The following cartoon was shared recently on my Facebook newsfeed by some relatives and Islamic Facebook pages.
As you might be able to tell the cartoon has been heavily edited by someone. Something from the calendar has been (quite badly) removed, the mother's breasts has been censored, the man is watching a blank TV and the writing in red (which reads "super mother!!!") is clearly an addition that the original cartoonist didn't include.
So, partially because I have a bit of free time this morning and partially because I was curious, I decided to search for the original image. I quickly found the unedited version with a reverse image search on Google and also found out for what it's worth that the cartoon is originally from Morocco.
So what has been edited out by the Islamic page? The woman's breast obviously, but more curiously the TV and calendar. The TV says "International Women's Day" and the calendar says "8 March".
hmmm...so why would the International Women's Day offend an Islamic page? Well it could be because International Women's Day not only recognizes the hardship women go through, but is also a day to recognize the need for gender equality, the importance of women's suffrage movements and the lack of women's rights in the world and particularly in Third World countries. Simply editing out any reference of the IWD had an effect that could be seen in the comments to the image. All the comments ranged from "may god bless the hands of mothers" to "may god help mothers". Support for mothers? Sure. Support for women's rights and comments about patriarchy in the Arab world? Nothing. The hardships faced by women shown in this cartoon is recognized by Arabs, but is seen as the natural order of things. It's not seen as a problem that needs a solution, but rather an example why we should pat women on the head every now and then for slaving away within society.
Yes, this is the predominant face of the so-called "moderate" Islam's change in attitude towards women. Without changing anything in society, without advancing the legal, social and private rights of women, what Muslim leaders decided to do is recognize the hardships and praise women for persevering while promising them a lot of rewards in heaven (although the Islamic version of heaven is very male orientated with hardly any mention of women - but that's another story).
I do need to add that it might not be completely fair to say there is no change in attitude towards women within the household, as there is always this:
This is Ahmad al Shugairi, described as a "Saudi media figure" on his Wikipedia page, he shows up a lot on Islamic TV programmes trying to give a modern face to Islam. The quote above is an attempt at modernising Islam's view of women, but honestly is completely mind-boggling for me how this is supposed to be a positive quote. If anything it shows that men should tolerate women (not respect, but tolerate them like a baggage you have no choice but to live with), and treat them like house pets (or as he says, children). But unfortunately, a lot of Muslim girls fall for this nonsense and, not knowing what it really means to be free and treated as equals, they think this is an example of how Islam is pro-women. That specific screenshot above is from my personal newfeed shared by a relative, but if you search the quote on the internet you will find thousands of Muslims (men and women) who think this attitude towards women is healthy.
Consider the Youtube comment below. In red is a comment I made on a video where a hijabi vlogger is arguing how hiding herself behind a veil is somehow empowering to women.
Her response (in green) is very telling. She not only admits that Islam treats women like house pets, but is proud of the fact. Is there any self respect here? Not even an inkling. This attitude is surprisingly common amongst Muslim girls who grew up with Western influences and are trying to associate Islam with a degree of feminism - and failing miserably. Feminism and gender equality doesn't take you from being beaten with a stick and having your husband marrying three other women all the way to being treated as a retarded child that requires special care. Feminism is about being equal with men and having the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as men.
Which is why whenever you demand details on what the "modern" Muslim means when he or she talks about Islam giving women equal rights, you will most likely hear the discussion entering gender roles. "Women and men are equal, but they each have a role to play", not surprisingly, the role women have to play is serving the men. It reminds me alot of the anti-suffrage propaganda that existed before women won the right to vote in the West.
Yes, women who leave their homes to have equal rights and opportunities as men will cause a disaster! - or so a few people thought, and amongst whom are women even. So it's not a uniquely Islamic thing to crush women's spirit so far that they will even defend their oppressors, but in the modern era of communication and with greater pressure from a dominating Western culture of freedom and equality, Islam is being pushed more and more into a corner and both Muslim men and Muslim women are scrambling for argument to defend their iron-age traditions.
