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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Piller, Ingrid. 2010. Transliterated brand names
Piller, Ingrid. 2013. Linguistic theory in Dubai

In Bahrain, I was beaten. For example, they asked for tea. I gave tea leaves. I did not make the tea. She put her hand on my neck and moved me to tell, ‘Boil the tea leaves. Make tea’. They told me things in Arabic, I did not know Arabic. There was no other Bangladeshi to help me out. That’s how I worked. Sometimes, the children said me something, but I didn’t understand. Then the children knocked me. But you can never have a gloomy face. (Afia, pseudonym, a Bangladeshi migrant domestic worker)

Pakhi Begum left Bangladesh for Dubai to work as a maid … (Source: Say NO – UNiTE)

This quote is taken from an interview with a female Bangladeshi migrant worker who was a participant in a research project we undertook which aimed to explore perceptions of the value of English for migrant workers from Bangladesh to the Middle East. The quote aptly illustrates Afia’s vulnerability as a domestic worker. Partly her vulnerability is a result of limited Arabic and English language proficiency and miscommunication.

This raises the question what the role of language skills in migrant exploitation is. Could Afia have avoided being beaten if she knew more Arabic or English? Or, to put it more generally, to what extent do communication barriers contribute to the exploitation of migrant domestic workers such as Afia?

We explore such questions in an article recently published in Multilingua, where we suggest that structural entanglements and global inequalities put into question commonplace assumptions linking language skills to economic success for Bangladeshi migrant workers.

Recent reports on the devastating experiences of Bangladeshi female migrant workers in the Middle East (which have gone largely unreported in English-language media) throw into sharp relief the deep structural issues – far beyond the linguistic – affecting the lives of female Bangladeshi migrant workers to the Middle East.

Since 1991 Bangladesh has sent more than 700,000 women abroad to work, primarily as domestic workers to the Middle East (BBC 2018). Many of these have returned reporting that they have faced exploitation and abuse in the workplace. The complaints that have been made – which echo accounts documented in our research – include receiving no salary (or a lower salary than promised), unbearable workloads, physical and verbal abuse, and sexual assault.

Reports in the Bangladeshi media relay the tribulations of Fatema, for example, who went to Lebanon to improve her family’s condition, but came back after only three months physically disabled, with a significantly worsened economic and social status (BBC 2018; Prothom Alo 2018). Her employer under-fed and tortured her, and when she, not able to bear it anymore, informed her employer that she wanted to go back to Bangladesh, the employer pushed her out of a third-floor window. Like Fatema, many of the women returning from the Middle East have physical injuries and/or psychological trauma. Additionally, they also face significant social stigma, including the refusal of their families to accept them back.

Despite these reports, there have been few attempts from Middle Eastern countries to take actions against the employers who were reportedly involved with such crimes. A country with less clout than other migrant-sending countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines or Sri Lanka, attempts by Bangladesh to lobby for work environments where Bangladeshi female migrant workers can work in safety and dignity have had little effect (BBC 2018).

The restricted bargaining power of Bangladesh has been increasingly observable since 2000, when an Indonesian domestic worker who had been tortured by her employer was executed for stabbing and killing her employer in Saudi Arabia. Protests from Indonesia and human rights groups ensued, and stories of the torture and exploitation of female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia attracted global attention. As a result, Nepal, the Philippines and Sri Lanka joined Indonesia to create pressure on Saudi Arabia to improve its treatment of female domestic workers by creating travel bans to stop sending women from their countries. Facing an acute shortage of female domestic workers, Saudi Arabia proposed that Bangladesh step in to fill the gap. Although there had previously been a ban on female migration as a measure of protection, Bangladesh eventually caved in when Saudi Arabia made the continued hiring of Bangladeshi male workers contingent on the availability of a female workforce, too (Prothom Alo 2018). Saudi Arabia further insisted that, even though female domestic workers from other countries are paid 1,500 riyals per month, the pay of Bangladeshi workers would be capped at 800 riyals (Prothom Alo 2018).

Today, Bangladeshi media regularly feature harrowing stories of exploitation faced by Bangladeshi female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. Despite these gloomy reports we do, of course, not wish to suggest that all migrant workers face abuse and exploitation. In fact, some participants in our research were able to improve their family’s economic and social status considerably by working abroad.

All of them shared stories of hardship, and limited Arabic and English language skills were a significant aspect of the challenges they faced. This raises the question whether pre-departure language skills training would improve the lot of Bangladeshi migrant workers.

There can be no doubt that English and Arabic language skills might help migrant workers to better navigate life in the Middle East. However, we should be wary of suggesting that language learning alone is sufficient to overcome the difficulties in which many migrant workers find themselves. The stories of suffering and exploitation from returnee female domestic workers are clear indicators that structural global inequalities must be considered when exploring the extent to which migration and language skills can be economically, personally and socially transformative to individuals like Afia and to countries like Bangladesh.

