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Musalmani Bangla and its transformation

I think that is exactly the reason why they aren't brought back !

As is the reason that now - we've forgotten about these things too & even the MQM raises this issue only for political mileage if they ever do raise it !

What is an even great reason is that most Pakistanis don't even know about this; I can't recall meeting anyone knowing about this except a handful of people who had studied about Bangladesh, the '71 War & stuff, knowing about this & even then at times they didn't know about the extent of the issue here !

Most thought that the Biharis are well integrated in Bangladesh without any issues & one even chuckled in disbelief when I told him about the Refugee Camps they have all over Bangladesh or the number of Stranded Pakistanis there are there !

Ideally the stranded Biharis should be relocated to their homeland, Bihar & UP! But they most probably hate India, so not a good idea.
 
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I think that is exactly the reason why they aren't brought back !

Then , mate , its not really a political party you are afraid of , it seems because unfortunately MQM didn't exist until the very end of the Afghan war , which means almost a 20 years opportunity when the issue was alive and fresh in the mind of people . Agree with me or not , there's indeed a soil issue here .

For the non awareness , it is not true here at least , people remember them with pain and is something frequently cited as an example of the state of Pakistan honoring its loyal citizens . Not a good precedent .
 
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Ideally the stranded Biharis should be relocated to their homeland, Bihar & UP! But they most probably hate India, so not a good idea.

Nope ideally they should be brought back to Pakistan - this country belongs more to them then anyone else !

Too bad the filth that rules us & has ruled us ever since Our Father died in '48 would sell Pakistan for a half broken bullion of gold were they offered some !

Then , mate , its not really a political party you are afraid of , it seems because unfortunately MQM didn't exist until the very end of the Afghan war , which means almost a 20 years opportunity when the issue was alive and fresh in the mind of people . Agree with me or not , there's indeed a soil issue here .

I'm not afraid of anyone ! :mad:

Though the thoughts of Altaf Bhai giving me a kiss the way he did to Moustapha Kamal makes my blood go cold ! :fie:

No there is no 'soil issue' here - Theres Politics....Dirty Politics !

Agree with me or not - Many politicians from the Urdu Speaking Community have played the same dirty politics !

For the non awareness , it is not true here at least , people remember them with pain and is something frequently cited as an example of the state of Pakistan honoring its loyal citizens .

Thats a moot point because naturally you guys are aware of it; the rest of us aren't !
 
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No there is no 'soil issue' here - Theres Politics....Dirty Politics !

Politics is heavily played on the same soil thing and the public perceptions/bias/mindset , my friend , so even that thing cant go in favor . Against whom if I may ask ? What race has been harmed by the Urdu speaking politicians ?

Thats a moot point because naturally you guys are aware of it; the rest of us aren't !

A point nonetheless . :D
 
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Politics is heavily played on the same soil thing and the public perceptions/bias/mindset , my friend , so even that thing cant go in favor . Against whom if I may ask ? What race has been harmed by the Urdu speaking politicians ?

Whosoever doesn't fall in line & condone either the militant economics that were pioneered by certain Bhais in Karachi or expresses distaste over being told over & over again how 'we owe the Muhajir our country whilst we sat on our arses doing nothing' & then the incessant victimhood too - This dirty politics is as irrational as it is peddled by all sides !
 
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Whosoever doesn't fall in line & condone either the militant economics that were pioneered by certain Bhais in Karachi or expresses distaste over being told over & over again how 'we owe the Muhajir our country whilst we sat on our arses doing nothing' & then the incessant victimhood too - This dirty politics is as irrational as it is peddled by all sides !

Militant economics pioneered here ? Seriously ? :what:

No one tells that story over here or makes that argument , mate , so there's little reason for that story to be told over there associated in our name . Minorities will always be somehow defensive and sensitive , the victimhood has its reasons and causes in history , Armstrong . Its not baseless on the whole as assumed .
 
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Thats a positive news. less shia to deal with.

That's an interesting viewpoint. Seems to be shared by more than one Bangladeshis here.

But then why try to associate with Persia or Persian?

But it is impressive how so many of you understand Hindi. I was not aware so many of you guys understand the language.

Or is it mainly the Muhajirs of BD (Biharis) who do that?
 
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Ideally the stranded Biharis should be relocated to their homeland, Bihar & UP! But they most probably hate India, so not a good idea.

Muhajirs have evolved into new ethnic group, they are no more identical to people of the land of their origin.
 
