For Pakistani Muslims abroad, faith can become lonelier and more deliberate, while Pakistan’s diaspora institutions have yet to meet that experience.

Between Maghrib and Isha, distance can stop being an idea and become a feeling in your chest. The Adhan does not drift through an open window here. If you hear it at all, it comes from a phone: muffled, scheduled, folded into an app.

You still stand for prayer. Something changes anyway.

Many of us left Gujrat, Gujranwala, Mirpur or Multan for Manchester, Milan or, in my case, Groningen. We carried religion like soil in a small tin: sealed, portable, never meant for a journey this permanent. Eventually, you begin to wonder whether the soil matches either ground.

In our new homes, we may feel too devout for the secular rooms we inhabit. Back in Pakistan, among the mosques and majalis that raised us, we can feel out of place, too. Our accents have softened. Our certainties have acquired footnotes, the kind you learn to add after enough time away.

Western scholarship offers words for this condition: hybridity, liminality, the “third space.” Homi Bhabha’s vocabulary helps explain a life lived between cultures. It has less to say about a Pakistani student praying alone in a Dutch flat at 11 p.m., half-listening in his memory for his nani reciting Āyat al-Kursī before bed. He recites it faster now, more quietly, conscious of the neighbours through the wall. Some nights, he wonders what that change means.

The third space is a concept. Ours is a Tuesday evening, and Tuesday evenings rarely resolve themselves as neatly as a seminar does.

Pakistan tends to tell two stories about people like me. In one, the migrant returns triumphant, bearing remittances and a foreign degree. In the other, he has lost his deen to the West: softened, secularised, practically gone. I have been cast in both roles at the same dinner table, by the same uncle, scarcely twenty minutes apart.

Neither story captures what happens to religious belonging abroad. Faith does not necessarily shrink. It reorganises around a different daily life.

Five prayers once had the rhythm of a shared household and the mosque loudspeaker down the street. Now there is a calendar app and the private negotiation of when and where to pray. Ramadan once meant a whole country slowing down together, everyone hungry at roughly the same hour, everyone understanding why patience ran short before sunset. Abroad, you fast through a lecture hall where nobody else is fasting. Iftar may be a sandwich at your desk because sunset arrives after the communal table has emptied.

That is a loss. There is no reason to dress it up.

Yet distance can also make faith more deliberate. At home, religious practice may be inherited so completely that you seldom have to ask why you follow it. Abroad, you encounter that question every day. You decide whether to pray when no one is watching and whether to fast when the people around you are eating.

I used to think a faith sustained this way was somehow lesser. I no longer think so, although I am not entirely persuaded by my own argument on days when I miss a prayer and nobody back home is close enough to notice. Choice does not make practice easier. It makes both commitment and failure feel more distinctly your own.

My years in humanitarian fieldwork taught me how readily institutions count what migrants send home. Money crosses a border. A floor gets built, a room added. The State Bank can enter the transaction in its ledgers. What comes back from a visit home cannot be converted into rupees or so easily recorded.

Grief travels. So does a changed understanding of faith. You return for Eid and find that you feel, however briefly, like a guest in the mosque where you grew up. Relatives notice the change, sometimes within minutes of meeting you at the airport, even if neither of you has words for it.

I think of this as an emotional remittance: the inward cost and transformation that accompany the money sent outward. It is harder to celebrate than a new house, but no less real to the person who carries it.

Some religious authorities may see altered practice as contamination by the West. That judgment misses the effort involved in keeping a practice alive under unfamiliar conditions. Still, I would not romanticise distance as a purifying ordeal.

Much of it feels like slow erosion, noticed only afterward, while doing laundry or waiting for a late bus.

The diaspora Muslim is neither automatically more devout for having lived away nor necessarily less faithful for adapting. A person can be formed by absence, disciplined partly by memory and by the ache of hearing the Adhan through headphones on a phone that is about to die.

The more useful question, in Pakistan and abroad, is how institutions can meet people living this experience. Pakistan has welfare attachés at missions overseas, and the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation offers services that include education, housing and assistance with complaints. These are valuable forms of support. They do not, by themselves, answer the religious and cultural questions that arise across generations.

A more serious effort at diaspora engagement would start by listening to migrants and their children rather than assuming they all want to be drawn back toward a single idea of home. Pakistani missions could support cultural programmes and accessible resources on history and faith. They could work with local communities, including mosques and other places of worship, across sects and provinces. Scholars who understand the pressures of life abroad could be available for sustained conversation, rather than appearing once a year at a conference.

A student who cuts a prayer short because he is embarrassed in front of his Dutch flatmates deserves a thoughtful response, not a verdict on whether he has become less Muslim. The answer must also be close enough to reach him when the question occurs, not only several time zones away.

“Neither here nor there” usually sounds like an accusation, as though a life between places must be incomplete. I hear it differently now. It may be an honest address for a generation that still prays in a language its new neighbours do not understand, facing a direction its new cities were never built toward. We can call these places home while remaining connected to the ones we left. No apology is required.