Dispelling public ignorance about Jawi

The issue of introducing the teaching of Jawi script or khat calligraphy in schools has become a hot issue, as it is facing vehement opposition by the non-Malay-Muslims, especially the ethnic Chinese. While I, despite being a Chinese Christian, support teaching Jawi script for everyone, it must be carefully implemented and promoted by taking the sensitivity of the non-Malay-Muslims into account.

I find this somewhat similar to the issues of signing and ratifying the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and Rome Statute, where it faced public backlash by the Malay-Muslim community in fear of losing their rights and privileges, and also concerns over the status of Islam as the official religion as well as the status of the Malay rulers.

All these issues show that the government must have an effective way to communicate and convey to the public to alleviate public fear out of their ignorance.

Therefore, for Jawi to gain public acceptance across racial/ethnic and religious lines in Malaysia, the government must dispel the non-Malay-Muslim public ignorance about Jawi, as many of them are mistaking it as Arabic language and see it as an “Islamic tool”.

Their misconception must be corrected so that they understand that Jawi is merely the variant of Arabic script used to write the Malay language [while there are other variants of Arabic script being used to write other languages such as Persian, Urdu (national language of Pakistan), Pashto (a co-official language of Afghanistan), Hausa (used in Ghana, Niger and Nigeria) and so on].

Interestingly, Arabic script is even used to write Chinese by the Hui people in China – such script is known as Xiao’erjing.

Jawi script must never, ever be confused with Arabic language. While I hope for all Malaysian students to learn Jawi, I would be against making Arabic a compulsory language for non-Muslims and would definitely not support the idea of making Arabic a co-official language or “second official language” as mooted by PAS Muslimat vice-chief Salamiah Mohd Nor, as even Islamic states such as Brunei, Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan do not make Arabic an official language.

The non-Malay-Muslim Jawi-phobia

I would say that the fear of the non-Malay-Muslims towards Jawi is a result of distrust and ignorance between races/ethnicities and religious communities, out of Barisan Nasional’s (BN) decades of rule, especially after the May 13 incident, which had a long-lasting impact.

The non-Malay-Muslims are generally ignorant about Jawi writing, mistaking it as Arabic language or even Javanese language, while it is actually “Arabic script for writing Malay language”. While the Malay language used to be written in Jawi script up to the 1960s for everyday purpose, the idea of writing Malay in Latin script (known as “Rumi” in Malay) emerged due to arrival of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial powers.

It was in 1966 that the then-education minister Khir Johari abolished Jawi script from compulsory teaching in schools, which resulted in a decline of its usage, and not all literate Malay-Muslims are able to read and write Jawi since then. Currently, the usage of Jawi script is mainly for “Islamic purposes” such as in mosques and Islamic schools, though there are a few non-Malay-Muslim Jawi enthusiasts as well.

This explains the ignorance that Jawi is Arabic language, and this is akin to thinking that learning Latin script would mean learning the Latin language as well. Such a move may be, to a certain extent, comparable with the usage of Latin script by the Turkish language since end-1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s language reform (where the modern Turkish replaced Ottoman Turkish, which was written in Arabic script and loaded with Arabic and Persian loanwords, and at the same time, many loanwords were discarded by the
modern language through revival of Turkish native vocabularies), as well as the Bosnian language having its Arabic script (called “Arebica”) replaced with Latin and Cyrillic script (the script used to write Russian, Serbian etc) in the 19th century.

At the same time, the political situation in Malaysia put the non-Malay-Muslims in fear of Malay-Muslim supremacy. The non-Malay-Muslims are getting annoyed by the ketuanan Melayu rhetoric, so-called “social contract”, Bumiputera quota in education and employment, “Islamisation” since the 1980s, and so on. Many non-Malay-Muslims see the revival of Jawi script as an attempt to impose Malay-Muslim supremacy, and possibly opening a Pandora’s box to turn Malaysia into an Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Pakistan etc, as their ignorance makes them see Jawi as an “Islamic tool”.

Nevertheless, some Jawi proponents among the Malay-Muslims are to be blamed for the non-Malay-Muslims’ ignorance and Jawi-phobia as well. These proponents have been using religion as their argument, claiming that Khir Johari’s policy resulted in younger generation of Malay-Muslims being unable to read the Quran. I find this argument unable to hold water, as the original Quran is written in Arabic language, and therefore one must actually learn a new language – Classical Arabic – to understand the original text. Otherwise, one must rely on translations of the Quran; for instance, an English speaker would need to read the English translation of the Quran in order to understand it.

Being proficient in Arabic does not mean being proficient in the Malay Jawi script either, as both have significant difference in orthography (Malay Jawi alphabets not present in Arabic are ca, nga, pa, ga, va and nya) as well as spelling rules.