References

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2018). ফেরার পর পরিবারেও ঠাঁই নেই: সৌদি থেকে নির্যাতনের শিকার হয়ে ফিরে আসা বাংলাদেশী নারী [Translation: No place in the family upon return: Bangladeshi women returning from Saudi being victim of torture] (4 June 2018).

Erling, Elizabeth J., Chowdhury, Qumrul Hasan, Solly, Mike and Seargeant, Philip (2018). “Successful” migration, (English) language skills and global inequality: The case of Bangladeshi migrants to the Middle East. Multilingua. doi:https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0021.

Erling, Elizabeth J., Seargeant, Philip, Solly, Mike, Chowdhury, Qumrul H. and Rahman, Sayeedur (2015) English for economic development: A case study of migrant workers from Bangladesh. ELTRP Report, British Council.

Prothom Alo (2018). প্রবাসী নারী শ্রমিকের গল্পটা কেউ শুনবেন? [Translation: Will you listen to the story of the woman migrant worker?] (4 June 2018).

Related content

• Urban sociolinguistics in Dubai
• Money makes the world go round
• Emergency service provision in linguistically diverse societies
• Frightful language tests
• Illegitimate English

Bangladeshi manager speaking English and subtitled in British educational video “How fair is fashion?”

The other day I watched a show about global textile production. How fair is fashion? by British educational media producer Pumpkin TV is an excellent resource explaining the circuits of cheap clothing for consumers in the global North, huge profits for multinational fashion and retail corporations, and the exploitation of textile workers in the global South. The film was shot in Bangladesh and features stories such as those of an 18-year-old woman, who has been working in a textile factory in Dhaka for seven years. Working 100 hours a week, she earns the equivalent of between 40 and 50 USD per month. Together with her husband she lives in a small room in a slum where they share toilet and water facilities with around 10 other families. The mud track leading to the dwelling doubles as an open sewer.

She is one of thousands of workers working for a factory in the Rupashi Group, which has contracts which many well-known clothing brands. On the day the film crew was visiting they were making shirts for Forever 21.

All the workers interviewed for the film spoke Bangla while managers, policy makers and a high-level union official spoke English. The language choices in the film are thus reflective of a well-known divide in Bangladesh: that access to English and proficiency in English is a marker of privilege.

A new wave of thinking about English and development has recently started to argue that English is vital to development and that to improve the lot of people like the 18-year-old garment worker English would be indispensable to her. English in Action, a UK-funded English language teaching program for development in Bangladesh, is an example:

The Programme’s goal is to contribute to the economic growth of the country by providing communicative English language as a tool for better access to the world economy. The purpose of EIA is to significantly increase the number of people who are able to communicate in English, to levels that enable them to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities. (English in Action)

Sounds good. However, watching How fair is fashion? revealed one problem with this theory. The problem was that the show treated all Bangladeshi speakers – irrespective of whether they were Bangla-speaking workers or English-speaking elites – as incomprehensible to the British viewer. Both Bangla-speaking and English-speaking Bangladeshis were presented as requiring mediation to become intelligible: Bangla was translated and English was subtitled. The image provides an example: The general manager of Rupashi group says “We are number three now. Our target is to become number two, and then one.” in English at the same time that the subtitles appear in English.

I have blogged about the politics of subtitling English speakers to other English speakers before. As I pointed out there, subtitling some varieties of English but not others to an English-speaking audience serves to mark the subtitled varieties as illegitimate.

The subtitling of educated Bangladesh English constitutes a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the assumption that being able to communicate in English has anything much to do with development. To assume that being able to communicate in English will enable Bangladeshis – or anyone else in the global South – “to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities” fails to recognize that language is never just about communication.

Linguistic exchange is always also an economic exchange, as Bourdieu explains:

[U]tterances are not only […] signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 66)

Subtitled speech is a sign of lack of wealth and authority. Only Bangladeshis who speak English can be rendered illegitimate in this way as the translation of Bangla is simply a marker of linguistic difference rather than a linguistic hierarchy.

The elite Bangladeshis featured in the film are competent speakers of English (you can listen to the excerpt with the General Manager of Rupashi Group and judge for yourself). However, linguistic competence does not necessarily translate into legitimate competence:

The competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to, likely to be recognized as acceptable in all the situations in which there is occasion to speak. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 55)

If the English of competent elite Bangladeshi speakers of English is not acceptable on the global stage (however valuable it may be in the local linguistic market), what likelihood is there that English teaching will turn ordinary impoverished Bangladeshis into global players? Hamid’s (2010) analysis of the gap between policy discourses about the promise of English and the reality of the implementation of English language teaching in Bangladesh paints a gloomy picture of high expectations, inadequate resource investment, and poor outcomes. Essentially, he finds that the current policy of “English for everyone” doesn’t produce much competence in English because it is severely under-resourced, and, where donor-funded, unsustainable and poorly integrated with the local environment.

