Eman Abdelhadi is an Palestinian-Egyptian American public intellectual and community organizer. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her academic work focuses on American Muslim communities and specifically women’s participation and exclusion in these communities. She focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, politics and religion.
Eman was born in Columbia, Missouri. Her mother is from Egypt and her father is from Palestine, and they met in the United States. Eman spent her early childhood in Egypt while also living shortly in Saudi Arabia. After her father passed away, her mother, sister and her moved back to Missouri when she was nine years old. Eman grew up in a diverse and tight-knit Muslim community. She grew up in a revivalist Muslim household that emphasized the technical observance of Islam, and tended to have an all or nothing interpretation.
The Muslim community Eman grew up in was very strict, especially in terms of gender. She remembers the community fearing losing their children and having them stray from Islamic values, but that most of this fear was projected on the girls in the community. She was also very active in the Muslim community and regularly attended services at her local mosque.
Eman had loved to read ever since she learned how. She was always at the top of her class in school and excelled. Reading was an escape from the tumultuousness of moving around a lot and immigrating. Writing was also something she developed in childhood, she started working on poetry and short stories. In middle school to early high school she became more involved in extracurricular activities, joining the debate team and mock trial. She was also the op/ed editor of the school newspaper. She was also in the gay straight alliance because she intended to be a good ally to queer people as a Muslim.
Having grown up in a very political household rooted in anti-imperial ethics and as a Palestinian, Eman was always oriented toward political life. The first protest she ever attended was about Palestine when she was a child during the Second Intifada. For this protest, she went to her local mosque and made signs. Although her family valued formal education and economic assimilation, they held on to their cultural and linguistic roots very tightly. Eman was only allowed to speak Arabic at home and watched Arabic tv to maintain these cultural ties and language skills.
After 9/11, Eman, who was 11 years old at the time, experienced acute awareness of being Musim in America. In the direct aftermath, her family did not feel safe to leave the house for several weeks. Although her family was aware of the impact of American politics abroad, this is the first time she realized that impact also extended to them as Muslim Americans.
The Black struggle felt familiar to Eman as a Palestinian and Muslim American. As a fan of hip hop she started reading about Black history. She saw the Black struggle as one of the most effective critiques for American imperialism. In high school she started to read Malcolm X, as well as Marx.
Growing up poor made her question capitalism. While she was not given an economic analysis at home, growing up in an anti-imperialism household gave way to this kind of thinking. So she started thinking critically about the exploitative nature of capitalism and this also influenced her political trajectory into leftist thinking.
As Eman was thinking about moving away for college, her community was disgruntled with her wishes to move away for education. Since she had grown up in a college town, most women (and men) from her community stayed in town and lived at home during college. They were shocked that she wanted to study in a different state, because she was very active in the mosque, and taught Qur’an classes at Sunday school. Leaving was seen as an affront to Muslim values. Eman still went out of state for her college education, because she felt as an adult she had the autonomy to be able to move away from her community.
Eman received her B.A. degre from the University of Michigan in 2012 with a degree in Sociology. While in college, the Arab Spring happened and she became very involved in their Students for Justice in Palestine chapter (Students Allied for Freedom and Equality) and the Muslim Students Association Trayvon Martin was also murdered during that time and she became very involved in causes fighting anti-Blackness.
In college, she learned about the vastness and diversity of Islamic history. She found that Islam has survived due to flexibility in interpretation. This opened the door for her to re-examine what she had been taught about Islam in her childhood. She learned about the particular historical developments that brought about the specific interpretation of Islam that she had grown up with. She learned it wasn’t necessarily the prescriptive view of the faith that she needed to continue to follow.
She also took many gender studies courses in college and an impactful work on her journey was Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality. Eman learned about the idea that queer desire can be socialized not to be read as desire since it is aimed at the ‘wrong person’. By the time she got to graduate school she was starting to realize that she desired women but was not fully there in her journey.
She went on to get her Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University In her graduate program, she was an organizer in the graduate student union, and working on Palestine advocacy. She became more involved in leftist spaces such as socialist and communist spaces. In graduate school, she distanced herself from the Muslim community and was heavily questioning her faith. She was disillusioned with gender inequality in mainstream Muslim spaces, but her connection to other Muslims was preserved by her connection to Queer Muslim spaces. She received her Ph.D. in 2019.
