Since Bilal spent the majority of his life in New Zealand, he feels the urge to say he’s from New Zealand but doesn’t want to deny his homeland either.
“I say I'm from Afghanistan and I’ve been living here for 20 years and people are like 'oh then you’re a Kiwi' and that is uncomfortable for me to have someone else to tell me what I am. Yeah, I am a Kiwi but that’s for me to decide not for you to decide.”
"I’m also equally Afghan because I can still speak my language. I obviously look different to what our ideas are around what it means to look like a Kiwi, so it was a personal experience of me having had those kinds of issues for myself,” Bilal said.
After the March 15 attacks in Christchurch, Bilal did some workshops with young Muslims alongside some qualified psychologists to support them. Through that, he realised that there was a need for Muslim driven research to be done to see how best to support young Muslim people.
“We were woefully unprepared for supporting Muslims in general and so what happened was a lot of psychologists were reaching out to different people asking how they can support Muslims in this time and Muslim people were reaching out to us saying these psychologists and counsellors don’t get us. We don’t want to go see them. We just want to see Muslim people,” Bilal said.
This inspired Bilal to do the research he’s doing now which is looking at how the March 15 attacks affected Muslim youth in terms of their identity, their sense of belonging, and their mental wellbeing. He will also examine how they’ve been able to respond or bounce back from the attacks.
He’s not just looking at the negative impacts of it but also the resilience that's embedded within Muslim communities across the country. For his research, he’ll be drawing on some Islamic concepts around how Muslims see themselves as a collective rather than individuals.
He is working on a few projects on the side; one which is Empower. A refugee mentoring programme that he helps run. It helps former refugees who are wanting to begin tertiary education get to that stage of their lives and supports them through one-on-one mentoring.
He's also doing another project with the Auckland Museum to build relations with Muslim communities and the museum, with the hopes of developing a collection that reflects the lives and histories of Muslims in Auckland, specifically.
Bilal only began to understand the significance of the article, which was published back in 1999, when he was around 19 years old. After being confronted with the 2015 European refugee crisis and the death of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, he asked his father to show him the article once more.