We as Christians generally do not learn Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Aramaic and Koine Greek to read the original Bible, we read the translations in our respective languages. Hindus and Buddhists generally do not learn the Sanskrit language to read their respective religious texts either, and while Sanskrit is still being used as a liturgy language, it is written in various script such as Devanagari (the script used to write Hindi), Bengali, Tibetan, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Thai, Javanese and even Latin script, in order to suit the different ethnicities so that they may read the Sanskrit text written in the script used by their vernacular languages, and this would be akin to transliterating the original Bible and the original Quran into Latin script for those who have no knowledge in Arabic script.

Therefore, simply reviving compulsory education in Jawi script does not actually solve the problem of Malay-Muslims being ignorant in the Quran. Instead, it is the Islamic education that needs to be reviewed and revamped so that Muslim students will be able to recite the Arabic Quran while understanding the content, at least by means of studying the translation in their respective language. After all, constant usage of religious rhetoric to defend or preserve the Jawi script would worsen the non-Muslims’ ignorance and fear of the Jawi script, therefore backfiring efforts.

Learning Jawi does not make you a Muslim

As argued, Jawi is just a writing, and not a religious tool, despite being rooted in the Islamisation of the Malays. Islam as a religion has been around for 1,400 years, yet there are still Christians among Arabs especially in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and the United States (where Christians are surprisingly the majority among Arab Americans!), and these Arab Christians are still using the same Arabic script as their Muslim peers to write their language.

On the other hand, even though Malays and Turks have switched from Arabic script to Latin
script, while Azerbaijanis, Bosnians, Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Turkmens and Uzbeks have switched from Arabic script to Latin and Cyrillic scripts, they do not become Christians en masse simply by using these “Christian” scripts.

Meanwhile, Bengali people in both Bangladesh and India write their language in Eastern Nagari script, which means the Bangladeshis who are Muslims have never switched to Arabic script. It seems that the choice of script for a certain language is just a matter of preference by the native speakers.

After all, author and poet Dr Lim Swee Tin said that Jawi script has nothing to do with religion, and learning Jawi does not jeopardise one’s faith. Not only me, in fact two of my Chinese Christian friends and also former DAP MP for Kepong Dr Tan Seng Giaw have learnt Jawi, yet none of us is tempted to convert to Islam simply by learning Jawi. Claiming that learning Jawi would make a non-Muslim convert to Islam is as ridiculous as claiming that using Latin script would make one convert to Christianity.

I remembered watching an Indonesian drama where there were a group of students consulting a bomoh for witchcraft. This bomoh had a piece of khat calligraphy hanging behind him where he would perform his ritual, having a big alphabet mim written in the middle. For my understanding, such witchcraft is shirk and forbidden in Islam, and having a khat as decoration does not make the witchcraft “Islamic”. That is why later a teacher warned the students not to have contact with jinns (genies) after the group of students above were possessed by jinns. As the teacher led the entire class of students to perform a mass prayer dispelling the jinns, the bomoh mentioned above was suddenly struck by agony.

Jawi gave me an insight of the Malay language. I have never received any proper education in Jawi, but by being self-taught since my secondary school years, I admit that I have not actually mastered the Jawi script. There is no apparent reason on my sudden interest in
Jawi, and it is of course very surprising to many, as I studied at a Chinese primary school – SJK(C) – and was studying in a Chinese Independent School (you may call it “UEC school”) back then. However, I felt that Jawi has helped me in pronouncing certain Malay words correctly, as I realised that the Rumi (Latin script), though its appears more systematic, has its flaws.

The Rumi script does not make a difference in e pepet (as in beli) and e taling (as in ekor), and both would be simply written as “e” while some of the e taling vowels would be written as “i” as in batik. As a result, we would be quite likely to pronounce a word containing an “e” wrongly (for instance, I pronounced entah in the e taling sound, which my then-Malay language teacher corrected me to the e pepet sound). But once I learned Jawi, I found that e pepet has been in some ways treated the same as the “a” vowel, while e taling is being treated the same as the “i” vowel.

Besides that, many non-native speakers may mispronounce words with “ng” by adding the “g” consonant. For instance, they may mispronounce jangan as “janggan”. By learning that there is a “nga” alphabet in Jawi (not in Arabic), it helps me to constantly remind myself not to mispronounce words in such way.

It was indeed an eye-opener for me to find that in Arabic script (and consequently, Jawi), there are two different letters for “a”, which are alif and ain, two different ha letters to represent “h”, two or three different letters for “s” which are sin (as in bahasa), sad (as in solat) and arguably sa (known as “tha” in Arabic, as in bahas which was previously spelt as bahath), and so on.

