RAMADAN OR RAMZAN? by SABAH HASAN I left Pakistan for the first time in 1982 – half a decade after Zia’s misrule had started - when I was in my early twenties, and landed in Egypt. It was there that I first heard ‘Ramadan’ instead of ‘Ramzan’ that I had been used to. So what is it actually – Ramzan, Ramadan, the even stricter Ramadhaan or simply ‘Rozyan da maheena’ (The month of fasting) as my illiterate and non-Arabophone maid-servant calls it? The answer is “all of the above”. Islam is a universal deen (way of life) for all humanity, not just for Arabs or those who (think they) know Arabic. With Allah it is the spirit and not the semantics that count. Arabic was just one of the languages He chose to address the mankind in. By the way, neither English nor Urdu existed when His last message came. As many of you will know, there are seven ways to recite the Qura’an – all of them correct. This indicates that slight variations in pronunciation of the name of the month of fasting are all correct in Arabic, except, of course, Ramzan, which is the way we pronounce it in Urdu. But again, reference is to the same sacred 29 or 30 days, not to something entirely different. Would the Allah who accepted the ‘seen’ of Bilal (ra) as ‘sheen’ admonish us for saying Ramzan or ‘Rozyan da maheena’? And guess what, the Egyptian greeting at the beginning of Ramadan is NOT “Ramadan Kareem”. It is “Kullu Sana wa anta Tayyab”, which loosely translates to Happy New Year, though everyone knows that it is not the beginning of any year. Their explanation is that Allah’s gift of spiritual cleansing in this month is so important that it makes this the most significant turning point in the year. In my humble opinion, an attitude much better than of some in our land who insist on this greeting on first of Muharram, a day of mourning for most Muslims, it being the death anniversary of Hazrat Umar and commencement of azadari of Martyrs of Karbala. This, a non-issue gifted by usurper Zia, is relatively seasonal. There are two others that are more or less perpetual. Is it ‘Allah Hafiz’ or ‘Khuda Hafiz’? Well, as far as I am concerned, the Punjabi ‘Rab Raakha’ is equally good. Khuda Hafiz is the Persian way of bidding adieu that had been used in Urdu for centuries until, that is, Zia “reintroduced” Islam to us. Though of Arabic origin, ‘hafiz’ in this sense is used in the Persian greeting. No Arabic speaking persons say “Allah Hafiz”. Interestingly, the greeting of choice among them is the very secular “Ma’assalaama” (Go in peace). So, again, “Allah Hafiz” has nothing to do with Islam. It just satisfies our mistaken perception that Arabic somehow makes us better Muslims. Another gift of that era is the insistence of use of the respectful “aap” instead of the informal “tu” for Divinity. Here again, perhaps the reformers forgot that the “tu” was a restrictive assurance of His Absolute Oneness, and, therefore, a sign of ultimate respect rather than the opposite. On a secular note, as more expatriates return from the Middle East, one sees more and more of the distasteful and illegal number plates on cars that tell us that these are from “al-Bakistan” – as if we would otherwise be in doubt as to whether this obviously Pakistan-assembled Mehran was local or foreign. For some reason, “al-Bunjab” is wrongly spelt as “Punjab” on these number plates. With these random thoughts on these non-issues, I say Khuda Hafiz and Ramzan Mubarak to all of you, with a request to ponder on this couplet: Haqeeqat riwayaat mein kho gayi Ye Ummat khurafaat mein kho gayi
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 06:58:05 +0000
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