The trouble of introducing Jawi script or khat calligraphy in faculties has to turn out to be a warm difficulty, as it is going through vehement opposition through the non-Malay-Muslims, mainly the ethnic Chinese. While I, no matter being a Chinese Christian, help teach Jawi script for each person, it ought to be carefully applied and promoted by taking the sensitivity of the non-Malay-Muslims into account.
I discover this somewhat similar to the problems of signing and ratifying the International. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and Rome Statute, in which it faced public backlash through the Malay-Muslim community in worry of dropping their rights and privileges, and also concerns over the fame of Islam because of the reliable religion as well as the reputation of the Malay rulers.
All these issues show that the government must have an effective way to talk and bring to the public to relieve public worry out of their lack of information. Therefore, for Jawi to benefit from public acceptance across racial/ethnic and nonsecular lines in Malaysia, the government must dispel the non-Malay-Muslim public’s lack of expertise approximately Jawi, as lots of them are mistaking it Arabic language and see it as an “Islamic device”. Their false impression ought to be corrected so that they remember the fact that Jawi is merely the variation of Arabic script used to jot down the Malay language [while there are other variants of Arabic script being used to write other languages such as Persian, Urdu (national language of Pakistan), Pashto (a co-official language of Afghanistan), Hausa (used in Ghana, Niger, and Nigeria) and so on].
Interestingly, Arabic script is even used to write Chinese by using the Hui humans in China – such script is referred to as Xiao’erjing. Jawi script has to, in no way ever be pressured with the Arabic language. While I hope for all Malaysian college students to analyze Jawi, I might make Arabic a compulsory language for non-Muslims. I would, in reality, not guide the concept of creating Arabic as a co-legitimate language or “second legitimate language” as mooted via PAS Muslimat vice-leader Salamiah Mohd Nor, as even Islamic states including Brunei, Pakistan, and the Taliban in Afghanistan do now not make Arabic a reliable language.
The non-Malay-Muslim Jawi-phobia
I might say that the concern of the non-Malay-Muslims closer to Jawi is a result of mistrust and lack of knowledge among races/ethnicities and non secular communities, out of Barisan Nasional’s (BN) many years of rule, especially after the May 13 incident, which had a long-lasting effect. The non-Malay-Muslims are commonly ignorant about Jawi writing, mistaking it as Arabic language or maybe Javanese language, at the same time as it is genuinely “Arabic script for writing Malay language.” While the Malay language was written in Jawi script up to the Nineteen Sixties for a regular reason, the concept of writing Malay in Latin script (referred to as “Rumi” in Malay) emerged because of the arrival of Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial powers.
It becomes in 1966 that the then-training minister Khir Johari abolished the Jawi script from obligatory teaching in schools, which led to a decline of its usage, and no longer all literate Malay-Muslims are capable of reading and write Jawi considering that then. Currently, the usage of the Jawi script is especially for “Islamic functions” along within mosques and Islamic colleges, though there are some non-Malay-Muslim Jawi enthusiasts as nicely.
This explains the lack of awareness that Jawi is the Arabic language, corresponding to questioning that learning Latin script would suggest mastering the Latin language. Such a move can be, to a certain volume, similar to using Latin script via the Turkish language considering end-1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s language reform (wherein the cutting-edge Turkish changed Ottoman Turkish, which changed into written in Arabic script and loaded with Arabic and Persian loanwords, and on the identical time, many loanwords were discarded by way of the contemporary language via the revival of Turkish local vocabularies), in addition to the Bosnian language having its Arabic script (called “Arebica”) replaced with Latin and Cyrillic script (the script used to write Russian, Serbian and so forth) in the 19th century.
