Arabi Malayalam
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Arabi Malayalam
Origin and spread
Election campaign graffiti for M B Rajesh, who is the LDF candidate in Palakkad, has brought to discussion a script which had been popular in the state till a few decades ago.
The graffiti seeking vote for M B Rajesh invited flak on social media for the ‘use of Arabic for minority appeasement’. However, the script used in the graffiti was Arabi Malayalam, a variant form of the Arabic script. The script, used for written and oral communication among Muslims, has its origin that dates back to pre-Islamic period.
Sherrif Kakkuzhi Maliakkal, associate professor at University of Calicut, in a social media post stated that he learned the script at the age of four, two years before his formal education began. Stating that Arabi Malayalam was the most used script during 19th century, Maliakkal said even Chelakkodan Ayisha, the brand ambassador of Kerala’s first literacy movement, learned Arabi Malayalam before she learned Malayalam.
N K Jameel Ahamed, researcher in Arabi Malayalam, said it was absurd to term Arabi Malayalam as a language of Muslims. “Until 300 years ago, the script in the region was not accessible for all. The foreigner traders, who arrived in the state had no other option but to write down Malayalam in their own script. Arabi Malayalam is such an attempt to write Malayalam in Arabic. An Arab person may be able to read Arabi Malayalam, but, may not be able to comprehend. It eventually became popular among Muslims as they had to learn Arabic words in madrassas,” he said.
Linguistic experts said using the script for graffiti could indeed be an attempt to connect with Muslims. They also said that the graffiti has lot of spelling mistakes.
