If your goal here is really to "reject[] the cultural Arabization of South Asia", have you considered writing your Urdu in... devanagari? Using nastaliq is already a pro-arabization move.
Apparently Nastaʿlīq was (a) developed in Iran (which is not an Arab country), and although it was developed as a combination of Nasḫ (Naskh) and Taʿlīq scripts, (b) it was never really used in the Arab lands, but in the Persian, Turkic, and South Asian spheres of influence.
So if the people in Pakistan feel that Nastaʿlīq is "their own" writing system and Naskh symbolizes Arab imperialism, in my opinion they have all the rights to feel that way.
Really, even if the script evolved from Arabic script, that was 700 years ago, and what matters in this matter is how the people feel about their letters today.
> what matters in this matter is how the people feel about their letters today
Sure. It's a political decision. alieteraz even states that the reason he feels strongly about font choice is politics, and observes that current Pakistanis (overall) want to Arabize more than they already have. But for some reason, the article's arguments amount to "naskh is ugly", which is completely irrelevant to the dispute. (There's also a weird idea that nastaliq presents such insurmountable technical challenges that even if Pakistanis strongly preferred it, for example if naskh was viewed as an affront to Pakistani culture, there would still be no reliable way to type in it. And also that various organizations, from Pakistani governmental departments to Microsoft, have already implemented nastaliq fonts.)
This reminds me quite strongly of Megan McArdle's observation that when an election is actually about gentrification, the attack ads focus on ineffable concepts like "respect", because it's not felt to be workable to say "we want the whites to stop moving in, and in fact we also want the ones who are already here to get out". If you want to fight for Pakistani separation from the Arab cultural sphere, say so, and point out the problems with Arab cultural affiliation. If alieteraz is a true weirdo and Pakistan's choice of font matters more to him than its cultural orientation, he still needs to make the argument for separating from the Arab world, because, as he points out himself, what's actually happening is that the people of Pakistan want to Arabize further.
The "people of Pakistan" are not a monolith. So some of them want Arabization and some do not and some want Westernization and so forth. As for the ugliness of naskh, its not that naskh is ugly, its that the naskh based mutant on digital devices is ugly. Also angular Urdu, generally speaking, is dissonant and hard to read for Urdu speakers. Here is an email I got since last night:
Hey Ali,
I loved your essay on The Death of Urdu Script. Nastaliq was the default script when reading Urdu books in schools. Therefore, I am so used to reading Urdu in Nastaliq that I cannot read properly in Naskh. And because I am a tech entreprenuer who works online, I am forced to read Urdu in Naskh. Therefore, over years I have lost interest in the Urdu language.
If Nastaliq is revived and becomes a common script online, I will be sure to read Urdu more.
Psychologists in the Dark Time did experiments that showed people couldn't read ALL CAPITAL LETTERS as easily as they could read lowercase. From that, in a wild leap of imagination, they concluded that lowercase letters were easier to read than capitals.
Unsurprisingly, that was garbage. Later psychologists easily documented that the reason test subjects read lowercase text faster was because they were used to it -- the advantage of lowercase quickly erodes as the subjects gain practice reading capitalized text.
What I'm saying is, this problem:
> I am so used to reading Urdu in Nastaliq that I cannot read properly in Naskh
is imaginary, not real.
> The "people of Pakistan" are not a monolith. So some of them want Arabization and some do not and some want Westernization and so forth.
Note how I summarized you as saying "current Pakistanis (overall) want to Arabize". Who's winning? If you're angry about being on the losing side, whining about ugly fonts is misplaced. Whine about the thing you're actually upset about.
>>Who's winning? If you're angry about being on the losing side, whining about ugly fonts is misplaced. Whine about the thing you're actually upset about.
Now you're just being mean. He's advocating (not whining) for a positive step forward. A step that has some political overtones, but also some cultural and artistic merit.
As I read it, he's not advocating for a step forward, he's advocating against taking a step backward. He wants things to stay as they are instead of shifting toward greater Arabic idenitification.
However, he's chosen to make his battle over an issue of no significance whatsoever. Because it's so insignificant, it's a proxy that reflects the issue he actually cares about, the cultural orientation of Pakistan. But the causality here is all in the other direction. Preventing people from taking umbrellas with them when they leave the house won't stop it from raining, even though people taking umbrellas with them when they leave the house reflects that it's likely to rain later. This is both dishonest and fundamentally misguided. I don't appreciate the dishonesty, so I'm taking a snappy tone. But I'm also offering what I see as good advice -- that if he actually cares about the culture issue, he shouldn't go taking dramatic stands on fatuous proxies. He should make arguments that address the culture issue. Political battles happen over innocent proxies all the time, but the proxy battle is never won on its own terms; it's won or lost based on how the issue it was a proxy for ended up.