While in graduate school, Eman came out publicly in the aftermath of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting while doing media work and interviews. She had come out on her Facebook page, and she realized she could not live her life quietly. She tried doing a double life before she took off her hijab and found that spiritually destructive. Eman promised herself she would never put herself in that position again. Eman has friends from college who practice Islam traditionally and respect her for her candidness and steadfastness in faith, and Eman also admires her friends and sees that being a practicing Muslim in America is hard regardless of how that faith is expressed. Eman collaborated with PBS in their ‘First Person’ series to tell her story about being queer and Muslim. The episode focused on her journey with sexuality and her faith, and culminated with her coming out to her mother.1
Her first queer relationship was with her best friend who was openly queer, and as Eman wrestled with her feelings, and also perceiving that her friend had a crush on her, she realized she wanted to be with her. On May Day she professed her feelings for her friend and they began a relationship.
Queer Muslim community in New York came to Eman through recognizing a Tumblr blogger through recognizing her hands in photographs. They met at a Muslim event and talked about feminism, and Eman realized she had known her from Tumblr. Over time their friendship developed, and Eman introduced her then partner at the time. Her new friend she made also told her she was queer and introduced her to other queer Muslims in New York and brought her to monthly meet-ups.
This chosen family Eman made in New York impacted her relationship with Islam, and she credits this relationship to why she is still Muslim today. Amongst this group, she realized she could pray in any attire, stand next to anyone and even lead prayer with men behind her. Eman had always felt a dissonance when praying behind men that knew less Qur’an than her, and she has memorized a considerable amount of the scripture. The queer Muslim spaces helped her unlearn the ‘all or nothing’ mentality she had grown up with. She had realized a more expansive and flexible Islam could be possible for her.
Eman is also interested in fiction writing and co-authored a book, Everything for Everyone with fellow writer M.E. Obrien, which was published in 2022. This book is speculative fiction about liberatory and revolutionary spaces in New York following the collapse of oppressive social systems.
Eman’s writing has appeared in different outlets such as Critical Inquiry, Jacobin and Muftah. Currently she writes for In These Times as a columnist, reflecting on American politics, Palestine and the Muslim community. Her writing encompasses her values in liberation and focus on marginalized communities and that comes through in all of the facets of her literary work.
Eman’s political home has always been with Palestine solidarity. She has also broadly worked with Muslim and Arab spaces. She was also a board member for the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity. She co-founded a group in Chicago called Salon Kawakib, a SWANA, queer-led, organizing collective. They started out doing cultural events but transitioned to political education and work. She currently organizes for Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and at the University of Chicago. She also organizes with a broader group called Scholars for Social Justice.
In April 2025, Eman was supposed to give a keynote speech for a student conference at the Keough School for International Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The dean of the school reached out to Eman to let her know that her talk would be cancelled because of lack of security, in spite of the event being scheduled three months in advance. Eman made her response to the dean public in In These Times admonishing the dean for censorship in a critical moment for Phalestinians.2
Eman is currently writing a book about the gendered experience of second generation AmericanMuslim immigrants and tracing their individual relationships to Muslim communities.3 The book focuses on how women come to be alienated from Muslim communities and how our anxieties are projected on Muslim women. She is also editing an anthology of speculative, revolutionary fiction with her co-author of the fiction book she published in 2022.
Eman has two cats and lives with her platonic life partner. Eman wants historians in a hundred years to know that in this time, queer people are extending something that even straight people benefit from. Straight Muslims are seeking queer spaces out because they align more with their values on gender equity and expansiveness of practice. That queerness not only opens up freedoms for queer individuals, but a collective freedom. Queer Muslims are opening up the interpretive space for all Muslims. Islam stopped being a living tradition and became stuck due to colonialism, and issues of gender and sexuality are forcing it to be a living tradition again.
(This biographical statement written by Soaad Elbahwati from an interview with Eman Abdelhadi and the sources below and was edited by Abdelhadi.)
1 PBS, First Person, “Queer and Muslim in America”, 2017.
https://www.pbs.org/video/queer-muslim-in-america-rgyuo8/
2 Eman Abdelhadi, “'Do Not Participate': The Absurd Excuse Notre Dame Gave Me When They Canceled My Talk," In These Times, April 2025.
3 Eman Abdelhadi, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago.
https://humdev.uchicago.edu/directory/eman-abdelhadi
Biography Date: August 2025