussian occupation at the time of his birth, and then for a decade during his lifetime was split between Germany and independent Lithuania (with his family and relatives equally split). Nowadays it belongs to the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast. Opportunities for work were very bleak in that impoverished and marginalised border region, which made him seek his fortunes elsewhere.

He would later bring his family to the Ruhrgebiet but Ottoman Istanbul was his first destination and he remained there for quite a while. He may have also had an interest in Islam: my grandmother once remarked that her father was not very fond of the Church and apparently considered Islam the far more rational religion. In my grandparents’ home there was a Turkish carpet that he had once brought over from there. There were colourised postcards of the sights of Istanbul, with printed Ottoman script, and a portrait of my great-grandfather in the dress of a late Ottoman gentleman, wearing a tarbush and smoking a hookah. These remnants of life in the Ottoman Empire always drew my special attention and offered another opportunity to escape from the world around me.

Despite these remnants of a more culturally complex past, however, my father’s family was one that had actively sought assimilation into German mainstream society right after immigrating to the Ruhrgebiet. My grandfather had even changed his name Kazimierz (which had already been Germanised into Kasimir) to Karl and had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. Nobody wanted to be Polish in post-World War II and Cold War Germany, as being Slavic was considered the next best thing to being brown in the charged nationalist atmosphere of the country. The German majority identified Poles with theft, dirt and disorder, and racist jokes about Poles were as common as racist jokes about Turks and Jews.

Admitting a history of migration was a problematic thing in Germany in any case. The idea of a ‘real German’ is a very strongly racialised one and is not really comparable to nationalist sentiments in other European countries. It is virtually impossible to ever ‘become’ German, no matter how long you have stayed in the country. In fact, it often takes several generations until a family can be accepted as part of German society. Even now, many decades on, children whose families migrated to Germany from Turkey four generations ago are identified as ‘Turkish’—not even ‘German Turkish’—and ‘Ausländer’ (foreigners) by German mainstream society. In that way, total assimilation was, and in many ways still is, the only way to be fully accepted as German. For Polish immigrants that path was always more accessible than to other immigrants since most were not constrained by racial markers that would eternally mark them as ‘other’.

As such, I grew up with knowledge of my Polish origins but only very few immediate connections to Polish language or culture. The general message was, ‘We are in Germany now, let’s try to be as German as possible.’ This bothered me. Why was it such a problem to speak about our origins? Why was it so important to belong to this particular people but not that particular people? The most important question for me was: why could one not be several things at the same time? My mother’s family was in many ways very different from my father’s family, though its history raised similar questions about singular and multiple belongings for me. While my paternal grandfather had been a coal miner, my mother’s father was a theologian. A gentle man who had been born into a very humble rural German family, he managed to study Protestant theology at university and become an ordained Lutheran clergyman. He loved classical European education and next to the Bible he regularly read Roman and Greek mythology. He also spoke Italian fluently and had spent several years of his life in Italy. During the Nazi period he had been an active member of the ‘Bekennende Kirche’, the Protestant church resistance. It was in those circles that he had met my grandmother, who came from a very different background.

My maternal grandmother descended on one side from an aristocratic family that had for centuries settled on both sides of the Polish-German border, and on the other side had roots in late-imperial Russian St. Petersburg. My grandmother placed high value on this noble and cosmopolitan descent and, since she found in me an eager ear interested in family history, she impressed that value on me early on. My grandfather and grandmother lived in a small apartment in one of the cities of the Ruhrgebiet. Almost all of my grandmother’s siblings led humble existences, very different from the grand manors and huge villas their family had once possessed in Poland and Russia. But even in that world there existed vestiges of the imperial past which drew my attention. Heavy St. Petersburg silver and Orthodox Christian icons. The old Uzbek ceramics which one of my grandmother’s sisters had added to the dowry of my mother when she married my father.

The upper-class cosmopolitan history of my maternal grandmother’s family contained a few connections to the Islamic world as well. My grandmother’s ancestry could, through Polish and Russian nobility, be traced back to a medieval Armenian family which had once occupied important positions both in the Byzantine Empire and under Arab Muslim rule. In much more recent times, my grandmother’s family had, after fleeing the October Revolution, been stationed for many years in Istanbul, an important hub for exiled Russians at that time. An uncle of my grandmother’s had also settled down and married in Istanbul in the 1920s. When I visit Istanbul, I still sometimes go to the cemetery in Feriköy to say a prayer at his withered grave.

My grandmother had also told me of our distant relatives in India. In the nineteenth century, my grandmother’s family had been closely associated with the Gossner mission, a mission that had once been active in St. Petersburg, which tried to unite Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians, but which had later focused its attention on Christianising the indigenous Oraon people of Indian Chotanagpur (now Jharkhand). A cousin of her St. Petersburg family had married a very prominent German Gossner missionary and had moved to present-day Jharkhand with him. That branch of the family was to stay in India for five generations. It was many decades later that I was able to reconnect with a cousin from that line. I met Mary Girard, who, like the late Indian actor Tom Alter, was an alumni of Mussoorie’s Woodstock School in the foothills of the Himalayas, while we were both in Delhi in 2017. I was surprised to click so easily with her and find someone not only related in blood, but in spirit. In her book, Among the Original Dwellers (2019), Mary tells the story of her ancestors, the nineteenth-century Gossner mission to the Oraon and how a missionary venture ended up playing ‘a significant role in helping the Adivasi retain their culture and fight for their liberation’.

I am, of course, constructing a far too convenient narrative of a cosmopolitan family of many roots here. There are, equally, several aspects of my family history which disrupt that narrative. My grandmother has an uncle who was a supporter of the Nazi party. In fact, her own parents once supported the Nazis in the hope that Hitler would restore the old imperial order of the world that existed before World War I and the October Revolution. I should add that I had a special interest in listening to stories of origins and seeking out remnants of a cosmopolitan past in my surroundings. Perhaps this was because, as far as my gender was concerned, I had already experienced a strong sense of alienation from the society I grew up in. Not everybody in my family attributed the same weight of belonging and identity to these things. My father in particular always insisted that all that mattered to his sense of cultural identity was being in Germany now. Most of my relatives have become quite comfortable with a German mi...