Yasser S. Khan and Rizwan Ahmad

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The offending dress (Image credit: BBC)

Recently, a woman in Lahore was accused of blasphemy for wearing a dress printed with Arabic calligraphy. The crowd had assumed that the sartorial motifs must be verses from the Qur’an.

In reality, the words on the dress were hayah and hulwah meaning ‘life’ and ‘sweet’ respectively. Islamic scholars had to be called in to verify this to eventually disband the crowd.

How did the misunderstanding come about?

The calligraphic style of the print on the dress loosely resembles the Thuluth style of writing. Thuluth literally means “a third,” referring to its compactness, as this style of writing occupies a third of the space in comparison to other more expansive Arabic calligraphic styles.

The Thuluth style is most notably visible on Kiswah, the black fabric that covers the Kaaba with verses from the Qur’an. The iconicity of the Kaaba, being one of the most well-known symbols within Islam alongside the crescent moon, extends to the black cloth that covers and adorns it in golden inscriptions of Qur’anic verses , which makes the association of the Thuluth form of writing with Qur’anic verse even stronger.

Generally, Muslims in Pakistan and the Subcontinent at large are able to read Quranic Arabic, even as they might not understand it; recognizing the script is distinct from comprehending it. Considering their familiarity with the Quranic script and the iconic visibility of the Kiswah, the crowd in Pakistan recognized the Thuluth form of Arabic writing on the dress, which to them is blasphemous as it is perceived as an irreverent treatment of sacred Qur’anic verses.

For the crowd, it was the form of the writing that evoked the sacredness associated with the Qur’an which they mistakenly associated with the content of the writing. If the dress had been printed with Urdu words (in which case the crowd would have known the content) or even perhaps Arabic words in another font, the misrecognition would not have arisen.

Using the sacred associations evoked by Qur’anic form strategically

Arabic “Do not urinate!” sign in Dhaka (Image credit: Global voices)

While the hapless woman in Lahore likely was unaware of the sacred associations evoked by the print on her dress, authorities in Bangladesh use the form of Qur’anic Arabic more strategically.

In Dhaka, as elsewhere on the subcontinent, it is common practice for men to urinate on the street, due to inadequate public toilets.

In addition to providing better sanitary facilities, the Ministry of Religious Affairs commissioned prohibitive messages against public urination in Arabic.

Why write prohibitive messages against public urination in Arabic instead of Bangla, even though Arabic is a language Bangladeshis recognize mostly in relation to the Qur’an?

For many Bangladeshis, as for Pakistanis, anything written in Arabic in a font associated with the Qur’an seems sacred. While they are unlikely to understand the meaning of the prohibitive messages written in Arabic, the use of the form of Qur’anic Arabic for the prohibition is effective, as people will be fearful to urinate on what they assume to be a sacred Qur’anic verse.

In both cases, it is the form that evokes the association with the sacred text, not the content.

These two episodes demonstrate that in the meaning-making process, there is often a complex negotiation and interaction between form and content of language. Conventionally, we give more precedence to content at the peril of losing the meaning conveyed to us by form. The overlooking of form can lead to misunderstandings, as happened in Lahore, just as the deliberate use of form can become a powerful tool to evoke associations that bypass content and thus shape perceptions. Alongside content, the form of language, script, or font shape and are shaped by the meanings they are supposed to carry. A neglect of form in our everyday perception of language can only lead to a fractured understanding of how meaning is produced and how it is perceived and consumed.

