The seemingly ingenious solution, by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, to our nation’s problem of urinating in public, is enjoying a moderate degree of success and has managed to make our streets slightly less noxious, but the paradigms that have made it possible might just be a little more unpleasant than the overpowering odour of urine could ever be.
The solution, which was to paint on public walls susceptible to being used as urinals, sentences like “please do not urinate here” or “there is a toilet up ahead” in Arabic instead of Bangla script had proven to be a powerful deterrent, as people seem hesitant to urinate on Arabic letters, regardless of what they say or whether they can read them, but will happily pee away on anything written in their mother tongue.
Apart from the obvious insult of having our national language, so emotionally held aloft and made essential to our national narrative, wantonly desecrated by all and every urinator in need, the fact that a foreign script can elicit such respect, even when it can’t be deciphered, or rather, especially because it can’t be deciphered, and even if it had said “don’t urinate here you degenerate lowlife” speaks of associations that are problematic on a number of levels.
Even though many people in Bangladesh can read neither Bangla or Arabic, loads, if not all, of them will associate Arabic lettering with religious or scriptural writing before they will associate Bangla with the same.
So, it’s reasonable to assume that if an illiterate person were to come across an actual Qur’anic verse written in Bangla on a wall he (they are almost always male) was about to use, he would urinate away to his bladder’s content on the holy verse, oblivious to the fact that he is committing the very offence he has tried to avoid by not taking a leak on a piece of Arabic writing that could say just about anything at all.
Put another way, reverence combined with illiteracy, fear and ignorance causes him to pee on sacred words written in Bangla and respect, to the point of worshipping, profane words written in Arabic. If no one recognises that as a problem, we’re not paying enough attention.
In another scenario, an educated person who can read Bangla but not Arabic might also hesitate to urinate on Arabic letters on a wall, since Arabic writing in Bangladesh is almost exclusively religious in nature, and he may want to avoid peeing on the Qur’an or the Hadith, in a roundabout sort of way.
This too is problematic since the person’s religious sentiment is being manipulated, albeit for a decent cause, but for something that is not essentially religious in nature, giving credence to the numerous instances where overtly religious symbolism is used to further non-religious objectives.
Only the person who can read Arabic can make an educated choice not to urinate on the wall and follow the instructions encoded, but he may also, ironically, choose to ignore it if he doesn’t think, and rightly so, that Arabic is holy simply for being Arabic.
The most worrying thing about this absurd, upside-down form of cognition is that it was dreamt up by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, presumably the main governmental body responsible for keeping religious matters free of forgery.
One has to wonder why the ministry would sanction such obvious trickery out of religious iconography, even if its intentions were noble. It suggests that people at the ministry are well-aware of the fear Arabic and Arabic writing inspires among the ignorant, and are perfectly willing to use this phenomenon for whatever outcome it can effectively produce, not a very comforting thought if you consider how badly wrong that can go.
Even more worrying is the fact that they took their cues from a similar effort in India, where images of gods and idols were posted on public walls, deterring people from urinating on or near them. So then, is our Ministry of Religious Affairs encouraging the idolising of Arabic as a language, effectively promoting the very thing Islam discourages -- the worshipping of lamps instead of the light?
