We like our mother tongues

 We like our mother tongues. Of course, they are the sweetest languages we speak on this earth. I like Punjabi, my mother tongue; I like Urdu, my national language, I like English, my academic language, I like Persian, a language of a glorious Muslim Heritage, but above all, I confess, above all, even more than my mother tongue, I like Arabic.

Today, I can realize why do I like Arabic, but back in my early twenties, I didn’t know perhaps. Even then I liked it. The memories of my efforts to learn Arabic are very dear to me.

Of course, I love Allah since my childhood, I love Muhammad s.a.w. from my boyhood, and I love Quran from my adolescence.

It was in Summer 1989 when I started taking interest in English literature. Keats was no doubt my first inspiration. I read his Ode to Nightingale and felt greatly moved. I could feel his pain in the first three or four stanzas very clearly. I had felt such things in Urdu poetry as well. Now, I started thinking about the natural function that made a poet’s very emotional conditions palpable in words.

I reached to the conclusion that the feelings of a poet or writer are captivated or imprinted in the arrangement of the words he has written some poetry or prose in. As long as the arrangement of words in a specific text is not disturbed or disarranged the heart and mind of the writer or poet can be touched and felt in his writing. We can communicate to his mind and heart whether he is dead two hundred or hundreds of years ago.

It was indeed a great discovery for me. I enjoyed the poets who didn’t change or alter their writings once written. When I read a piece of writing I could feel whether it was written under a spell or in a single sitting or written in many sittings thinking and altering again and again.

In winter of the same year, one night I was feeling tired of reading. I had put aside my books of poetry I had borrowed from libraries and was just lying and thinking about nothing. Yet I was thinking on a life changing topic. I thought if I read a translation of Quran I communicated to the mind of a translator, and if I read the Arabic text I might communicate to the mind and heart of the Rasool of Allah, or to direct Allah Taala. I got moved. The thought was so simple and so clear.

‘If I want to communicate to the holy spirit of my prophet, if I want to get in contact with the mind and heart of my prophet, or if I want to feel the heavenly spirit of Jibrael, or if I want to come closer to Allah Taala, I must have to learn Arabic and feel the Quran directly’, I concluded in the end.

And that was the start of my love for Arabic. In the next few days, I was sitting in a local Masjid with my Arabic primer and taking my first lessons from an Imam Sahib rahimahullahu Taala. I used to get up before the Azan of Fajr and prepare myself to go to the Masjid and offer my Fajr there. After Fajr, the Imam Sahib rahimahullahu Taala used to teach Arabic to the amateurs like me. We were just three in those days.

I wish I could tell my love for learning Arabic in a series of posts, and my philosophy of reading Quran in its original language.

May Allah Taala give all Muslims the love of learning Arabic and reading Quran in its original language. Amen.

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