This year’s Booker prize list (the highest and most prestigious award for fiction) included a book by a Pakistani author, Mohsin Hamid, named The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Though it eventually lost out to The Gathering by Anne Enright, it is nonetheless a positive step for a Muslim author to be nominated for a distinguished literary award. And for the time being atleast, it also silences my criticism of the dominance of the English language at all levels of government, military, and educational institutes in Pakistan. I had serious reservations about the widespread use of a foreign language that had clearly managed to raise a generation proficient in neither their mothers tongue, Urdu, nor the language they have so emphatically adopted, further highlighting the existing colonial mentality even though the physical subjugation ended 60 years ago.
Anyways, visited Chapters today looking for a cheaper paperback edition but that’s not due out till July 2008, which means back to the long waiting list of the public library.
Have you read his Moth Smoke?
I remember reading it but didn’t like it too much.
I’m taking the Peak of Eloquence course on SunniPath, and Sh Hamza does an amazing account of how the Arabic language today is losing out because of the different movements of Grammarians to simplify the rules. And he also mentions how Arabic was preserved almost 100% until about this age (100 years ago). The cause of the degradation was trade and mixing with other cultures towards the end of the Khilafah.
According to the UN, the classical Arabic language will be gone in about 35 years (I have to find where I read this). And other languages would perhaps suffer the same fate?
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Yes, the rate of extinction for languages is actually quite high.
Any existing language is dynamic and constantly evolving. Unless the language is dead, like Latin, it is impossible and unrealistic to preserve it in one form. Even English, which is the lingua franca today, is changing as it comes into contact w/ other languages.
The natural evolution is understandable for any language but what is upsetting are the forced changes that are artificially implanted in a myopic attempt for short term gains.
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um. i’m no expert on languages. I can’t eloquently speak my own mother tongue, and am always laughed at for my hyderabadi + bangalori + English urdu*… but recently I was listening to the courseLens event on SunniPath called “Islam & the Language of the Arabs”
Sh Hamza Karamali (who is also teaching the course Humairah mentioned) referred to the The Lincoln-Douglas debates. He went on to explain how they spoke “typographically” – and the language has degraded over the while. Quite interesting.
If you are interested in the history of languages, then you should listen to the lecture.
*I’m willing to provide examples 🙂
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Thanks for the link Hafsa. I think I will check it out iA.
But I think people like us are in a different category because of the unique situation we’re in. It would be another story if you had lived all your life in India and hadn’t moved to Canada.
By the way, I would like some examples 😉
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