6 ms·
So I skimmed the article once, then read it again. I see the writer is here. I just want to say I understand your sentiment, but your title and content are fi
by 616c 12y ago
So I skimmed the article once, then read it again.
I see the writer is here. I just want to say I understand your sentiment, but your title and content are filled with some annoying misinformation and discrepancies.
First of all, Nastaliq is not "the Urdu script". If you even skimmed Wikipedia, you would notice that the script does come oringinally from Arabic (where it is used, but more to your point, sadly not as much in print media, at least from my experience in the GCC) and was later well loved by the Persians, and later different portions of the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, and beyond). To call it Urdu script, just because it is popular, and to insinuate that it Naksh is the default script of Arabic (it is not the preferred one, by the way) is a huge stretch.
Another point: Naksh was invented by a Persian, but who grew up his whole life in Arab Baghdad and was an Abbasid court vizier in modern-day Iraq. He did not spend time in Iran (then Fars, as it is known today in Arabic), until he was a tax collector there after growing up in Iraq, and only for a period. He might have been ethnically Persian, but to call Naksh script Persian because of the guys family background is far-fetched, especially if you know how loose the cultural boundaries between Abbasid Iran-Iraq were (they were part of the empire and people, goods, and ideas freely flowed between them). It is a derivative of Kufic script, and has strong ties to the religious intellectual history of Iraq (Basra and Kufa were the seat of a massive amount of religious scholarship and still prominent beliefs in Islam; scripts and art were an awesome by-product).
Sorry for the rant, but I know this is probably not your field. As I guy who spent a lot of time studying Arabic and Arab and/or Islamichistory, I get very annoyed at the misinformation peddled by people about Arabic history and culture. I do not mean to be so blunt, but I hear people rattle off misinformation like this often, and it irritates me.
- alieteraz 12y agoYou are correct about the history. Unfortunately the Abbasid empire came to an end in 1258 AD and Urdu wasn't even around then. I take your point that naskh has been wide-spread. And it is true that it is even in the Indian sub-continent. Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based language. Punjabi, which my parents spoke, on the other hand, prefers nastaliq, and regionally the two places are adjacet. That doesn't mean that those people didn't historically play around with scripts. They did. However, my piece is entirely about what is going on today. Sure you can find Ottoman era signs in Egypt and the Levant that display Arabic in nastasliq (my readers sent me plenty such pictures), but by and large Arabic today is written in naskh and almost never in nastaliq. Take a look at some of the fonts that the Omani government is playing around with. They are not nastaliq. This is the political aspect I briefly touched upon in the article. I hope you will get a chance to look into the Arabization aspects of the political debates raging in that part of the world. I make brief mention of it by bringing up the fight over "Khuda Hafiz" or "Allah Hafiz." Meanwhile, the past two or three generations of Urdu readers and writers grew up associating nastaliq and Urdu almost exclusively with each other (thus the jarring effect associated with having to read Urdu in something else). I have plenty of emails testifying to this from people from my parents generation and some people of mine. In short, no one is really talking about ancient Arab history here, as fascinating as that would be.
- zohaibr 12y agoAs a person who grew up reading Urdu in Pakistan- I can attest to the fact that I associate nastaliq with Urdu exclusively. Regardless of the history - his post is about what's currently happening with the Urdu script. If given the opportunity to read Urdu in nastaliq, I would probably read Urdu more often. I have tried reading BBC Urdu various times, and have given up due to the naskh script.
- 616c 12y agoI can see the value in said script, but I have to live a more pratical lifestyle: as an IT guy, if I could stop reading English, Arabic, or Persian every time it is in an ugly font, I would. And if you want to see ugly fonts, try Arabic news sites. BBC, Nastaliq or Naksh, have nothing on Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiyya.
- sampo 12y agoAccording to Wikipedia, the difference between Nastaʿlīq and Naskh is much more than just a different font. And also, according to this discussion, I have also learned that Nastaʿlīq is deeply connected to feelings of origin and pride in (at least some) Urdu speakers, and these are delicate matters. So why would you even make such an obnoxious, and totally incorrect, reduction of this matter to differences in mere font choices?
- 616c 12y agoI understand you might find my comments on history annoying, but I was pointing out a few things because the average reader is not familiar with such things, namely these scripts are not specific to Urdu despite Urdu reading-writing communities appreciating it and there is some undertone that Arabic scripts of lesser beauty are being forced upon Urdu readers and writers. All of them come from Arabic (not just the letters, the scripts) as well, and as an Arabic speaker I find that attitude strange. I could be reading too much into it. And thanks for your notes re politicization of Arabic and script. I happen to live in that part of the world, hence I know. Off-topic: saw your bio blurb and saw what you write about. Sounds cool. I will definitely try to read your stuff when I have some down time.
- sfjailbird 12y agoI find it interesting that many variations of Kufic script, which as far as I know is the 'original' Arabic script, seem to be almost ideally suited for print/digital reproduction. With the square normalized forms it almost looks like QR codes: https://www.google.com/search?q=kufic+script&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=kufic+script&tbm=isch This is in contrast to modern Arabic writing which seems to be geared to handwriting, with its flowing and connected shapes, kind of like old Latin cursive scripts.
- 616c 12y agoHardly optimal, to be honest. The QR code nature is because all diacritics are not used at all, period. Those dots actually signify, you guessed it, different letters (ironically, they are grouped into Arabic by articulation: b, t, and th are letters in Arabic, same shape and different dots; there order in the alphabet are grouped because you make them with the same part of your mouth). Problem with that is, grokking text is difficult without a lot of practice. I am not a native Arabic speaker, and reading that stuff, even if I can read novels, the Quran, and weird pre-Islamic poetry (vocab is very different) would take me days to decipher if written in that script. What is more funny is that there are not even short vowels in Kufic script. So after I learn to read and know contextually which letters are which, I would only know the consonants. And the vowels in Arabic are amazingly important (same consonant, different vowels = same word root, but meaning can change from book to dest to library to writer, for example), so Kufic is an easy way to bring an Arabic student to suicide.
- jdmitch 12y agojust a minor correction - the script is naskh from the triliteral root n-s-kh (نسج - copy) not naksh from the root n-k-sh(نقش - engrave)