Omair Ahmed: I know that it is a moral failing, but I have never been able to summon any sympathy for the ignorant. In this day and age there are so many ways and means of getting information that it takes a great deal of effort to stay ignorant. Those who stay without knowledge in today’s world are those who have made an effort not to know, and it is difficult to sympathise with this.
One example of such wilful ignorance is the increasing use of the term ‘Allah hafez’ among South Asian Muslims. This is a twisting of the Farsi term ‘Khudahafez’, which translates as ‘May God take care of you’ and is used as goodbye. In fact, ‘goodbye’ is itself a contraction of the old English term ‘God be with ye’, so it’s an almost exact translation. But for some people, ‘khudahafez’ no longer suffices, and instead of ‘May God take care of you’, they prefer to say, ‘May Allah take care of you’.
It is a distinction without a difference. ‘Khuda’ is Farsi for ‘God’ and the Arabic term ‘Allah’ is a contraction of the words ‘al ilah’—or ‘the god’. Insisting on ‘Allah, not khuda’, thus, is the equivalent of insisting on ‘God, not God’. At best, it signals a preference for Arabic instead of Farsi. What sounds silly is when an Arabic term ‘Allah’ is forced into a Farsi phrase, leaving it neither Farsi nor Arabic but a mockery of both.
[…] Such idiocy is not peculiar to a single set of people. Across North India, another visible effort is the trend of renaming old Urdu Bazaar areas of small cities ‘Hindi Bazaar’. Unfortunately for these rewriters, the ‘Urdu’ in Urdu Bazaar has nothing to do with language. In Turkish, the word for military is ‘ordu/urdu’. These Urdu Bazaars were cantonment markets set up during the Sultanate and Mughal eras. Their civilian equivalents were the Sadar Bazaars. As far as I can tell, the British continued this tradition with their cantonment markets and Civil Lines, which we still follow.
[…] The history of Urdu as a language is a history of indigenisation, of the way Indians taught the haughty Mughal Darbaar some humility. Instead of understanding this history, some would like to paint over the name ‘Urdu’ and write ‘Hindi’ in its stead much the same way that some Muslims, turning towards the Arab world, would like to replace Farsi with Arabic.
Maybe it feels empowering to say, ‘Our way is best, and we will overwrite history in our name.’ Yet, in trying to overwrite history, we lose out so much that is our own. In rejecting a mixed legacy, we only reject a part of our own inheritance, leaving all of us poorer in the process. More here.