Recently I started reading an Arabic book written by Khalil Abdel Karim titled The Historic Roots of Islamic Shariah and found it absolutely fascinating as it shows where a lot of rules and laws within Islam today have come from - no, not from Allah, not even from Muhammad himself. The book (although an abridged version of the original) goes into detail of several Islamic traditions and shows that most of them came from pre-Islamic tribal cultures and religions predominant in the region as well as opinions of individuals around Muhammad. Things like fasting during Ramadan, the importance of the Hera Cave, how much needs to be paid for blood money (100 camels if you're wondering - and it was the Prophet's grand father Abdul Mutalib who came up with it, just like cutting the hand of the thief both of which Muhammad adopted into Islam later on) forbidding alcohol and pork, the effects of envy (الحسد) and its cures, and many more.
So as I felt this book is important for a larger audience than the Arabic one only, I decided to begin translating it. I divided the book into several sections where each section will be my daily allotment for translation and (if I stick to the plan) I should be able to finish it within 4 or so weeks. One thing I found difficulty in is that Arabic literature tends to be very long winded and written in a way that would make it uncomfortable for an English reader. I never really realized this until I started translating. When reading a book in its original language, it all seems very normal, but when you try and convert that text into another language, it's not so much translating the words and sentences that's the most difficult part, but rather translating the whole book for a different audience! However I wanted to stay true to the author's work as much as possible, but one thing I did add are descriptions in the footnotes. The author took for granted the Arab audience will know several things without being told what they are, but obviously this doesn't apply to an English audience, and rather than intrude on the author's text, I just added footnotes where I felt required.
Obviously I'm not going to paste a huge section in a blog post, but I felt I could put the first page for people to enjoy. It's a very brief outline so it's quite an easy read. I'll probably post more sections here and there in the future.
---------------
The Spiritual Traditions Inherited from the Hanifiah
The Hanifiah is a
religious movement that spread across the Arabian Peninsula
before Islam. It was preached in Yathrib[1]
by Abu Omar al Rahib (Abu Omar the Monk) and in Taief by Amiah bin al Sult. As for Mecca it had many preachers amongst
whom are Warraqa bin Nawfal, Zaid bin Amro bin Nafeel (Omar bin al Khattab’s
uncle), Abdullah bin Jahsh, Ka’ab bin Luai bin Ghalib (the great grand father
of the Prophet) and Abdul Mutalib (the Prophet’s grand father – who is
considered by Dr. Saied Mahmoud al Qamni in his book al Hizb al Hashimi (The
Hashemite Party) as the teacher of the Hanifiah and its leader) and they were all
known as the Hunafa’ah.
The Hunafa’ah were
introduced by Dr. Abd ul Azeez Salim in his book Dirasaat fi Tareekh al Arab
Qabl al Islam (Essays on the History of the Arabs before Islam) as a group of
intellectual Arabs who refused both idol worship as well as Judaism and
Christianity. They proclaimed the
oneness of god and had amongst their followers Zuhair bin Abi Salmah, Uthman
bin al Harith and Assa’ad Abu Karb al Humairi.
Mr. Abbas Mahmoud brings more light onto this movement in his literature
where he says that they knew that worshipping one god was the correct way over
worshipping idols. Their belief stems
from the opinion that monotheism is the religion of Abraham. Amongst their practises were the following.
The abandonment of idol worship and
sacrificing of animals for polytheist gods and goddesses. This also came with forbidding the consumption
of meat that has been slaughtered in the name of idols. Both these practices were adopted from
Arabian Jews.
Forbidding usury – another practising
adopted from Arabian Jews who permitted it to foreigners but banned its
practise from amongst themselves.
Forbidding fornication (adopted from
Jews), alcohol and the punishment of those who practise them.
