These are some excerpts by an interesting piece I’ve just read and I can relate to it as I’ve observed it alot myself. **
"So many times, I’ve heard fellow Pakistani Muslims saying that we should abolish culture completely because there is no culture in Islam. We’re Muslim and that’s it. I bought into that for a while. “Yeah, we Pakistanis watch too many Bollywood movies,” I would say, “We have girls dancing at our weddings, that’s not Islamic!” As I condemned Pakistani culture, I didn’t realize that I was adopting another culture: Arab culture, or at least what I perceived to be “Arab culture” (saying “Arab culture” is inaccurate since the Arab world is filled with diverse cultures, religions, and dialects, it can’t be narrowed down into “one culture”). In my freshmen year of college, I would wear my keffiyeh (traditional Arab scarf), drive around blasting Arabic music, and making enormous efforts to learn Arabic. To give you an idea of how much I studied Arabic, I can put it like this: my Arabic pronunciation is much better than my Urdu and Punjabi pronunciation. I don’t regret learning the amount of Arabic I know now; I admit that it helps understanding your prayers a lot better, but I feel a tremendous amount of shame when I make pathetic attempts to speak Urdu. When I throw in some Arabic phrases when I meet Arab-speaking people, they smile and tell me how good my accent is. When I try to speak Urdu with South Asian friends and family, they laugh because they can hear it mixed with my American accent.
I have seen many Pakistanis Muslims using Arabic words like “akhi” (brother), “ukhti” (sister), “wallahi” (I swear to God), and even non-religious words like “yanni” in their conversations. There’s nothing wrong with this, but if they inserted Urdu words instead of Arabic words, they wouldn’t be taken seriously. Why? Because we don’t take Urdu seriously. The only time we’ll use Urdu is to be funny. It’s like, “haha, you sound like a FOB!” The only time we’ll use Urdu in a serious manner is when we’re speaking to elders (because it’s an “older people” thing, right?)
The little secret about us Pakistani Muslims is that we like when people mistaken us for Middle-Eastern. We get all flattered. Really? You thought I was Arab? Wow, thanks! But when people ask if we’re Indian, we respond in disgust. The first time I noticed this difference was in college when my professor felt like bashing on Muslims one day (she was one of the most Islamophobic teachers I’ve ever had). She asked, “Where are all my students from the Middle-East?” She immediately looked at me because she knew I was Muslim. “I’m actually from South Asia,” I said, “but thanks for the compliment.” Smile. I said that in defense of Middle-Easterners since there’s such a negative perception of them in the media (and also because Middle-Easterners get lumped together with Muslims). About a week later, I remember asking a non-Pakistani girl if she was Pakistani, and she responded with disgust, “No! I’m not! Why does everyone always think I’m Paki?!” Well, excuse me, I didn’t mean to offend you. I mean, ew, Pakistani? Who wants to be Pakistani? Ask us if we’re Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian, or even Iranian, and we’ll totally be cool with that. Why? Because we don’t want to look like Pakistanis. We don’t want to look like what we are."**
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/04/17/searching-for-my-pakistani-identity/
I’m not using this post to bash arab people, but rather to address the current identity problems some of our youth have been having, in an attempt to be more islamic, some of the British Pakistani (maybe US aswell I’m not sure i dont live there) youth are adopting an arab culture. I know our Prophet was an arab, but we pray our salah in arabic because we love our prophet not because we think arabic is the language of God or something superior. If our rasol was chinese, Im sure we’d be praying namaz in chinese.
I have to admit i’ve been mistaken for some other ethniticity like egyptian and have been flattered but at the same time when i was in egypt alot of people saw me as an indian woman (im paksitani lol) and told me how beautiful they were, it felt great. I guess people find anything exotic to be beautiful.
Don’t you think its high time we instill some sort of ethnic pride in our youth (referring to the ones overseas) and teach them that culture and islam can go hand in hand?
I know people always use the ummah concept but really? A Pakistani Christian would live easier with pakistani muslim rather than nigerian christians.
I know this issue cant just be associated with British pakistani youth but also alot of bengali kids act like this too (my husband is bengali so we see it alot aswell as I live in his community)
sorry if im rambling
