From: jamalin@newton.ccs.tuns.ca (Nadeem Jamali)
Subject: Re: Muhajirs in Sindh
Organization: Technical University of Nova Scotia, Halifax, N.S.
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 00:43:21 GMT

In article <21JUL199212113781@vxcrna.cern.ch> hasan@vxcrna.cern.ch  writes:
>In article <1992Jul20.164843.13630@bernina.ethz.ch>, nadeem@igpho (Nadeem Malik) writes...
>
>> ... Stuff deleted ...
>
>>But there is another important factor why Urdu is the natural national
>>language of Pakistan, and that is its Muslim connections. It was the language
>                                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>of the Mughul courts and has become associated with Muslim India. This 
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>Just to keep the historical facts right, Urdu had never been the language
>of Mughal courts. Even during the dying gasps of the Mughal Empire, when
>it had shrunk to the confines of Delhi with a King who was one of the 
>foremost Urdu poets of his time, Urdu was was not the court language. It
>was Persian that had always been the court language of the Mughals,
>notwithstanding that their native language was Turkish.
>
>And just as a highlighting aside, I may add -- even the court language
>of Ranjeet Singh, who for many, was the father of Punjabi nationalism (if at 
>all such a thing ever existed :-)) was Persian.
>
>I must clarify that I have no serious objection to the crux of the argument
>and the sense in which I have used the word  *court language* would be
>analogous to *official language* in the modern political jargon. Urdu did
>come to be used more and more by the Mughal elite, especially during the
>last hundred years of the empire that no longer was.
>
>And as I wrote that, an intriguing thought strikes me: Urdu was slowly
>displacing Persian (if not completely overthrowing it) during the years
>that the Mughal empire was in decline, so is it not a remnant of a period
>of decay of Muslim power -- a symbol of decadence, if you like?:-)
>
>
>
>
>What's in a .sig! 

It's encouraging that at least some people do not consider talking 
rationally about the country we care about as some kind of sacrilege.

WHO DECIDED THAT URDU BE MADE THE "NATIONAL LANGUAGE" OF PAKISTAN... if anything
can be _made_ the national language? Whatever happenned to Sir Agha Khan's 
suggestion that if there aught to be _one_ official language, it should be 
Arabic. We may not agree with his religious ideology, but we should give him
credit for at least this particular idea. No other language is related to Islam
more than Arabic. For those more than 90% people of Pakistan who did not know
Urdu before partition, learning Arabic would not have been very much more 
difficult... Also, how many people would have put so much more effort to learn
the language. How it would have helped Pakistan, an intellectually more stable
nation than other Muslim countries, to serve as a leader in evolving the Islamic
thought, by bringing Pakistan closer to rest of the Islamic world.

Arabic is not less known to us than it was in 1947. If we want to have one
official language in Pakistan, let that be Arabic.

Nadeem

ps: one gentleman whose last name I forget (his first name was probably Jawahar)
had sent me his comments when I posted above things last year. He was critical
about the mere idea. But there wasn't any response on the net (if I recall).

-- 
Nadeem Jamali                                     jamalin@newton.ccs.tuns.ca
						 
School of Computer Science			  
Technical University of Nova Scotia		  (902)420-7882  
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan