Hijrah is a decision, not a daydream

Ask around and you'll find that a surprising number of Muslim families are thinking about hijrah. They've thought about it for years: it comes up at dinner, after a difficult week or when the news is bleak.

“Maybe we should just go.”

And then Monday arrives, and the thought folds itself back up and returns to the drawer marked one day.

I don't say that with any judgement, the drawer is full for most of us (mine included); but it's worth being honest about what's happening there. For a lot of people, hijrah isn't actually a plan, it's a mood. A warm, recurring daydream that does real emotional work: it comforts, it gives you somewhere to point the restlessness, without ever being asked to become a decision. And a daydream and a decision are very different.

A daydream is allowed to stay vague, that's its whole appeal. In the daydream, the new country is sunlit and the masjid is around the corner and the community is warm and the kids are thriving and somehow the money works out. You don't have to specify, you get all the feeling with none of the arithmetic.

A decision is the opposite. A decision has to get specific, and specific is uncomfortable, because specific is where the trade-offs live.

That's the real reason so many of us keep hijrah in the daydream folder, I think. It's not laziness and it's not weak faith. It's that the moment you try to turn it into a genuine decision, it fractures into a dozen hard sub-questions that don't have clean answers.

Which country?

Can you even get a visa there?

What happens to your income?

What about schooling?

What about your parents, aging, back home?

What about your spouse, who might love the idea of the move while quietly weighting the whole thing completely differently to you?

Every one of those is a real question, and none of them is answered by how much you want to go. Longing for a place doesn't get a visa approved or find a school. And so the decision feels overwhelming, and overwhelm sends the whole thing right back to the drawer, where it's safe and warm and does nothing.

Here's what I've come to believe: the way out isn't more longing, and it isn't a sudden reckless leap either. It's the unglamorous middle path of actually thinking it through. Turning the daydream into a set of concrete questions and sitting with them honestly, one at a time.

That means naming what actually matters to you, in your specific situation, and being honest that it's different from what matters to the next family.

For one family, proximity to aging parents outweighs almost everything. For another, it's the kids' schooling. For a third family, cost of living is the hinge the whole thing turns on. There's no universally correct ranking, the mistake is pretending there's one right answer floating out there, rather than your answer, built from your weights.

It also means having the conversation with your spouse properly - not the vague, circular dinner-table version where you're both gesturing at feelings, but the specific one where you each actually name what you're weighting and discover, sometimes to your surprise, that you're not optimising for the same things at all.

That divergence isn't a problem to avoid. It's the most important thing to surface, and far better surfaced early, on paper, than discovered halfway through a move.

None of this kills the dream, if anything it honours it. It takes the thing you've been longing for seriously enough to actually examine it, instead of leaving it as a comfort object you never intend to act on. Some families, doing this honestly, will find the move is right and finally start moving. Others will find that now isn't the time, and there's real peace in that too; a clear "not yet, and here's exactly why" beats a vague guilt that you're not doing the thing you keep talking about.

The point isn't that everyone should make hijrah. The point is that hijrah deserves to be a decision made with clear eyes and shared honestly between spouses, rather than a daydream you carry around for a decade. Decide it, one way or the other.

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If you're doing this thinking-it-through right now and you're have an Android smartphone, I’m building a small tool to help exactly this kind of decision and looking for a few testers - details in this recent post.