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Ideally the stranded Biharis should be relocated to their homeland, Bihar & UP! But they most probably hate India, so not a good idea.

They should relocate to the place they have the real loyalty to.

Even if that place is a few thousand KMs to our West in the middle of a desert.

After all, what are a few difficulties in the pursuit of your dreams? ;)

It will be win-win for all...
 
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That's an interesting viewpoint. Seems to be shared by more than one Bangladeshis here.

But then why try to associate with Persia or Persian?

But it is impressive how so many of you understand Hindi. I was not aware so many of you guys understand the language.

Or is it mainly the Muhajirs of BD (Biharis) who do that?

Many of the pre 1947 native elite families and their extended relatives speak urdu... Our village religious sermons ( often runs all night attended by whole village) called Waaz Mahfil are often delivered in Urdu. As for me i used to watch disney in ZTV as a kid. Almost 99% of other people understands the language and half of them can talk fluently.

As for persia, Most of our preachers and their followers who came with them are persian. Pre shia time saints and their thousands of followers came from persia and settled here, started preaching and intermarriage happened. Almost all parts of BD had sufi saints who turned BD into muslim majority. That is our only link with persia aka Iran.

But dont get the wrong signal. Majority of Bangladeshis prefer Iran over Ksa because of The islamist regime. Anti shia sentiment is non existent in bd.
 
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At present Bangla is in which condition, doesn't matter. Statistics say that Bangla is the second most used language after Arabic by the Muslims.
 
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Musalmani bengali was never quite *fully* standardized owing to the feature of local dialects and a profound practice of Urdu, Farsi and Arabic among the Muslims of Bengal. there was limited practice (?) of Bengali in Nastaliq (Persian-Arabic) script by Muslims though in the 18th century though (@kalu_miah). the Bengali language later standardized by Hindus had been the language of high caste Hindus and in today’s Bangladesh it has somehow become a “book Bangla” although it was alien to all socioeconomic classes of Bengal Muslims even in the 20th century. i pasted some extracts from “’The Language of Respectability' and the (Re)Constitution of Muslim Selves in Colonial Bengal” by Samantha Arnold in Identity and Global Politics (2004). The educated Muslims are referred as ashraf and uneducated Muslims (mostly thought to be of indigenous ‘convert’ background) as atrap.


As I have noted, underlying those arguments concerned to demonstrate that Urdu is the language of the ashraf even while admitting that Bengali may well be the mother-tongue of the atrap is the (re)production of an image of Muslims in Bengal as belonging to two distinct communities—"real" Muslims on the one hand, and "half-Muslim" converts on the other. However, there were arguments “in the air” suggestive of quite a different agenda: rather than (re)producing the distinction between ashraf and atrap. some arguments seemed intended to deploy Urdu in order to awe that distinction—the perception of a growing imperative to accomplish precisely such an erasure was brought into sharp focus over the last decades of the nineteenth century. This need to cultivate "fellow-feeling" between the "higher Musalmans° and the “lower orders" placed the ashraf in a difficult position; as Saeed/Hussein recognized in 1880. the cultivation of a sense of community between the athraf and the atrap was significantly compromised by the former's unwillingness or inability to use anything but Urdu (at least in public). The task of transcending the linguistic barrier would thus be placed squarely upon the atrap—if the Urdu-speaking Muslims would not use Bengali, then the Bengali-speaking “converts”- would have to adopt Urdu. This is in fact something many were eager to do in the context of the reformist movements of the late nineteenth century and the "ashrafization" attending the increased wealth of many Muslim cultivators that sparked among the atrap a rejection of Bengali culture and language. As Rafiuddin Ahmed has argued in this context, “virtually everyone was keen to discard his Bengali identity and be recognized as an ashraf of alien origin," and the adoption of Urdu provided away for these "half-Muslims” to reconstitute themselves as “true” and “respectable” Muslims. The discursive erasure of the line separating Urdu-speaking Muslims from Bengali-speaking Muslims was apparent in the admission by some ashraf that perhaps Bengali was not the mother-tongue of the atrap Muslims after all. Abdul Karim was vocal in his opposition to the idea of introducing Urdu as the mother-tongue of Bengali Muslims but nevertheless contributed to the notion that Bengali's status as the mother-tongue was not unassailable. He argued in 1900 that:

Properly speaking the Musulmano of Bengal have no particular language of their own, as their distinct dialect does not deserve to be called by this name. The assumption that Bengali is the vernacular of all the Musalmans Is not wholly correct. In large towns many Musalmans speak Urdu, while in the Mufussil the mother-tongue of the respectable Musalmans is a kind of Bengali which is different from pure Bengali.