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Yasser Shams Khan is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University. He is the recipient of the 2024 British Association for Romantic Studies President’s Fellowship. His work focuses on the history of theatricality and performance practices, with specific interest in issues of race, Orientalism, and empire in the long eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

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Related content

Ahmad, Rizwan. 2022. Mal Lawwal: Linguistic landscapes of Qatar
Ahmad, Rizwan. 2020. “I regret having named him Sahil”: Urdu names in India
Grey, Alexandra. 2018. Do you ever wear language?
Piller, Ingrid. 2010. Transliterated brand names
Piller, Ingrid. 2013. Linguistic theory in Dubai

Map of Transoxania (Source: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: Arabic language learning is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world, such as China, where it may be a source of empowerment for impoverished Muslim women. This post by Mehrinigor Akhmedova (Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan) and Rizwan Ahmad (Qatar University, Qatar) takes us to Uzbekistan, a part of the post-Soviet world, where some aspects of Transoxania’s multilingual past are being revived for religious and economic reasons.

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Mehrinigor Akhmedova, Bukhara State University, Uzbekistan
Rizwan Ahmad, Qatar University, Qatar
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Recently, interest in the learning of Arabic language and script among the young generation of Uzbeks has been rising. Young Uzbeks are learning Arabic not simply because of their faith, Islam, but also because it is desirable in the domestic job market and opens a window of opportunities in the Arabic-speaking Gulf states.

In September 2023, the Department of Islamic History Source Studies, Philosophy at Bukhara State University invited a professor from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University to teach courses in Arabic. This is a significant change in the history of Arabic and Islamic learning in Uzbekistan. During the Soviet rule and early years of independence in 1991, Uzbekistan witnessed many ups and down regarding the place of Islam in the constitutionally secular Uzbek society. In 1998, fearing radical Islamic ideologies, the government closed many madrasas, traditional schools of learning, established soon after the independence.

Liquidation of Madrasas and Teaching of Arabic in Uzbekistan

Although the repression of Islam in the former Soviet republics, including modern-day Uzbekistan, began during the Tsarist regime, it reached its climax during the Soviet rule following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The state repression of Islam took many forms, including the persecution and killing of mudarris and ulama, teachers and scholars of Islam, nationalization of vaqf properties, Islam endowments, and forceful removal of veils from Muslim women, known as the hujum campaign.

Dome of the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa (Image credit: Wikipedia)

On the educational and sociolinguistic fronts, the repression led to the dismantling of the centuries old traditional Islamic educational system of maktabs and madrasas where students learned to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic. In 1928, the Fourth Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic issued an order on the liquidation of all old method schools and madrasas. According to Ashirbek Muminov and Rinat Shigabdinov, before the 1928 decree, there were 1,362 madrasas in Uzbekistan with 21,183 students enrolled in them.

Another measure that damaged Arabic teaching and learning was the decision to replace the traditional Arabic script of Uzbek with a Latin-based writing system in 1927. Ten years later in 1937, as a measure of Russification, the Cyrillic script replaced the Latin script. These measures dealt a death blow to the teaching of Islam and Arabic language and script in Uzbekistan. In 1945, as a token of acceptance of religious institutions, Stalin allowed Mir-e-Arab madrasa, established in the 16th century, in Bukhara, to reopen with a limited number of students. Subsequently, two more institutions of Islamic learning were established; namely, madrasa Baraq Khan in 1956 and Tashkent Islamic Institute of Imam al-Bukhari in 1971.

Arabic within Multilingual Transoxiana

Present-day Uzbekistan, which in pre-modern times, was part of the larger Transoxiana region in Central Asia, was a thriving center of Arabic language and literature. The Persian-speaking Samanids (819-999 AD), who ruled Central Asia from their capital in Bukhara under the suzerainty of the Arabic-speaking Abbasids, maintained Arabic as the language of administration, Islamic learning, and sciences. The Samanids simultaneously encouraged use of Persian in the court. Under their patronage, many Arabic texts were translated into Persian, including the Quranic tafsir, exegesis, of Al-Tabari (d. 923 AD) and the Kalila wa Dimnah, a collection of fables, originally written in Sanskrit.

1958 Soviet stamp celebrating the 1100th birthday of Rudaki (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Rudaki (858-940), born and raised in Bukhara and regarded as the founder of New Persian Poetry, was granted the esteemed position of the court poet of the Samanids.

