You know the concept of migration? I like to believe that we, as humans, learned it from birds and animals. When the winds grew colder and the food vanished from their lands, the birds flew away searching for warmth, safety, and the chance to start anew. Animals too, when water dried up or herds thinned, migrated for survival, for continuity. Some birds migrate just to lay eggs, instinctively sensing that life demands movement, that survival is linked to motion. In many ways, migration is natural. God-gifted, even. And humans did the same. They migrated for survival. They migrated for hope. They migrated for ideas.
Ideas migrate too. From culture to culture. From language to language. From one hemisphere to the next. One of the most fragile yet powerful of those ideas was that of utopia – a perfect society. A society built on justice, peace, equality, and freedom. The West may have given it a name, but the dream was never owned by borders. In the Middle East, in South Asia, across ancient civilizations, prophets, philosophers, and poets alike carried forward that same longing. A better world. A just world. A world that works for everyone. Humming in poetry, traveling in prophetic sermons, it has floated everywhere. And yet here we are – living in what looks nothing like utopia.
The 21st century has made some parts of the world look like they’re flying private jets into the future, while others remain paralyzed in an unending struggle for the basics: food, water, shelter, dignity. The unequal distribution of power, wealth, and opportunity between nations is no longer subtle, it is brutal and blatant.
Palestine bleeds every day, a stateless nation that has become the symbol of global hypocrisy and human indifference. For decades, its people have been resisting occupation and apartheid. They ask for what any utopian model would promise: freedom of movement, access to basic resources, the right to live without fear. Yet what they get is siege, silence, and slaughter. Their diaspora is not romantic, it’s a consequence of abandonment.
Syria, once the cradle of civilization, is now fractured by foreign wars, authoritarian control, and displacement. Over 13 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes, forming one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Did they not long for peace? Were their dreams not utopian in essence merely to live in dignity, to return to Aleppo or Homs or Damascus and find a garden blooming?
Afghanistan, devastated by decades of foreign intervention and domestic collapse, has witnessed dreams turn to dust. Girls walking to school with trembling courage, journalists risking their lives for truth, mothers trying to secure bread for their children under the weight of drones and ideology. Every Afghan who leaves carries a version of utopia in their heart – of a homeland they may never see whole again.
This is the diaspora of those who did not leave by choice, but by necessity. A utopian diaspora, not because they reached utopia – but because they still dream of it. And a hundreds of societies destroyed like that. Look what the world has done to African countries, starved them to death and later initiated welfare projects of ‘feeding the poor’. What an insane narrative!
The idea of utopia, too, migrated. It wasn’t born in one place. It doesn’t belong to one civilization. In fact, many forget that the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were deeply utopian in their values. They spoke of equality, of the dignity of the poor, of the reward for justice and punishment for tyranny. From the Prophecy of Muhammad where even the ruler feared public accountability, to the Buddhist Ashokan model of welfare and non-violence, and the Indus Valley civilization’s urban planning, the East has often attempted to articulate and practice utopian principles long before they were wrapped in modern political theory. But it rarely lasted because power corrupts, and utopia needs a collective morality to survive. In a world defined by imperialism, capitalism, colonization, patriarchy, and militarism -such a morality is hard to nurture.
The Third World, especially, has become a graveyard for utopian aspirations. Each movement toward justice is silenced with either bombs or bureaucracy. Leaders who promise equity are assassinated or exiled. Activists are jailed. Minorities are silenced. And yet, somehow, the people go on dreaming. Go on migrating. If not physically, then mentally and spiritually to a world they hope exists, even if only in imagination. Perhaps the utopian diaspora isn’t only made up of refugees crossing borders. Maybe it includes the youth in Pakistan dreaming of a merit-based system. Maybe it includes the Rohingya child drawing a home she can never go back to. Maybe it includes the African mother in a refugee camp telling her son that someday, there will be no hunger. Maybe it includes even the whistleblowers in the West who refuse to accept dystopia disguised as democracy. They all carry pieces of a shattered utopia trying to reassemble it wherever they land.
As I pen this down, there’s a song playing in my head by Tears for Fears…
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
Because I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world
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