Cutting the hand of the thief, a
punishment ordained by Abd ul Mutalib the grand father of the Prophet.
Forbidding the consumption of carrion,
blood and pork (Jewish practises).
Forbidding filicide due to the gender
of the child[2] and
making it obligatory for a parent to raise their children. It was told by Ibn Sa’ad[3]
in his book Tabakaat al Kubra that Saieed bin Zaid bin Amro bin Nafeel
used to say to men who want to kill their daughters: “Don’t kill them and
I will pay for their sustenance.”
Fasting (adopted from Arabian Jews)
Female circumcision (adopted from
Arabian Jews)
Ritual washing to cleanse from impurity
(adopted from Arabian Jews)
Faith in resurrection and judgment day
Retreat and worship within HeraCave during the month of Ramadan as
well as giving alms.
Islam has then
adopted all of these practises and beliefs and in the words of Al Hafiz Abi al
Faraj al Jawzi[4]: “Islam
later agreed with them about these issues and preached them.”
[1]
Yathrib is the original name of the city of Medinah before the prophet Muhammad migrated
there.
[2]
There have been recorded incidents in Islamic literature that pre-Islamic Arabia practised filicide where the first born child is a
girl as that would be considered shameful amongst pre-Islamic Arab men.
Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape
goes into detail about how science is
better equipped to answer moral and
ethical questions than religion
When Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins argue that science has an answer to ethical and moral questions they were quite right. There is no doubt that the more we investigate not only social science but also neuroscience, we find a lot of evidence that human behaviour relies on many factors that traditional moral teachers (clerics and philosophers) are not aware of - and the answers from science of course always outweigh any other answer due to its reliance on observation and evidence rather than ideological biases.
Be that as it may, I'm going to argue for two opposing points in this post pertaining to sex and relationships. The first point are opinions I held for a while reinforced by some research but mainly philosophers and logicians while the second is purely scientific that a recent discussion on Reddit has brought to my attention. Further investigation into this scientific view that seem to oppose my initial opinions shows it to be quite a large subject in itself that I thought deserves a blog post - especially as I haven't written anything here for a while - to not only share the information, but also help structure and solidify it in my own head.
The Argument
What is sex and how does it relate to relationships? In its basic form sex is nothing more than an activity carried out with two or more individuals. Looking at sex from a neutral stand point, there is absolutely nothing else to add to this activity in terms of emotions, responsibilities or consequences. However the value of sex seems to vary with different people as some will practice it quite liberally with many people, some will only practice it with individuals they feel an emotional connection with, some will only practice it when a certain marriage ritual is carried out and of course some choose to remain celibate and not practice it at all. Thus it seems the value sex holds is very subjective, it depends on the individual in his or her religious views (a major point to be expanded on later) and in his or her upbringing and opinions as well as social views and practices. One thing that can definitely be taken from a basic observation that sex and love do not necessarily go hand in hand.
I like to use a hypothetical scenario to bring the point home. For the sake of brevity I'm going to assume I'm talking to a male in a heterosexual relationship. The point however still stands with opposite genders and/or sexual orientations replaced. Remember, before you think this is absolute nonsense, I'm going to provide the counter argument afterwards which I only recently learned.
The scenario requires an assumption that you know as an indisputable fact that your partner is straight and will not commit to a relationship with someone of the same gender (remember the assumption is that I'm talking to a male in a heterosexual relationship simply for brevity - the argument still applies with genders/sexualities reverses). Now what if you come home one day and you find your wife sleeping with another woman (homosexual flings amongst the straight community happen quite often and do not necessarily entail committed relationships). How would your emotional state at this moment compare if it was another man your wife was cheating on you with? The common response is that the feeling of distress and jealousy will be larger where your wife cheated on you with another man rather than a woman as this research argues. The reason behind this is the man poses a greater threat to your relationship than a woman would, and in addition to that, evolutionary speaking, the opposite sex will further pose a reproductive threat. So it's not so much the act of sex that causes emotional distress, since sex occurred in both instances whether another woman or another man was involved - but rather it's the competition and the threat of you being replaced within the relationship which truly causes the distress.