In this multilingual linguistic and intellectual environment, there emerged in Bukhara two towering figures among the scholars of Hadith, the most foundational Islamic text after the Quran, namely Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari aka Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD) and Muhammad ibn Isa known as Al-Tirmidhi (824-892). Both were born in the Bukhara region of what is today Uzbekistan. In pursuit of the compilation of the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, they travelled widely to different parts of the Muslim world. They wrote their collections of hadith in Arabic, known as Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sunan Al-Tirmidhi respectively.

To the illustrious history of Bukhara as a center of Arabic can be added the polymath and physician Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin Western sources. He is considered to be the father of early modern medicine. Born in Afshona in Bukhara, Ibn Sina, had memorized the whole of the Quran before the age of ten. Later he turned his attention to the study of medicine. He authored many books in Arabic on philosophy, mathematics and other branches of knowledge. In medicine, his famous work is Al-Qanoon fi Al-Tib, “The Canon of Medicine.” This work consists of five volumes with over 1 million words. He was the physician of the Samanid ruler Nuh II (976-997).

In September 2023, in a speech delivered in the UN, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the president of Uzbekistan, named Imam Bukhari and Ibn Sina, among others, as scholars who richly contributed to science and showed that Islam was a religion of knowledge and peace.

Rise of Interest in Arabic in contemporary Bukhara

After the repression of Arabic and Islamic teaching during Soviet rule, there are signs of change in today’s Uzbekistan. In addition to official institutions such as Bukhara University encouraging the teaching of Arabic, many private language centers have also recently emerged in the city of Bukhara. There are over 50 private language centers in Bukhara, including popular ones like Takallum, An-Nisa, and Naqshbandi School.

Drawing of viscera from Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine” (Source: Wellcome Collection)

On their Facebook page, Takallum invites students as follows, “…reciting the Qur’an with Tajweed is our obligatory deed and our deed will lead us to Paradise! Lead your friends to paradise, help them read the Quran, be a true friend for them”. Evidently, for Takallum the learning of Arabic is coupled with Islamic beliefs and practices.

Based on a pilot study conducted in September-October 2023, we found that there are clear signs of the rise in the interest in Arabic learning. First, we discuss a survey that was given online to an active Telegram group called NIسA_School, Ayollar Maktabi, with over 14,000 women members. The use of the Arabic letter س in the first word of the group is indexical of the fact that it brings back the Arabic language and its history in Uzbekistan.

Next, we discuss statistics of students who received Arabic language proficiency certificates from Davlat Test Markazi Buxoro Viloyat Bo’limi, National Test Center, Bukhara Region.

In response to the survey question ‘what was your goal of learning Arabic?’, an overwhelming 82% of the participants (N=347) answered that they considered learning Arabic as most important knowledge for their self-development. Related to this personal/spiritual goal of learning Arabic was the response from 14% of the participants who learned Arabic in order to teach it to others.

It is important to mention here that Muslims believe that God rewards those who read the Qur’an in the original Arabic, even if they do not understand its message. This means that the original Arabic text has spiritual value that cannot be gained by reading it in translation.

The remaining 4% learned Arabic because they wanted to live and work in an Arabic-speaking country.

Another indicator of the rising interest in Arabic comes from the data of students who have received a proficiency certificate in Arabic based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2022, Uzbekistan started to use the six-point CEFR proficiency levels from A1-A2, basic user, through B1-B2, independent user, to C1-C2, proficient user. Since the implementation of CEFR in 2022, the total number of students receiving CEFR enrolled in different Arabic language teaching centers in the Bukhara region alone was 3,079. The vast majority of them (92%) received B1 and B2 and the remaining 8% received the higher proficiency level C1. No Uzbek students attained C2, the highest-level proficiency.

