Hijrah Journal #1 – We need to leave

June 2021 – The month that chaos reigned

I stood guard outside my home at night. Helicopters circled above. Every few minutes I could hear gunshots in the distance. We prepared for the worst. In just a few days, Durban, South Africa had turned into a scene from a nightmare. Riots, looting, and gunfights spread across the city. We barricaded our neighborhoods, armed ourselves, and took turns standing guard. For years, I feared something like this would happen. I wanted to get out before it did. It was destiny that we had to witness this.

Tension and resentment had built up in our community during the pandemic/lockdown. This reached boiling point in July 2021 when riots broke out due to political unrest. Very quickly, the riots escalated, turning into violence and mass looting. For one week, our city turned into Hell. Eventually, the government sent in the army, and things settled down. After a month, distribution chains returned to normal, and life regained a sense of normalcy. But things were never the same again.

Many people left after that. It felts like a taster of what could happen in the future. There was no guarantee that a similar or worse event would not happen in the future. Our community was never the same again. It was there, during that crazy week, sitting huddled with my wife and four kids, that we all made a firm commitment to get out of South Africa as soon as we could. It was destiny that we would remain stuck in South Africa for another four years.

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Dreams versus Reality

I never felt at home in South Africa, despite being born and raised there. As an Indian Muslim, I do not think there is a place on earth where I can truly feel “at home” as we are minorities wherever we go. But for many, South Africa is as close as it gets. I know many of my friends and family love South Africa and it is home to them. My experiences there were very different from most people around me. I always felt like I belonged somewhere else, and it was my duty to explore and find the land where I belong.

There were many trials I experienced living in South Africa. Crime is out of control there, and I was a victim many times. One of my earliest memories was when two robbers broke into our home and started shooting at us. I was eight years old, and I ran for cover while protecting my four year old brother. My father shot and killed both robbers in front of me. A few months later, he was gunned down by a different group of robbers in his shop. I was orphaned at the age of eight, with three younger siblings including a baby. Over the years, I have been robbed, beaten up, stabbed, and awoken at night to the sound of gunshots. I developed insomnia from all these experiences. I only sleep well when I am far away from that land.

It is true that South Africa has a strong Muslim community, a lack of Islamaphobia, and perhaps the best freedom of religion in the non-Muslim world. But the Muslim community is highly sectarian, and I just never fitted in or belonged. Most South African Muslims (where I lived) are either Barelvi or Deobandi, and highly sectarian to anyone outside their groups. I never felt a connection to either group, so always operated as an outsider, never feeling a sense of belonging. I longed for a land far away from these Indianized divisions, a place where I could just be a regular Muslim.

My desire for Hijrah started very early in life. I spent some time in India between 2007 and 2011, especially in 2009, as a way of connecting with my roots, but it was not the right place for me. I traveled to Kuala Lumpur in 2016 to scout it as a potential Hijrah destination, but it would take a full decade before moving there was even a possibility. For over a decade, Hijrah was a dream but there were many obstacles in the way. Between family obligations and paperwork, we were stuck in South Africa until Allah willed a way out for us.

Navigating Third World Bureaucracy

Between 2018 and 2025, my family were practically stuck in South Africa due to paperwork issues. This was complicated even further by the pandemic, during which the departments were closed for almost two years, causing a massive backlog with all paperwork. By January 2024, we needed to resolve thirteen document issues to travel as a family. At that point, I reached a breaking point with all my community issues and decided that I would do whatever was needed to get out. That month, I contacted two lawyers and began working on all our paperwork, one by one, determined to resolve it all.

This was no easy task. Over the next two years, I needed to visit various government departments over twenty times, submit and resubmit dozens of pages of paperwork, and call them and follow up many times. But with Allah’s Help, one by one, the paperwork issues were resolved, and by October 2025, my family were finally able to start traveling. As soon as we received our final documents, I booked our flights three weeks later and left the country. Alhamdulillah, years of hard work and persistence had finally paid off.

Now our adventure begins

I write this journal entry from an Airbnb on the other end of the world. Alhamdulillah, our efforts have finally paid of. We are now traveling as a family, and seeking a new home abroad. With determination and optimism, we hope and pray that we can settle in a Muslim land soon, and begin a new life far away from the chaos that defined our lives until now. Our journey as a family has just begun, but my journey started a few years earlier.

Realizing that it will take a while to resolve our document issues, I decided to start traveling by myself to scout out potential Hijrah destinations. In July 2022, I made my first trip to Istanbul. This would be followed by another trip to Istanbul, two trips to Doha, and finally arriving in Kuala Lumpur with my family in November 2025. During my adventures, I connected with people who had migrated to each of these lands, learned about their lives, challenges, and experiences, and made notes for myself.

In this series, I plan to share my notes with you all, starting with my two trips to Istanbul, and what I learned about life for immigrants in that land. I will share my experiences in the next chapter of this series inshallah.

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