Whatever happened in Lahore’s Ichrra the other day clearly shows our progressive regression, to say the least. According to media reports, a mob had gathered outside a shop in one of Lahore’s busiest bazaars after someone alleged that a woman’s shirt had Quranic verses printed on it.
Alarmingly, some people insisted on a ‘blasphemy’ charge. The police official, ASP Syeda Shehr Bano Naqvi, deserves a lot of praise for successfully rescuing that aghast girl, retrieving her from the clutches of the mobsters before shifting her to a police station amid heightened security measures.
Some Senators too deserve commendation for calling for a strict action against those leveling “false allegations” of blasphemy.
Rubina Khalid of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), in particular, has come down heavily on those who are calling for her head by saying, among other things, “the incident that took place is very dangerous. […]This determines where our society is heading, the level of intolerance and ignorance that we cannot differentiate between Quranic words and ordinary Arabic words.”
Having said that, it is my view that the Ichrra incident in Pakistan and how the Arabic language is viewed in certain Western societies perhaps lead to all sorts of paradoxes.
Consider: no doubt Arabic is one of the dominant languages of the world today. Unfortunately, however, this language is facing the prospect of extreme censure or denigration in the West where criminalization of this highly important Semitic language seems to have already begun as a new dimension of Islamophobia, which is likely to turn into a new stereotype in Western societies anytime soon.
This absolutely implausible argument behind this sinister design is that since Arabic is essentially linked to Muslims as the language of faith and Muslims, according to them, are behind violent acts of terrorism and extremism in Western societies.
Hence the need for criminalization of a language, which is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, used daily by more than 400 million people across the world. All those who have been advancing this arguments seem to have lost their marbles, to say the least.
Syeda Naureen Hammad Ali (Lahore)
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024