Post-Soviet transformations

Bukhara, Old City (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Another important factor propelling people’s interest in Arabic learning is that the Government of Uzbekistan encourages learning of foreign languages and rewards those who earn high-level proficiency certificates in them. According to a presidential decree of 2021, teachers of Arabic and other foreign languages with a C1 certificate will be paid an additional bonus of 50% of their basic salary. Similarly, employees in any government agency possessing any national or international certificate in a foreign language will receive an extra bonus of 20% on their basic salary. Furthermore, students applying for admission into master’s and Ph.D. in the philological studies must show a C1 level proficiency in a foreign language and those in non-philological fields must have a B2 level proficiency.

The discussion above clearly suggests that the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union have transformed the linguistic and educational fields. Uzbekistan, one of the great centers of Arabic language during the medieval era is witnessing a renaissance in the learning of Arabic after a long period of state suppression. Many young Uzbeks are rediscovering their history by learning the Arabic language and its script. The government’s incentives of learning a foreign language make Arabic learning even more attractive.

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Akhmedova Mehrinigor Bahodirovna is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Translation Studies at Bukhara State University. Her research covers issues related to translation, literature, spirituality and sociolinguistics.

In this post, Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi (Department of English Literature & Linguistics, Qatar University) examine the specific form this language panic takes in the Gulf countries, where Arabic is in close contact both with the languages of labor migrants from South and South-East Asia and with English as the language of globalization.

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Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi
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Is Arabic under threat in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and the UAE, where the number of non-nationals exceeds the nationals? Do non-Arabs living in the GCC pose a threat to the Arabic language and Arab identity? These questions have been the subject of debates not only in the Arabic language media but also conferences and seminars. Since Arabic is a symbol of national identity in the GCC, it is understandable why Arabs may be concerned, but beyond the emotional rhetoric, do facts support the anxiety about the decline of Arabic?

Demographic changes after discovery of oil in GCC

The GCC countries have experienced an influx of migrant workers over the past few decades following the discovery of oil and gas. The massive economic and social projects undertaken by the GCC governments have further created needs for labor and skills that the local population cannot fulfil leading to reliance on temporary foreign labor. In the GCC, non-nationals outnumber the nationals, accounting for 52% of the total population. In the workforces, the percentage of non-nationals is even more pronounced reaching up to 95% in Qatar. While migration into the GCC has brought many benefits to the region, it has also given rise to concerns among the local population that the Arabic language and Arab identity are in danger.

Fear of decline of Arabic

GCC Flag (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In popular discussions, the perceived decline of Arabic is generally attributed to two factors. First, it is argued that the presence of non-Arab migrant population from South and Southeast Asia not only poses a threat to the structure and use of Arabic but also endangers the Arab identity of the youth. Al-Farajānī, a political thinker and a columnist, in an article published on Aljazeera in 2008 argued that the presence of Asians had negative cultural consequences, the most important of which is ifsād al-lughah al-‘Arabīyyah, ‘corruption of the Arabic language’.

In 2013, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Center for Language Planning and Policies, based in Saudi Arabia, organized a conference aimed at developing strategies to strengthen the Arabic language and identity against the backdrop of social, demographic, and economic changes in the GCC. On a panel, Dr. Lateefah Al-Najjar, a professor of Arabic at UAE University, presented a paper on the effects of the Asian workforce on the Arabic language in which she argued that Asian maids and drivers affect the language of children and recommended that the Asian workforce be replaced with Arabs and that the learning of Arabic be a condition of employment in the GCC.

A second source of anxiety comes from the presence of numerous English-medium schools and colleges in the region. In a report published in 2019 on the occasion of UN Arabic Language Day – celebrated annually on December 18 – it was argued that English was a threat to Arabic in the GCC in the same way as French endangers Arabic in Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa. According to another report published in the Economist, in 2022, the youth in the GCC uses English more than Arabic and the use of Arabic is becoming limited to the home domain.