Here, we see an effort to establish a distinction between the Bengali spoken by the Hindus from that spoken by respectable Muslims in the countryside. This goes some way toward including the Bestgali-speaking Muslims within the limits of the “orthodox” by establishing that while many Muslims did not speak Urdu as their mother-tongue, nor did they speak Bengali. Importantly, these quasi-Bengali-speaking Muslims (a reference to the "Musalmani Bengali” spoken by many Muslims, a dialect that was fundamentally Bengali but marked by its inclusion of Arabic and Persian vocabularies) are described as "respectable," a characterization that serves to alter the test of "orthodoxy" such that the requirement of “real” Muslims is not so much that they speak Urdu, but rather that they do not speak Bengali.


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This line of reasoning is picked up by another observer, who argued not only that Bengali was not the mother-tongue of Muslims in Bengal, but on the contrary that Urdu, or something like it, served in this function for all Bengali Muslims. Muzhar-i-Tawheed, to whose letter to the editor of the Mussalman I have already referred, makes an argument to that effect. He begins by asserting that, "if we are sure of anything, we are sure of this, that Bengali is as much foreign to the Mussalmans of Bengal as any other foreign tongue. But, as is clear from what follows. Tawheed’s characterization of Bengali as a “foreign tongue" applies not only to the ashraf, but also to the atrap, who speak, according to Tawheed:

... in a jargon which a Hindu will probably not understand. for only the pronouns and verbs are Bengali. and the rest Urdu. Persian. and Arabic ... This is the language to which Moulavi Abdul Karim Saheb characterises as "a kind of Bengali' which the "agriculturalists speak." But it is respectfully submitted that it is not "a kind of Bengali" but a kind of Urdu. So. the Muslim majority of Bengal speaks a kind of Urdu, while the minority speaks complete and through Urdu, though had Urdu"'


Quite a different approach was taken by some Muslims who accepted that Urdu was not the mother-tongue of all Muslims in Bengal, but who argued that it should be. There is evidence of this in the protestations of those opposed to this move. For example, the editor of the Naba-Nur a journal known for its liberal editorial policy on social issues complained in 1903 about those Muslims who 'desire to create a single mother-tongue for Muslims throughout the whole of India by forcibly conferring upon Urdu the status of the mother-tongue of Bengali Muslims:" the Darsan similarly notes in 1913 that “some Moslems in Bengal are trying to make Urdu their mother-tongue." In 1916, Abdul Malek Chowdhury pointed in the Al-Elsam to the “many people (who] still cling to the unnatural and extraordinary desire to sow the seed of Urdu in the soil of Bengal,” while Mozaffar Ahmad noted in the same journal the following year that non-Bengali Muslims "are trying to promote their mother-tongue on the grounds that Urdu literature has attained the peak of excellence and therefore Bengalis by virtue of being Muslim ought to learn Urdu. What is clear in each instance is the sense that the advocates of Urdu were trying to displace the “local” mother-tongue with a “foreign” language, and in this way, the associ-ation of Urdu with the ("foreign') ashraf, and of Bengali with the (“local”) atrap was maintained. With specific reference to the last example, it is espe-cially telling to note that while the distinction between “Bengalis” and “non-Bengalis” is maintained and Urdu is described as the mother-tongue only of the latter, the former are urged to adopt Urdu "by virtue of being Muslim." Here we see a discursive turn having the effect of reinforcing the distinction between "Bengalis" and "non-Bengalis” while simultaneously calling on "Bengalis" to transcend the linguistic barrier between them. Most importantly, the “Bengalis” are encouraged to do so precisely because they are also Muslim. This is especially interesting because it has the effect of constituting the Bengalis as "Muslims' in advance of their acquisition of the very "Islamic languages" needed to be a "good' Muslim.
 
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unfortunately this is the rising trend in Bangladesh. Few years ago there was none, now a days i find 10% of Bangladeshi youths are religiously perfectionists, in your word Salafist.

In the UK Bangladeshi youth are known for being Salafists, everything is bid'ah to them, they hate their country as well as every other country except for palestine, syria and saudiarab and their constant preaching is actually annoying lol, even if you burning on the floor they would not stop, they walk around in their jubbah/thoub all day on the streets giving out leaflets and these bengalis are usually supporters and followers of Anjem Choudary and other extreme groups such as hizb ut tahrir and al muhajiroun.
 
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