I was on top of the world. I sat precariously at the edge of my seat, waiting for my Arab language class. My feet dangled over the clouds of the wide Arab world, floating across vast pieces of land – the Gulf, the Levant, Africa, my own South Asia…
It’s ironic, my excitement of entering this new “world.” Geographically, the Arab world is pretty close. A two-hour flight, in fact. Direct route from Karachi to Dubai. Historically and culturally, too, we are entrenched in it. As a Muslim Pakistani – a country of Muslim majority – you speak the language every time you greet someone with a salam or bid them farewell from this world with a ilaihi raji’un prayer when they die.
Bismillah’s, Masha Allah’s, Subhanallah’s, are all part of life, yet we say them without really knowing what they mean literally. As a Muslim, you read the Quran and pray in Arabic and yet, how many of us can say we know what we’re reading and saying? I call myself a Muslim, and Arabic God’s chosen language for the Quran – heck, even my name is Arabic. Yet one never quite makes the effort to seek the meaning of any of it all. I can’t help but feel like a fraud.
Right beyond neighbouring Iran lies Iraq, an Arab country. Yet our sense of Arab-ness is limited to just our religion, when there is so much more. About a quarter of a hundred countries are native Arab speakers. Covering that much land and people, there’s history and culture beyond just religion. Arts, maths, food, calligraphy, Arabic numerals, shawarma (if atrociously modified, as my Jeddan friend says). These are things we touch and know, but hardly realise their origins in connection to Arab culture.
So it was with this mix of fascination and frustration that I finally booked a class with a human Arabic teacher. As we started chatting in English, about my goals and each other, something strange happened. The tutor was amazed that I knew as many languages as I did. While I was wrapped up in the globalness of Arabic, of how far-reaching it is, she was impressed at the fact that I was multilingual despite belonging to a small region in a relatively smaller country. Pakistan may be as diverse as Arabic is vast.
So, I pondered over it. I know three languages in both written and spoken form: Sindhi, the regional language; Urdu, the national; and English, the official language. I may have exaggerated a little bit, by bragging that I can understand most of spoken Hindi, too. Plus, I could read Arabic, as she’d find out after the reading test. Apart from the little I do know, it turns out, learning Arabic is no joke. The language is 1,400 to over 2,500 years old1, with multiple variations per region and even country, as I found out in my pre-class research.
As if the language itself wasn’t hard enough. My tutor was Egyptian, and could teach me the Egyptian dialect, which wasn’t like my Duolingo Gulf-style and classical Fusha that I’d been casually dabbling in across a span of years. Thus, I was pronouncing words differently than one would in Egyptian, and was using non-colloquial vocabulary. To top it off, it is contextual, too, so the same word could mean something entirely different in a different context. For example, the word ما (ma) means “that which/what” in some instances and “no” in others.
Before I could burst with frustration, something clicked: I am Sindhi. This language itself is also thousands of years old, and can be traced as far back as the Indus Valley (2500 BC), one of the world’s first known civilisations. Sindhi, too, has multiple dialects, and can be confusing sometimes. In fact, for the secluded urban kid, here’s a story.
My cousin in the army was posted in Umerkot for a time, a town far south of our northern Sindh origins. He was puzzled to hear people calling flowers “mocharo.” Who calls flowers ugly? Turns out, “mocharo” in their dialect and in formal Sindhi,, too, means “fine,” “good enough” or… well, “pretty.” This is the same language in the same province of the same country, just a bit south of our hometown.
Another example of a language having multiple, conflicting dialects can be seen in yet another old but widely spread language: English. In England, you also have very distinct Northern and Southern accents, each with varying vocabularies. And that’s not counting the subcategories. Zoom out to the globe, and you have an almost similar story, hiding in plain sight. The word “quite” means “slightly” or “somewhat” in UK English, and “very” or “extremely” in American. (Otherwise, it depends on the context; whether the word following it is negative and binary, or a neutral adjective).
Sigh.