English is literally on the move on the roads of the UAE (Image: Language on the Move)

Some scholarly studies have also argued that English medium schools and colleges in the GCC are a threat to Arabic and Arab identity. A similar fear of the decline of Arabic in the entire Arab World was the theme of a Pan-Arab conference entitled “The Arabic language is in danger: We are all partners in protecting it” held in the UAE in 2013 indicating that the purported decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC.

Language policy changes in the GCC

The presence of large non-Arab populations has also led to communication problems between monolingual Arabs and non-Arabs. The governments of Qatar and UAE have started to use migrant languages in dealing with issues related to the workforce. At the same time, the concerns about the decline of Arabic have led the countries in the region, especially Qatar and UAE, with the largest foreign populations, to take measures aimed at protecting the Arabic language and identity. In the UAE, the Cabinet passed Resolution Number 21/2 in 2008 whereby all ministries, federal entities, and local government departments were required to use Arabic in all their official communications. In 2015, the Department of Economic Development of Dubai in the UAE issued violation tickets to 29 restaurants for not having their menus in Arabic in addition to not specifying the prices. Similarly, in 2019, Qatar passed the Law on Protection of the Arabic Language which regulates the use of Arabic and foreign languages and provides a fine up to 50,000 Qatari Riyal in case of non-compliance in some cases.

Language decline as proxy for social and political crises

A major shortcoming of the above reports, studies, and conferences is that no concrete evidence was provided to support the purported decline of Arabic. There is no linguistic evidence that Arabic spoken by young people in the GCC shows linguistic influences of their maids and drivers. They may have acquired some words, phrases, and sentences from their languages to communicate with them, which only suggests that their linguistic repertoire has been expanded. In fact, maids and drivers learn to communicate in Arabic with proficiency ranging from broken pidgin Arabic to native-like command. There is a need of systematic research based on empirical data to understand the linguistic effects of maids and drivers on the languages of host society.

Magazine ad for the University of Wollongong’s branch campus in Dubai (Image: Language on the Move)

Moreover, the discourse of the decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC but covers the entire Arab World, as was the theme of the 2013 conference in the UAE. Yasir Suleiman, a sociolinguist who has written extensively on the Arabic language and identity describes the situation as one of language anxiety, which is less about language and more about social and political tensions and crises besetting the Arab world.

One major external factor that contributes to the anxiety is the presence of English in educational institutions. Another is the demographic changes that the discovery of oil and the massive modernization projects have brought to the GCC countries whereby non-nationals constitute a significant part of the Gulf social and cultural space. Suleiman argues that the discourse of decline of Arabic is a proxy for these social tensions whereby a defense of Arabic becomes a defense of the Arab social and moral order.

The issue of anxiety and fear notwithstanding, something concrete has appeared in the linguistic landscape of the GCC, and maybe even more broadly in the Arab World, which is that for the first time in their history, Arabs are becoming bilingual in their dialect and English.

Before the advent of English-medium international schools and universities, Arabs from the region would seek higher education in other Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, where the medium of instruction was Arabic. Their level of education would be displayed in their knowledge and use of Standard Arabic.

By contrast, many GCC students today graduate from English-medium schools and international universities in Qatar and the UAE with a better command of English than Standard Arabic, especially in discussing professional issues.

This is part of the anxiety that English is encroaching upon the space of Arabic. However, we know bilingual people can command two languages equally proficiently and use each in its appropriate context. More research is needed to better understand usage patterns at home and in professional spaces. Census data, similar to those collected in bilingual Quebec in Canada could shed empirical light on what language(s) people use in different social domains such as the home, the workplace, or social gathering such as majlis. This might be more productive than the fear about the decline of Arabic that currently prevails.