So:
1. If alieteraz cares about the culture issue, fighting over a font won't win the battle or lose the battle. It's wasted energy, and it will anger people looking for sincerity in their position pieces. (Personally, I have no intimate connection to Pakistan, broadly but weakly believe that it would be a bad idea for it to shift towards the Arab world, and place great value on sincerity and honesty over BS.)
2. If alieteraz really, truly cares about the font, identifying font choice with Arabization is the worst thing he could possibly do, as it will likely tie the outcome to whether Pakistan decides to make the cultural shift.
Therefore, 3. In no case is this essay a good idea.
Furthermore, I don't get at all what he's trying to say about the technical difficulties of implementing a nastaliq font. He seems to contradict himself in multiple ways within the body of the essay. I don't like that either.
Yes, I know, but Urdu written in devanagari isn't called "Urdu", it's called "Hindi". The only thing reifying "Urdu" at all is the choice to make a cultural affiliation with the Arab world.
Especially around Lucknow, there are certainly vocabulary differences, and some very minor grammatical ones (matching numbers in verbal phrases, some nouns changing gender, but overall yes, I see your point). I would be interested in your opinion of what Kamleshwar's novel Kitne Pakistan was written in or Munshi Premchand's early work published in Devanagari?
> I would be interested in your opinion of what Kamleshwar's novel Kitne Pakistan was written in or Munshi Premchand's early work published in Devanagari?
You've exceeded the bounds of my knowledge, but I can provide some generalities. Writing systems can have no effect on the, um, "identity" of a language, since it's quite possible for people to be illiterate. So to me, saying something is written in Urdu, or saying something is written in Hindi, are exactly the same claim about the language involved. I have been taught that Urdu is written in Arabic letters and Hindi is written in Devanagari, and since that is the only difference between the two, iconic cultural works of Pakistan, if written in Devanagari, would fairly be described as being written in Hindi -- they have all of the defining characteristic[] of Hindi and none of the defining characteristic[] of Urdu.
The existence of geographically-based variation in vocabulary and grammar, especially minor variation, doesn't make for a claim that the languages are different. In Georgia (and, so I'm led to believe, other parts of the American South, but I can speak to Georgia from personal experience) it's possible to combine modal verbs, which is grossly ungrammatical in standard American english. Using just examples from country music, it's also possible in southern dialects to use verbs that don't exist in SAE ("I ain't [...]") or to conjugate verbs in impossible ways ("He don't [...]"; "We was [...]"). There is no serious case to be made that they're not speaking english in the South, though (Jamaica would be a more interesting case).
The only other place I'm familiar with where the alphabet (term used loosely here) is held to, under its own power, define the language, is China. I actually had a dispute some weeks ago on HN with someone advancing the argument that the "Chinese language" is the writing system, and any spoken language is a dialect of "Chinese". Despite its total incoherence, this is essentially the "party line" in China, and a very common view among people educated in the Chinese school system. So here are some examples I used there:
1. If the english sentence "How old are you?" is written as 多老是你？ (pronounced "how old are you?"), english has not become a dialect of Chinese.
2. If the mandarin sentence 你多大？ is written "Ni duo da?", mandarin has not ceased to be a chinese language, nor has it become a dialect of english (or turkish, or any other language written with roman characters).
3. Considering two illiterate Chinese people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other hakka, is it correct to say, since they're both illiterate, that neither knows any language at all?
It should be easy to see that choice of writing system is orthogonal to what the language is that's being written (or, in example 3, not written). Chinese politics dictate that different languages with 0% mutual intelligibility be made to appear "the same". What we see in Pakistan is the opposite impulse, that the same language be made to appear different for political purposes. But this has no basis in reality; Urdu and Hindi, with their 100% (!) mutual intelligibility, are the same thing. Arabic letters don't make Urdu different from Hindi any more than they make it similar to Arabic.
Ok then, why do I regularly encounter Hindi words like "saphalta" and "viruddh" that I have never encountered written or spoken anywhere in the Pakistani mediasphere and have to resort to a dictionary for (when there are perfectly good 100% mutually intelligible equivalents "kamyabi" and "ke khilaf/mukhalif hona/rokna")
You know, for my whole life people have been complaining to me that I use words they don't understand. Words like "quixotic", "propriety", and "fee schedule" (those aren't invented examples; they all happened recently enough for me to remember). They've never suggested that my vocabulary actually means I speak a different language, though.
So if the people in Pakistan feel that Nastaʿlīq is "their own" writing system and Naskh symbolizes Arab imperialism, in my opinion they have all the rights to feel that way.
Really, even if the script evolved from Arabic script, that was 700 years ago, and what matters in this matter is how the people feel about their letters today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script