A life shaped by migration, public service and community leadership offers a quiet rebuttal to claims that Muslim Australians do not belong – and a reminder that belonging is built through contribution, not fear.

If I were to draw the line of my life, it would not be straight. It would bend across countries, cultures and identities. Yet running through it is a single, unbroken thread: the search for belonging.

Belonging has not always come easily. Sometimes I inherited it. Sometimes I lost it. Often, I had to build it.

I was born in Bangladesh into a society shaped by humility, service and responsibility, but also by political instability. From an early age, I learned that leadership was not about privilege but duty, and that trust, once broken, takes generations to restore.

After college, I was awarded a Malaysian government scholarship to study economics at the International Islamic University Malaysia. That experience taught me a lesson I have carried ever since: belonging is often created through hospitality and shared responsibility, not through sameness. Later, postgraduate study took me to Canada, first to Ontario, then to Montreal, another migration, another adjustment, another encounter with uncertainty, in a faraway place that few from my generation had ever experienced.

In 1992, I migrated to Australia, beginning what would become my longest and most formative chapter.

Like many migrants, I arrived with qualifications but without certainty. I briefly taught at the University of Sydney and TAFE before joining the Australian Public Service in 1993. Over more than three decades, mostly in........

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