Akhlaq Ahmad at work on the mural in Shahdara for the ‘Delhi, I Love You’ project. (Image Credit: Delhi, I Love You)

On July 8, 2020, The Wire published an anonymous article by a young Indian Muslim. In it, the writer shares his painful experience of how, in the anti-Muslim Hindutva climate created by the right-wing BJP government, his identity has been reduced to his Muslim name. Despite the fact that he observes no Islamic practices and champions liberal views, his Hindu colleagues look at him with suspicion. On social media, he is often called a jihadi, an ISIS-sympathizer, and mulla, a slur, for speaking up for the rights of minorities, especially Muslims.

Fearing for his life, he has stopped saying in public salamwaleikum, the Muslim greeting in Urdu. He also instructed his kids not to call him abba, an Urdu word for ‘dad’. He even started tweaking his name, so that it does not sound Muslim.

While violence, including mob-lynching of Muslims and the anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi in February 2020, has been discussed, the symbolic violence against the Urdu language—a proxy for and target of hate and discrimination against Muslims—hasn’t. I use the term Urdu in a broader sense to encompass the language as well as names.

Consider Urdu personal names and cases of hatred and discrimination that revolve around the identities they reveal. It is worth noting that the  BJP government in the last few years has renamed many places containing Urdu/Muslim names with names that evoke Hindu history and culture.

Personal names are not simply a system of identification by which people differentiate one person from another; they are also carriers of cultural information, including the social identities of the bearers of the names. A study conducted in the USA found that white-sounding names such as Emily and Greg were more likely to get callbacks from employers than Black-sounding names Lakisha and Jamal. While some names in the US clearly indicate racial identity, others such as John and Michelle are non-discernable. By contrast, in India, most Muslim names are discernable as they draw largely upon Persian and Arabic sources as against Hindu names which are derived, among other sources, from Hindu traditions. Since Urdu names are signposts of the Muslim identity, they easily become instruments of hate and discrimination against Muslims.

In May 2015, a Muslim young man, Zeeshan, holding an MBA degree was denied a job by Hare Krishna Exports, a diamond company based in Mumbai, because of his religion. Less than fifteen minutes after he submitted his application online, Zeeshan received a shocking reply from the company: “We regret to inform you that we hire only non-Muslim candidates”. Clearly, the decision to reject his application was based on the candidate’s Urdu/Muslim name.

Other cases of discrimination based on Muslim names have surfaced recently in companies that deliver goods to people on their doors. On 24 April, 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Barkat Patel, a Muslim employee of Grofers, an online grocery store, went to deliver grocery to Ms. Chaturvedi at Jaya Park in Mumbai. But her father stopped her from taking the delivery. According to the report filed at the police station,  the father wanted to know the  name of the delivery guy first. Once he found out from the name that Barkat was Muslim, he refused to take it. Barkat recorded the whole exchange on his mobile phone and submitted it to the police.

Similar cases of discrimination were reported from Zomato and Swiggy, popular food delivery companies. On October 25, 2019, Swiggy lodged a complaint with a police station in Hyderabad stating that a customer refused to receive their food order because the delivery man was Muslim. Another case of discrimination was reported on August 1, 2019 in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. In this case, a customer Amit Shukla cancelled his Zomato delivery when he found out from the name Faiyaz that his delivery man was Muslim. What makes it even more reprehensible is that Shukla argued that this was part of his freedom of expression and religion guaranteed by the constitution.

However, names don’t always correspond with social-religious identities. Some Hindu names of Persian or Arabic origin bear similarities with Urdu/Muslim name. In absence of other visual cues e.g. outfit or facial looks, such names could miscommunicate the identities of the bearers of the names. This is exactly what happened when a 23-old young Hindu man named Sahil was lynched by some Hindus in Maujpur in Delhi. Although the police denies the claim, Sahil’s parents, Sunil and Suneeta, both believe that their son was killed because he was mistaken for a Muslim who had entered a Hindu neighborhood. Suneeta expressed her regret at naming him Sahil, “I wouldn’t have named him Sahil had I known that it would turn out to be the cause of his death”. The incident that led to Sahil’s killing is worth mentioning. Sahil was at home when he found out that some of his friends had a brawl in Gali Number 5 in Maujpur, Delhi. When he rushed to the spot to resolve the issue the residents of the neighborhood asked his name. On knowing that his name was Sahil, the crowd turned to him and thrashed him severely. He died on his way to the hospital.