Bertrand Russell
This opinion is further enforced by Bertrand Russell in his book Marriage and Morals (1929) where the first few chapters describe the differences between a patriarchal society and a matriarchal one. Before I go into that however, I should just briefly introduce the gene centred view of evolution where the driving force of reproduction is considered to be passing on your genes. Richard Dawkins wrote an excellent book on the subject aptly named The Selfish Gene (1976) where he shows within different species the objective of passing on your genes are a priority in life and your body is merely a tool for those genes to survive different generations. And this broadly relates to what Bertrand Russell views the very reason a patriarchal society and marriage itself has developed. Evolutionary, men within societies common in the world today, have an intrinsic need to pass on, not only their genes, but their belongings, wealth and way of life in an attempt to possibly survive death (in a metaphysical sense I suppose). This desire amongst men would obviously require procreation and obviously the tool towards that is women. But how would a man ensure that the children of the woman they chose to procreate with are truly theirs? That those children truly have his genes? According to Bertrand Russell, it's marriage. Marriage (monogamous or polygamous - as long as only one male is in the picture - the number of women is irrelevant in the patriarchal society) ensures that the children bred by a female will only carry the male's genes and thus his property, wealth and culture following the individual male's death.
Marriage is further attacked as a patriarchal and oppressive institution by George Bernard Shaw who said:
The stupidity is only apparent: the service was really only an honest attempt to make the best of a commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry. But the actual result is that when two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. And though of course nobody expects them to do anything so impossible and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their relations, and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only feasible but beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it, they deserve no sympathy and no relief.
What Shaw argues is not necessarily an abandonment of monogamy, but rather the view that people marry for life (or until death do them part) is illogical. He rather espouses a serial monogamy since you cannot possibly reason that it's possible to find one person and love that person for the rest of your life just as you have the day you decided to get married. There will always be someone else you will meet that you might relate to more than the person you have decided to chain yourself to. Thus the very institution is viewed as not only oppressive, but also unnatural.
As for the matriarchal (or rather matrilineal) society that Bertrand Russell spoke of, he describes the inhabitants of Melanesia and in particular the Trobriand Islanders. A common belief amongst these communities is that pregnancy occurs through spirits entering the female body. Sex and the role of men in a relationship has been completely divorced from pregnancy and procreation and thus a father in the sense people in the modern world view is absent. Children are raised by the community, men are less competitive and there is no jealousy when women have sex with men other than their partners. This clearly shows the emotional distress that men in the modern world feels when his partner 'cheats' on him is something that is not intrinsic to our nature as humans, but rather programmed within our minds.
The Counter Argument
There are many arguments in support of a life long monogamous relationship, but I found two arguments only deserves serious consideration, the welfare of children and the neural processes and hormones released by the brain when in a relationship and especially during sex.
As for children, there are opposing researches on both sides of the spectrum. According to one research, children raised in a traditional nuclear family do much better than those in a blended family (step-parents) or single-parents. However, another research shows that children raised by communities with several adult supervisors rather than a nuclear family tend to be more emotionally stable and caring. Whatever the best lifestyle raising children is, in terms of relationships, children aren't a necessary product. With modern day contraceptions during and after sex as well as the safety of abortions, having children is now a choice that a couple can plan for if they really want one and wont be forced on them in normal circumstances.
