Abdul Muqadus is from Pakistan and has been seeking asylum in the UK for the past ten years. He is a member of the Knightswood-based Framework for Dialogue group. He was assisted in writing this story by Sue Reid Sexton.
Sue Reid Sexton lives and works in Glasgow. She worked as a counsellor specialising in trauma for over a decade and spent another decade working with homelessness. She is the author of four novels including two examining the effects of war on ordinary people and another about complicated grief. She has been published in a variety of forms, most recently in the Glasgow Voices edition of the International Literary Quarterly.
A place to live
When I arrive in a continent, they refuse to have me based on one of three reasons, race, religion, or human law.
It is like God threw me here, as if he threw me on top of a mountain. On three sides of the mountain there are three continents and in each one I am refused for a different reason.
There are a million things my religion expects me to do but I am not able to do them because they are too much. I believe racism is a cultural thing and find the Arab world rejects me because of my race rather than my religion. In some parts of the world, like Pakistan, the human laws serve certain political groups who have kidnapped law and order, and monopolies have been given to certain people. The human laws are not for ordinary people.
I am standing on this mountain. I want to come down to these three places but all of them do not want me based on certain reasons. They won't accept me. I don't know where to go. I am still standing on that mountain. I don't belong to any political group, any movement or ideology. All I need is a little bit of space to stay in any of these places, somewhere I can feel safe, and I am being denied that right.
I feel that in my emotional life I am travelling through a very dark tunnel. All I want is reassurance: Is there light at the other end waiting for me?
Abdul Muqadus with Sue Reid Sexton
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