If I were a cynic, I’d argue that the whole point of universal English language teaching is not actually the acquisition of linguistic competence but the recognition of the legitimate language; not to learn how to speak English but to learn how to recognize legitimate – “metropolitan” or “global” – English; to learn one’s place in the linguistic hierarchy and thus to accept one’s inferior position as a natural and incontestable fact. I am not a cynic and I follow Bourdieu in seeing the disparity between knowledge of the legitimate language (always a limited resource) and recognition of the legitimate language (always much more widespread) as a function of the linguistic market.

While proponents of universal English language teaching for development may not intend to collude in linguistic domination, they fail to achieve any of their well-intentioned aims because they ignore the fact that language is not only about communication but also about legitimacy – an error Bourdieu (1991, p. 53) calls “the naïvety par excellence of the scholarly relativism which forgets that the naïve gaze is not relativist.”

While I’m pessimistic about English for development, How fair is fashion? ends on an optimistic note by featuring a cooperative in rural Bangladesh producing for People Tree, a fair trade fashion label. The garment worker interviewed there earns about the same as her Dhaka-based counterpart. However, in contrast to the factory workers in Dhaka, she has fixed hours and works from 5-9; she has a proper contract and the cooperative also provides childcare and schooling for her children; above all, more autonomous and diverse, there is dignity in her work.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hamid, M. Obaidul (2010). Globalisation, English for everyone and English teacher capacity: language policy discourses and realities in Bangladesh Current Issues in Language Planning, 11 (4), 289-310 DOI: 10.1080/14664208.2011.532621

Reza’s family, too, got caught up in the turmoil. When he was four, Reza witnessed his uncle being killed for being a Bihari – in the eyes of many Bangladeshis, an exponent of Pakistani domination. However, unlike other Biharis, who have come to be known as “stranded Pakistanis,” Reza’s family managed to flee to Pakistan in 1971.

In Bangladesh, Urdu-speakers such as the Biharis were living symbols of Pakistani domination. In Pakistan, their Bihari-accented Urdu marked them as unwelcome refugees from the East. One of Reza’s earliest memories is of his family being outsiders because they were Urdu speakers in East-Pakistan. However, his outsider status did not change after their move to West-Pakistan.When he started school in Karachi, his peers would often make fun of him and his Bihari accent. To be called a “Bihari” became a daily insult. To this day, Reza remembers running home crying after being teased as “Bihari.” This linguistic bullying had a devastating effect on Reza. He began to avoid socializing and internalized the belief that he and his family were inferior while the speakers of “good” or “unaccented” Urdu were superior. As a Bihari it seemed there was no place to be – unwelcome and abused both in the East and the West.

Soon, Reza transformed himself into a speaker of “unaccented” Urdu, who spoke the same as everyone else in Karachi. As a matter of fact, this dominant accent of Urdu is a mix of the accents of Punjabi, Pashto, Balochi and Sindhi. It was a different story with Reza’s parents. They never quite managed to acquire this new accent, which was far removed from the Urdu spoken in India, where they had grown up. In order to hide his Bihari identity, Reza avoided introducing his parents to others and started to keep a distance from his family.

Reza soon learnt that an even more effective way to gain respect was to transform himself not only into a Karachi-accented speaker of Urdu but an English speaker. He went to an English-medium school and Reza idolized his teachers, who seemed to speak English fluently. Reza, like everyone else, thought those English speakers were educated, enlightened and modern. They were real human beings, and those who could not speak English somehow seemed less than human. Eventually, Reza completed a Bachelor’s degree in English followed by a Master’s degree in English Literature and English Linguistics. By now he had thoroughly escaped his Bihari identity and was “making it” in the world. He pretended to be so in love with English that he spoke it all the time, and he finally got the respect that he had been denied in his childhood.

Even so, and despite all his qualifications, achievements and upward social mobility, he is haunted by the fear that a trace of that Bihari accent might suddenly surface in his speech and expose him as a fraud. He never tells anyone that he was born in East-Pakistan and he makes every effort to keep his children away from the Bihari community. He has deliberately left many good people behind only because of the fact that his association with them would expose him as a Bihari. Above all, he cannot afford to lose any more family members by becoming a member of minority speakers in Pakistan. Despite the massive bloodshed stemming initially from the partition of India and later the creation of Bangladesh, the state of Pakistan still promotes monolingualism in multilingual Pakistan.

Reza’s linguistic trajectory is deeply enmeshed with the upheavals of the 20^th century. A question that bothers him most often is this: Can people do nothing more than strive to escape the prison of their language or is there a way to tear down the prison walls?