In another case, a Muslim man’s nickname, which did not sound Muslim, actually saved him. On May 19, 2016, as part of beautification of Delhi, Akhlaq Ahmad, an Indian artist who holds a degree in fine arts, and Swen Simon, a French artist, were writing an Urdu couplet on a wall in Shahdara, Delhi. Some members of the right-wing RSS gathered there and asked them to stop writing the couplet in Urdu and threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t. They said, “ …they could bear anything, but not the Urdu script” They snatched the artists’ paintbrushes and smudged the Urdu writing on the wall. In an interview, the Muslim artist, said, “…I said my name is Shabbu [his nick name] and they assumed I was Shambhu, a Hindu. So, they turned their ire towards my French colleague, Swen Simon, asking him to pay me my wages and go back to Lahore”.

This exception only proves the rule. The cases of Sahil and Akhlaq/Sabbu are both of some kind of miscommunication based on Muslim names. The action that led to the loss of Sahil’s life and saved Akhlaq’s is based on the ideology of hate and discrimination against Muslims as manifested from their names.

The fear of uttering Urdu names, greetings, or words in public is increasing among Muslims in north India. In response to the anonymous article with which I opened this piece, Rana Safvi, a Muslim writer tweeted that she also avoids saying salaam, Muslim greeting, in public.

Although Akhlaq had a sigh of relief because his non-Muslim-sounding name saved him, the stories of Zeeshan, Barkat, Sahil, and Faiyaz, clearly show how ideologies of hate and discrimination can be routed through personal names, labels over which we as bearers of the names have little control.

Discrimination based on names are just be a tip of the iceberg of a larger systemic process of exclusion and marginalization of Muslims in India. A democracy worthy of its name cannot allow names to be the ground of discrimination against its own citizens in whose very name it rules.

Related content

• Stereotyped names as a barrier to workplace entry
• What’s in a name?
• Behind a name
• Names on the move: Ghanaian names in the diaspora

The spread of the pandemic COVID-19 and the measures to tackle it, however, challenges monolingual ideologies and practices of governments because the degree of success in fighting the outbreak depends substantially on the dissemination of correct information in different languages. Many governments, who otherwise have aggressively implemented monolingual policies, have taken recourse to minority languages to spread awareness about the pandemic. The availability of knowledge in the languages of the people not only ensures that the message is not misunderstood due to a poor level of command of the official language but also creates trust, which increases the likelihood of acceptance.

Roots of monolingualism

The roots of the monolingual state ideology trace back to 19^th century European nationalism in which language, nation (as a cultural unit), and country (as a political unit) were considered coterminous. Until the arrivals of guest workers after World War II and more recent migrant and refugees from Asia and Africa, European countries such as Germany, Spain, France, and England were “good” examples of this model in which language, the people, and the country coincided. In order to give authenticity and credibility to such a conception of a nation-state, histories of languages were created to show that they had existed for centuries. An example of this is the use of the term “Old English” to refer to the language spoken in England before the Norman conquest, which is barely comprehensible to modern English speakers. The term “Old English” created a sense of history and continuity for English, which was used to legitimize the monolingual ideology. During the Indian national movement, literatures produced in other languages such as Braj Bhasha, were couched under the Hindi language in order to give it some historical legitimacy. This European monolingual state ideology gradually spread to become part of many other state policies.

