‘<i>Of Course</i> Muslims Can Be Gay’: Sexuality and Religion in Adiba Jaigirdar’s Young Adult Fiction

Today, Irish Young Adult (YA) literature examines a wide variety of youth experiences. However, an aspect that it is still slowly beginning to address is Ireland’s multiculturalism. While it is possible to find racialised characters or characters who belong to marginalised ethnic minorities in some Irish YA texts, white characters still predominate. Thus, it is significant to highlight the work of those authors who offer a depiction of today’s multicultural Ireland and a window into the experiences of characters that are usually found outside the mainstream, as is the case for Adiba Jaigirdar. Her YA novels The Henna Wars (2020) and Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating (2021) depict experiences and challenges that many Muslim girls may encounter in contemporary Ireland. This essay aims to analyse, in particular, how both novels explore matters of sexuality and religion together with race and ethnicity by focusing on how these intersecting elements of identity are negotiated by the characters of Nishat and Hani, two queer Muslim girls. This intersectional analysis will focus on how sexuality and religion working simultaneously both shape, and are influenced by, the girls’ experiences in a multicultural yet mainly white and Catholic Ireland.