There are other complications in Arabic and Jawi orthography which may be hard for
me to elaborate further. Arabic loanwords in Malay are being kept with their original Arabic spellings, which makes them considerably different from the native Malay words. For instance, halal is spelt as “ha kecil/pedas-lam-alif-lam”, bahasa is spelt as “ba-ha besar/simpul-alif-sin”, and Arab is spelt as “ain-ro-ba”.

It is interesting to note that rakyat, which is an Arabic loanword, does not have any letter representing the “k”, instead it is spelt as “ro-ain-ya-ta marbutah”. Therefore after learning about the spelling, I began pronouncing the word as “ra’yat” (that is why it was previously spelt as ra’ayat) and no longer pronouncing it as “rak-yat”.

As my home state is known as “Perak Darul Ridzuan”, I learnt that “Ridzuan” is spelt as “ro-dhad-wau-alif-nun”, which means there is no “z” (zal, zai or zo) in it. No wonder the same word is also being spelt as “Ridwan”, “Riduan”, “Reduan”, “Ridhuan” and so on.

And I also remembered that the same Malay language teacher, who corrected my
pronunciation of the word entah, had taught us that the word masalah should be pronounced as “mas-alah” (instead of “ma-sa-lah” or “ma-sa-a-lah”), which I found it to be another Arabic loanword, spelt as “mim-sin-alif-hamzah-lam-ta marbutah”, where the hamzah mark does the trick of separating syllables.

Jawi and Rumi should complement each other

Jawi is, of course, not safe from its flaws as well. The phrase harapkan pegar, pegar makan padi has got the word pegar (pheasant bird) misspelt as pagar (fence). How can it be possible for a fence, which is not even a living thing, to eat padi? This is due to the indifferent between the “a” vowel and the e pepet vowel in Jawi.

The spellings of certain words in Jawi can be confusing as well. I have seen the word lima spelt as “lam-ya-mim”, which looks like “Lim” to me, a surname commonly used among Chinese of Hokkien and Teochew descent. For me, I would spell lima as “lam-ya-mim-alif” instead.

The Jawi letter wau is equivalent to the “o”, “u” and “w” in Rumi. However, for the same letter wau, it may actually be three different kinds of vowels (apart from the consonant written as “w” in Rumi), as in orang, timur (previously spelt as timor) and buku. Therefore, with Jawi alone, it will be virtually impossible to know the correct pronunciation of a word containing the wau letter.

The pros and cons in both Jawi and Rumi convince me that for one to speak perfect Malay, they should learn both scripts in order to master the pronunciations. After all, learning a new script is definitely much simpler than learning a new language, where one will not only have many new words to learn, but also unfamiliar grammar and sentence making as well.

Even Finnish, which is using Latin script, would be among the hardest languages for a native English speaker to learn, as these two languages are not only unrelated but also
having very much different grammars and vocabularies, and a native English speaker might find Russian and even Hindi easier than Finnish, as Russian and Hindi are distantly related with English, despite using different scripts (Cyrillic and Devanagari respectively).

Nevertheless, I believe that Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) should consider reforming both Jawi and Rumi scripts, in order to make them consistent with each other, and should decide whether Arabic loanwords should retain their original Arabic spellings.

Bringing Jawi back to schools, roads, railway stations etc.

While considering the sensitivity of the non-Malay-Muslims, Jawi education should be done in phase, and not being “bulldozed”. Instead of making it part of the Islamic education, it should be made compulsory in sekolah kebangsaan (SK) and for the Malay students in vernacular schools, while making it optional for non-Malay students in vernacular schools. Perhaps it can be taught in the Malay language societies in vernacular schools, since students who choose to join the society (if given the choice by the school) should be interested in the Malay language as compared with their peers. Once Jawi regains widespread acceptance without religious connotation, it shall be made compulsory in vernacular schools as part of their Malay language education.

Besides Kelantan, where even shop signs must have Jawi, there are a few places
in other states where Jawi is being written alongside Rumi on road signs. There are even a few places such as in George Town, Penang, where Chinese is written on road signs. Therefore, other local governments should follow suit and add Jawi script, Chinese and even Tamil on road signs in phases, wherever appropriate.

We used to have railway signs where the station name is written in English or Rumi, Jawi, Chinese and Tamil, until the Jawi, Chinese and Tamil writings were removed from the station signs as Rumi became the sole official script of the Malay language in Malaysia. I would like to urge Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad (KTMB) to consider bringing back such multilingual railway signs in phases, starting from selected railway stations, in order to revive the legacy where we will take pride of being a multiracial country. However, I would personally suggest that the Jawi script should be as big as the Rumi script on the railway signs, while having much smaller Chinese and Tamil inscriptions.