In the USA, where till World War I multilingual activities including those in German, Spanish, and French were accepted, English emerged as a defining characteristic of being American. This was accompanied by hostility towards other languages and English became not only a dominant mode of communication between immigrants of different ethnic origins but also an insignia of patriotism and loyalty to America. This ideology of equating language with state loyalty became quite manifest in cases of discrimination against Muslims following 9/11. For example, a passenger on a Southwest Airline flight was kicked off because he uttered the Arabic expressions Insha Allah, God willing, on the plane.

A very grotesque expression of equating language with patriotism and loyalty surfaced in Delhi in 2016 when some members of the right-wing RSS approached artists who were writing an Urdu couplet on a wall as part of Delhi government’s #MyDilliStory campaign and ordered them to stop writing in Urdu and forced them write the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s name over it. They also asked them to go to Pakistan. The members of the RSS said they could tolerate anything but the Urdu script. To them Urdu, a language spoken in India by Muslims, is a sign of lack of patriotism.

Communicative Function of Language

In sociolinguistics literature, the function of language as a carrier of social meanings such as national identity, loyalty, and patriotism is referred to as indexical. The function of language to convey ideas, such as the one I am doing right now, is referred to as communicative function. With regard to COVID-19, it has become clear that the best way to fight its outbreak is to make people aware of how it spreads and how it can be stopped.

There are two major linguistic challenges in containing the spread of virus. The first is the dissemination of information about preventive measures to all people in their own languages, i.e. mother tongues. The second is countering misinformation about its spread and prevention.

The presence of multiple languages within a country could create a communication barrier with devastating consequences for the country as a whole. Many minority groups within a country may not have a good command of the official language and therefore may misunderstand the message in the official language. The hygiene and health information must therefore be made available in all major languages.

Multilingual health communication in Qatar

Qatar, with a population of only 2.6 million, is linguistically an extremely diverse country because Arabic-speaking Qatari citizens constitute only about 10% of the population. The remaining 90% come from many countries, including a large number from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The official language of Qatar is Arabic, but English is widely used. However, a large number of the expatriate population consists of workers who neither know Arabic nor English (Dubai has a similar linguistic profile).

The communication of health information therefore is quite a challenge. In addition to Arabic and English, Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health made the decision to create handouts and posters in Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, Tagalog, Tamil, Nepalese, Sinhalese, and Malayalam. These handouts are available on the website and on social media platforms such as Twitter.

Related to the language barrier is the issue of literacy. Many workers from South Asia are either illiterate or semi-literate and therefore an alternative media that they can understand was needed. In addition to the written posters, the Ministry also made the message available in a video format in the above-mentioned languages of the expatriates. Although a study is needed to assess how effective these measures were, there is hardly any doubt that the Government made serious efforts to use the multilingual resources to reach out to different language groups living in Qatar.

The availability of information in the languages of the people has another positive aspect. It increases the chances of acceptance of the message. Dr Yu Lha has shown that health information available in Chinese was not helpful, especially to elderly people in her village located in Tibetan regions of western Sichuan province. The community effort to translate the message in the local languages helped significantly in conveying the precautionary measures needed to arrest the spread of the virus.

Countering misinformation

The second challenge in fighting the pandemic is countering misinformation circulating, inter alia, on the social media platforms. In India, this has been a huge challenge as in addition to WhatsApp messages the sources of misinformation are sometimes the elected members of the parliament. In fact, the Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Ashwini Kumar Choubey told reporters that staying in the sun for 10-15 minutes every day could be helpful. Another example of misinformation in India with severe economic consequence is that the virus spreads from the poultry. This led to a huge plunge in the retail price of chickens which led to cases of suicide of farmers. Both the misinformation and fake news about the virus can only be dealt with effectively by deploying all linguistic resources to reach out to the people.

Whether it is the challenge of disseminating correct information or dealing with the challenges of misinformation or fake news about COVID-19, multilingualism must be used as a resource to reach out to the people in languages they understand and trust. Along with other tools such as medical, clearly language is an important and effective one in our fight against the pandemic.

Language and communication challenges of COVID-19

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