The neurological changes, however, is where this argument gets interesting. Vasopressin is a hormone that plays an important role in social behaviour in particular amongst monogamous species. To quote from the Wikipedia link:
There are consistent differences between monogamous species and promiscuous species in the distribution of AVP receptors, and sometimes in the distribution of vasopressin-containing axons, even when closely related species are compared. Moreover, studies involving either injecting AVP agonists into the brain or blocking the actions of AVP support the hypothesis that vasopressin is involved in aggression toward other males. There is also evidence that differences in the AVP receptor gene between individual members of a species might be predictive of differences in social behavior. One study has suggested that genetic variation in male humans affects pair-bonding behavior. The brain of males uses vasopressin as a reward for forming lasting bonds with a mate, and men with one or two of the genetic alleles are more likely to experience marital discord. The partners of the men with two of the alleles affecting vasopressin reception state disappointing levels of satisfaction, affection, and cohesion. Vasopressin receptors distributed along the reward circuit pathway, to be specific in the ventral pallidum, are activated when AVP is released during social interactions such as mating, in monogamous prairie voles. The activation of the reward circuitry reinforces this behavior, leading to conditioned partner preference, and thereby initiates the formation of a pair bond.
So Vasopressin is responsible for the feeling of jealousy and aggression towards other males. It is also responsible for feeling a reward when forming a bond with a mate. So this hormone is clearly a way our body tries to instil a monogamous relationship within our social lives.
The second chemical is also a hormone that is fairly known; Oxytocin. The following video from TED gives a very engaging introduction to Oxytocin and how it effects our mentality.
So briefly, Oxytocin creates a feeling of love and emotional attachement to a fellow human being. I'd like to add that Oxytocin is released by the brain at certain events, one of which is at sexual orgasms in both men and women. I suppose that puts into question an earlier statement I made in this post that sex and love don't necessarily go hand in hand. Furthermore, similar to Vasopressin, Oxytocin was also found to be responsible for feelings of jealousy and aggression around individuals seen as a threat to a relationship.
So there you have it. Two hormones our body releases that seem to favour a monogamous relationship. Is it only an evolutionary conclusion forced on our neural biology due to a long history of monogamous relationships? The philosophy behind open relationships, or at least, serial monogamy still holds logical sense, but the bio-chemistry of our make-up suggests otherwise. In the end we're constantly learning about ourselves and who knows what will neuroscience discover in the future. More importantly though, we are constantly evolving and I imagine our logical thoughts will help us change our environment to that we see better for the specie and thus carve out our evolutionary path. It's an interesting subject either whatever opinion you hold.
A few months ago I came across Audible.com. Audible is a company owned by Amazon which specializes in selling audio books (and pretty great quality I must add). So I subscribed to get one audio book every month and after research I settled on getting Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. An absolutely wonderful book which I heartily recommend, but there is one section that I keep returning to again and again as it fascinated me to no end. I decided I should share that brief section with everyone and so played the audio book and typed down what was being said as accurate as need be. The book starts by talking about the universe and how it started (where you're writing about the history of 'everything', how the universe began would be the best place to start I guess) and Bill begins showing how immense our universe is by just showing us our own solar system. A small picture in the grand scale of things, but effective in it being a small picture.
Our solar system is so vast that even the maps we look at in books are not even remotely to scale. This is a necessary deceit to get all the planets on the same piece of paper. For example, Neptune is five times away from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us. Such is the distances that it isn't possible or practical to draw out the solar system to scale. On a diagram of the Earth drawn to scale with the Earth at the size of a pea, Jupiter will be over 300m away, and Pluto 2.5km distant and about the size of a bacterium. On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star will be 16,000 km away! Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter will be the size of a full stop at the end of a sentence and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, pluto will still be more than 10m away!
Our solar system surrounded by the Oort Cloud.
If we rode a spaceship that can travel at the speed of light (which is not possible) (300,000 km/s) it will take us 7 hours to get to Pluto from Earth. Currently at the speed of a normal space ship (56,000 km/h) it will take 9 years to reach Uranus and a dozen years to cross the orbit of Pluto. By the time we get to Pluto the Sun is as small as a pin head. At this point, the Oort Cloud, at the edge of our solar system, is 10,000 years away from us. Where Pluto is about 40 AU from the Earth, the heart of the ort cloud is about 50,000 AU. In other words, it is remote. Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will visit the edge of the solar system. Ever. It is just too far. And remember, we're talking only about our own solar system, our Milky Way galaxy contains billions of solar systems and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.
