No sugar on this tongue, mate.
Only ash and iron.
The tale’s older than supremacy, older than script,
etched into sandstone with the bones of the forgotten.
A tough case?
Call it what it is: an open wound.
A brutal ledger, autographed in the blood of men
who prayed eastward and spoke in tongues
your maps could not fathom.
There is no mistaking the pattern —
from Andalusia’s cathedrals repurposed,
to the sickly glow of Guantanamo’s cages,
from the Sykes-Picot lines drawn by gin-soaked hands,
to the drowned faces in the Aegean,
still clinging to the smell of home.
I have watched them shuffle in,
barefoot, broken-backed,
clutching nothing but the word ‘hope’ —
a word turned counterfeit
the moment it passed foreign lips.
They have stared down barrels,
felt boots on their necks,
and lived to count the microaggressions
that chip away at a man’s soul
quicker than any bullet.
The psychologist would call it ‘othering’,
the philosopher would call it ‘absurd’,
Kafka wrote it in code,
Camus wrapped it in smoke,
Orwell saw it, bled it, named it.
Muslims — an easy shorthand
for fear, suspicion,
a wildcard in the media’s deck.
Brown skin — your convenient silhouette
for terrorists, refugees, cockroaches, invaders,
depending on the decade.
London, Paris, Delhi, New York.
The skyline changes, but the cold shoulder remains.
Your streets, carved by colonisers,
still smell of the sweat of Muslim hands
who built them, unthanked.
We don’t ask for much, you know.
No thrones, no sceptres, no crowns.
Just a square of earth to call ours,
unspat upon.
Yet you treat us like relics,
museum pieces behind glass,
or worse: statistics.
Collateral in a war we didn’t declare.
You fear us,
because your history books taught you to.
Your Churchill, fat with imperial pride,
let Bengal starve as he lit cigars.
Your Kipling spun verses,
singing the ‘White Man’s Burden’
as Muslim corpses paved his kingdom’s roads.
And today?
The same old tune —
syllables stitched into soundbites:
‘radical’, ‘extremist’, ‘immigrant’.
When all we are is weary,
exhausted by centuries of suspicion.
A quiet racism,
the kind that does not shout but whispers.
In job interviews, in airports,
in the narrowed eyes of neighbours
who’ve lived next door for decades
but still call you ‘foreigner.’
We are not cattle, mate.
Nor your scapegoats, nor the unfeeling mountains
against which you hurl your inadequacies.
We breathe the same bitter air.
We bleed the same red.
Our prayers are not calls for conquest,
but quiet hopes to be left unmolested.
Emma Lazarus wrote of your golden door,
but it slammed shut long ago.
Now you build walls,
literal and psychological,
to keep us in check.
You, the majority,
the architects of borders and bullet points,
fear us.
Why?
Because to welcome us would be to admit
your systems were built on sand.
We ask only this:
Let the soil you claim as yours
recognise our footprints too.
History will judge you, as it judged Rome.
And the verdict will be cold.
Because you had the numbers,
the wealth, the power,
but lacked the humanity.
The question isn’t,
“Are we safe with you?”
It’s:
“Are you safe from the rot you’ve sown?”
For without the hands you vilify,
who builds your cities?
Without the backs you bend,
who shoulders your economy?
And without the hearts you break,
who tells your children
the world can be better than this?
So I stand here, in this grand courtroom of existence,
the defendant, the witness, the accuser, the victim.
And I ask, plainly:
Haven’t we been through enough?
We are not seeking charity,
just the decency owed to any human soul.
Not asylum,
but home.
Not tolerance,
but belonging.
If your scriptures, your constitutions,
your manifestos, your manifest destinies,
mean anything at all —
open the damned door.
Let the house you call civilisation
be more than just walls.
Let it be a hearth.
And let the fire warm all who gather,
without question.
For the world is tired.
And so are we.