Jawi can be eventually made co-official with Rumi. In Brunei, both Jawi and Rumi scripts are made co-official for their Malay language, even though the usage of Rumi is now predominant. I believe that we can actually follow their footsteps, without any significant religious connotations, in order to keep both scripts alive.

I believe that it should be a personal choice to use either script in their daily lives, after learning both. Similarly, both Cyrillic and Latin scripts are given official status in Bosnia-
Herzegovina and Serbia for the Bosnian and Serbian languages (which are
essentially the same language).

There are two different forms of Norwegian language being made official in Norway, which are Bokmål (based on Danish and has been the dominant one) and Nynorsk (based on local Norwegian dialects). While one is being brought up and educated in Bokmål, they would be required to learn Nynorsk as their “second language” as well, and vice versa, therefore every Norwegian would have learnt both forms. If Norwegians are able to be educated in both forms of the language while having a personal choice to use either one, I do not see a
problem for Malaysians to learn both Jawi and Rumi for the same form of Malay language.

Jawi is useless and irrelevant? What about ancient Malay scripts?

As mentioned, Jawi helped me in speaking Malay better by learning the correct pronunciation of words, therefore it is not “useless and irrelevant”, if one realises that Malay language is our national language and we should uphold it.

If Jawi has become useless or irrelevant, does it mean that Chinese schools should stop teaching Chinese calligraphy, since we no longer write with a calligraphy brush as in ancient China, but write with a pen, pencil or a chalk?

Does it mean that Chinese schools should also stop teaching Classical Chinese, since it is almost completely different from Modern Chinese, and we are nowable to read translations of Chinese classics such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and even Analects of Confucius in Modern Chinese or even other languages such as English?

After all, out of our 11 to 13 years of primary and secondary school education, as well as our college and university education, most of the things we have learnt would not be able to be applied in our daily lives. Should educationists scrap all the “useless” things from the curriculum and teach students only the “useful” ones? How many of us who have finished schooling, are using algebra, differentiation and integration, trigonometry and so on in our daily life calculations?

Some may argue that if we should bring back Jawi, we should also bring back pre-Islamic ancient scripts such as Pallava and Rencong. While I personally do not see the need to bring back these scripts, which have been abandoned for centuries, and the Malay language has been evolving, I do not see a problem in bringing any of them back, if there is such a popular demand.

However, by reviving any of these ancient scripts would require careful scrutiny in order to suit the modern Malay language. Nevertheless, these scripts should still be continued to be taught in university degree courses such as Malay studies, as students should have a thorough understanding of the history of the Malay language. Enthusiasts of these ancient scripts may even establish clubs or societies to attract fellow hobbyist and get together.

The basis – Malay as the national language

Jawi is useful in helping us to learn the Malay language, which is our national language. Instead of using Islamic religious rhetoric, proponents and the government should be using the status of the Malay language as the national language as the argument. The government certainly needs to fix the mess left down by the previous BN government in terms of racial and religious harmony, as there are certain quarters within the non-Malays having resentment against the Malay language and would like Malaysia to follow the footstep of Singapore to replace Malay with English as the common language.

The idea of replacing Malay with English would definitely face vehement opposition by the Malays who see this as their homeland, and I personally see this as some sort of “colonial mentality” and we would be losing our own identity. Vietnam is also being made up of many different ethnicities speaking different languages, yet it is the Kinh people’s language known as Vietnamese, instead of their former coloniser’s language which is French, that
becomes the sole official language.

To be ideal, I would personally also like to see Malay students in the future being required to learn Chinese, Tamil (in Peninsular Malaysia), Kadazandusun (in Sabah), Bajau (in Sabah) or Iban (in Sarawak) as well. By then, each student would have learnt at least three languages in schools – Malay, English, and any of the major languages used in their respective states. I believe this will encourage racial harmony without jeopardising anyone’s language while upholding Malay as the national language and English as the de facto international language.

By then, we would be moving closer to Switzerland, where native speakers of German, French and Italian would learn each other’s languages.

I am afraid that if the public ignorance is not being dispelled, and the non-Malays especially the Chinese, keep opposing the teaching of Jawi script, it might really open a Pandora’s box where non-Malays would go on demanding to abolish Malay as a compulsory language in schools. I do not want to see our country becoming like Belgium where many among native Dutch and French speakers do not speak each other’s language (therefore lacking a “common language”) and being segregated, and the language barrier was partly to be blamed for the Pécrot rail crash on March 27, 2001 that killed eight and injured 12, as the French-speaking signalman in Wavre and the Dutch-speaking signalman in Leuven failed to communicate with each other in an event of emergency.

Elijah Hee is an FMT reader.