Well now that I finished a major part of my dissertation, I feel I have more time to return to blogging! So here we are again!
Today someone on reddit mentioned something quite interesting about life in the depth of the ocean which lead to alot of reading on the net. The following are three amazing creatures of the oceans and seas that I want to share.
First, the immortal jellyfish (pictured) that can practically return to its youth after sexual maturity and repeat its biological life-cycle indefinitely! They would actually carry out the transformation in times of hardship and physical damage so that in a sense they would get another chance at things!
Another sea creature worth mentioning amongst the immortals is the lobster. Apparently their DNA contains a gene that will repair deteriorating cells and thus technically, they never age but still continue to grow in size! The article on the lobster end with a brief mention of something known as the Hayflick limit stating that due to this limit we cannot introduce immortality to humanity as it will only lead to cancerous cells. I did a brief research on what the Hayflick limit is and my understanding is that it is a limit to the number of times a human cell can divide (through mitosis) to continue the growing process. Research discovered three stages to a cell's life;
Hayflick found that cells go through three phases. The first is rapid, healthy cell division. In the second phase, mitosis slows. In the third stage, senescence, cells stop dividing entirely. They remain alive for a time after they stop dividing, but sometime after cellular division ends, cells do a particularly disturbing thing: Essentially, they commit suicide. Once a cell reaches the end of its life span, it undergoes a programmed cellular death called apoptosis.
The last mention to the fantastic world beneath the seas and oceans goes to the octopus and their amazing brains. Not only are their brains larger relative to their size than any other animal except for birds and mammals, but they also have areas of their brain completely dedicated to memory and learning. Furthermore, like humans, they have a preference as to whether they're left or right oriented in the sense that there is preference for the use of the right or the left eye. According to the article on Discover;
Such lateralization, corresponding to our right- and left-handedness, suggests specialization in the brain's hemispheres, which is believed to improve its efficiency and which was first considered an exclusively human, then an exclusively vertebrate, attribute.
It is also worth mentioning that like dolphins and dogs, Octopuses enjoy playing and they each have different personalities and characters and thus react differently to different situations. The Youtube video linked to earlier further mentions their ability to detect light from their body rather than their colour blind eyes which just imagining how that would appear is absolutely mind blowing!
We all know that different animals have different ways of communicating with one another, however our understanding of the different languages in the non-human world is very limited to say the least. Wikipedia has quite a good article on animal communication for further reading, but I just want to talk about two animals in this post. I've just stumbled upon this interesting article which is a few months old now about prairie dogs. According to research carried out by a professor in the North Arizona University, prairie dogs have a quite intricate language system - and not just some simple noises, but specific 'words' for specific items that they see. Thus not all danger is described in one word, but each forms of danger is given a name; a falcon, an owl, a human, a coyote, etc. According to the article they can even differentiate between a coyote and a domesticated dog! But it doesn't stop there, the professor decided to test if there were different calls for different humans so he dressed four men in exactly the same clothing except for their t-shirts where each one wore a different coloured shirt. And indeed, the prairie dogs gave a different call for each person! Apparently they describe what they see in their call. It makes me wonder whether it is possible that they actually could maybe invent new words for things not included in their vocabulary? Or is that a bit too far? I don't know!
This article actually reminded me of a very old story I read about honey bees. There was this girl (Barbara Shipman) whose dad was an agricultural researcher working with bees and he always had his daughter involved in his work. However, as fate would have it, the daughter decided to enter the field of mathematics and graduated as a mathematician from the University of Rochester. But that's where she made her greatest discovery in bees language! It's very complicated to go through her methods over here, you really need to read it yourself as I'm not even 100% on it, but apparently bees can perceive not just magnetic fields (which we know alot of animals can see them and use them for directions) but also quantum fields! Fields made by quarks - the tiniest of particles that make up our own atoms! It's mind boggling to say the least and there has been disputes over her conclusions, but it's still a very interesting read non-the-less!