So yes, I can not be mad at Arabic for the word ما (ma) meaning something in some instances quite another in others. I can keep myself from pulling my hair out. But there was another step beyond all that, stopping me from learning Arabic very quickly: being not very good at Urdu. I realised that although I could hire really affordable teachers locally who taught Arabic in Urdu, my poor vocabulary of written Urdu got in the way. In this case, one language was a gateway to another. You see, a lot of Urdu words come from Arabic, and that makes sense because Urdu is a relatively recent language and borrows from a lot of languages in the region. It developed in the 11th to 15th century, after the arrival of Mahmud Ghaznavi2 where the Persian-speaking outsiders mingled with the locals, giving way to this new language – which will ultimately become a language of the court, too, in the Mughals Era. So it’s relatively newer, despite how much more deeply ingrained it is here than its Arabic and Persian parents.
For a learner like myself, this reality proved to be very annoying. I realised this when I learned Arabic from local teachers who were teaching it in Urdu. So Arabic words like “حجت”) “hujjat” – that is, “argument/proof”) already mean exactly that in Urdu, too. Like other words, I found out that this word is used in normal (and formal) Urdu speech anyway. So teachers would teach away with less deep of a translation, while I stayed behind because of my relatively poor Urdu base.
My problem’s origin, I found, was in the system – the one I personally went through, at least. Growing up in rural Sindh, your first language is usually the region’s language, and it is also the one you study other subjects in, too, unlike the other schools at, say, the federal level. There simply isn’t a need … until, apparently, grade three.
By that time, any basic Urdu I could’ve started learning went down the drain when my parents upgraded me to a federal school where the kids were already at the sentence level rather than learning it from scratch. Thus ensued my lifetime (so far) of being behind on formal written Urdu and its vocabulary as the school focused more on the poetry of our national language and the grammar of the colonial (English).
So, not only was I behind on the national language but I’d also stopped learning Sindhi at a more advanced level altogether. My formal vocabulary at the secondary school level was hugely affected. It also did not help that tertiary education would abandon all regional, national languages to only focus on the very serious management and some social sciences courses taught in our official language, English.
To reiterate, Urdu and Sindhi share a huge amount of vocabulary with Arabic and if I or the school system hadn’t failed at that, my learning journey would’ve probably looked different. Firstly, the education system, with its Islamic ideologies, seems to have almost consistently rocky consistency over the years and across private and public sectors. General Zia, a former and Islamist dictator-President imposed Arabic as a compulsory subject3, likely due to the Holy Quran being in that language, originally. This does not reflect in private schools. To be clear, I am not in favour of mandating any non-essential subjects onto students. However, keeping cool options is always a good idea. The option does come at the university level, which if you’re able to afford it, can probably agree that nobody can quite learn a new language in a total of four months, can they? What if we offered that option in school, letting the child learn it slow and well, letting them voluntarily build their curiosity and vocabulary? The transition to university then, if it occurs, would be a lot smoother. Anyway, I may be whining too much for a person who speaks three languages – isn’t that what the tutor called impressive?
Oh, but… is it impressive?
In hindsight, I remember Egypt also is a colonised country. An educated person there, like my tutor, would know three languages, too: Arabic, French, and English. So technically, she and I spoke the same number of languages – only she was doing a sales pitch and I wasn’t. In any case, the glazing worked, if only temporarily.
Notes:
- “Showcasing the role and legacy of the ARABIC LANGUAGE along the Silk Roads.” United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2024, p. 18. ↩︎ - M.Saad Hanif. “Heritage or Hurdle? Understanding the Decline of Urdu Among Pakistani Immigrants.” Oriental College Magazine, Vol.99, No. 04, Serial No. 374, 2024, p. 7. ↩︎
- Tanveer, Lodhran. “Islamization in Pakistan & Bangladesh: A Comparative Study of Zia ul Haq and Ziaur Rehman.” Sadiq Journal of Pakistan Studies (SJPS), Vol.3, No.1, (Jan-Jun. 2023), p. 25. ↩︎
Bio note:
Maria Saleem is a corporate slave based in Karachi. In her free time, she is lost in books and sometimes touches grass to photograph for her book review blog. Her few works have appeared in Young World, Dawn and the anthology Dreams & Delusions by TWS Publications. You can come and say hi @fancyafantasy on her bookstagram.
