Re: Arabic or Persian
Arabic has not been ignored. Rather people have tried their best to adopt it. Just looking at this thread we can see that there are more people wishing to learn Arabic than Persian.
Obviously it is for religious reasons. But lack of adoption of Arabic by masses shows that there are forces more important which force people to learn a language. In my view, economy and then culture. People had to learn Persian because it was the language of the Mughal darbar. It later had so much impact on the local language that fusion of local and Persian language gave rise to the ‘language of Muslims’, Urdu.
So Persian and Urdu are now mixed together. Like I said, even the Arabic words which were introduced in Urdu came through Persian. They did not come Arabic directly.
While our religion is Arab-based, but our culture and history is aligned with Central Asia and Afghanistan. So anyone interested in culture or language will always prefer Persian. He will also find Persian to be much easier to learn because Urdu is based on Persian language and literature.
He won’t find Arabic as easy because we have no history with Arabs, nor are our culture or language influenced by Arabic.