Any one who read George Orwell's book Ninteen Eighty Four is familiar with the term 'Newspeak'. For those who haven't read the book, it's basically a dark vision of a future world ruled by a totalitarian regime that stabilises its rule through constant supervision of its citizens as well as through insuring they remain too busy doing one meaningless task after another thus wont have time to think, wonder or plan. The totalitarian regime also introduced 'Newspeak' which is a simplified language that drastically reduced the number of words in the English dictionary by just removing 'unnecessary' words. Thus basically to retard human intelligence, imagination and creativity by simplifying language and making it as plain and dull as possible. The Wikipedia article on Newspeak explains it as follows.
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce the total dominance of the State. Similarly, Newspeak root words served as both nouns and verbs, which allowed further reduction in the total number of words; for example, "think" served as both noun and verb, so the word thought was not required and could be abolished.
But is Newspeak as bad as it's portrayed? A recent news article on the BBC reminded me of how in our real human history governments did try to forcefully interfer in local languages for one reason or another. The article talks about the government of Taiwan deleting all Simplified Chinese scripts from its agencies texts and using only the more complex traditional Chinese script instead. Obviously this is probably for political reasons more than anything (I'd imagine to insist on their independent identity separate from mainland China), but on the Chinese side, according to the article, traditional Chinese script has been abandoned only in the 1950s for the simplified Chinese. Unlike Newspeak, however, simplification has been done to raise literacy levels rather than retard imagination.
Kemal and the new Turkish alphabet
I can think of another example of a language reformation and that is in Turkey after it won its independence from the Allies in 1923 and established the modern Turkish state. Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey, had a more nationalistic agenda to his language reformation. In 1932 he established the Turkish Language Association which aimed to remove all non-Turkish words in the local vocabulary that have established itself under the multi-national Ottoman rule. But not only did Turkish nationalism allowed for the reintroduction of abandoned Turkish words to replace those borrowed from other nationalities - there was more in the Turkish language reform. Mustafa Kemal replaced the Turkish script and alphabet completely from that based on Arabic alphabet and grammar to that of Latin based. There are two reasons for this. First was political; Mustafa Kemal wanted Turkey to move away from the Eastern world and join Europe and the West as a new 'modern' Turkey. The other reason was the complexity of the Arabic language compared to the simplicity of a language based on Latin grammar. Turning to a more simple script allowed literacy rates to increase - or so I'm told (I've never seen any statistics to prove anything though).
I'm really in two minds about this. I can understand the logic that a simpler language will be easier to learn and thus would allow for higher literacy rates, but does it effect imagination and intelligence? Could Shakspear write his plays in Newspeak? The Qura'an itself was revealed to an Arab population who valued poetry and the linguistic arts as the highest form of expression. Infact even today Muslims consider the miracle of the Qura'an to be a linguistic miracle more than anything else. Would simplifying language really be a good educational policy? I really don't know. A part of me prefers the more complex arts and allowing human imagination to wander wherever it wishes. When I started studying Turkish language a while back, I was told that language isn't only a means of communication, but also the way people think. Language is the result of an evolutionary process and reflects culture, ideas, arts and the characters of a people and the more languages you speak the more you can think in different ways. Something doesn't sit right with government interference in language, even if it is to increase literacy rates.
I personally want to learn a computing language and be able to design websites. I tried getting into it but found it too difficult and time consuming that I decided to leave it for another time when I have more free time on my hands. Now I do wish there is a simpler programming language but I have to wonder, does simpler not mean I will be able to do less? Rather than design a very unique website, I would probably only be able to put blocks and buttons with a very simple language. Does not the same apply with human languages only in a non-tangible format that might only prove its negative effects after several generations? It's a scary thought.
