Honour and shame

Pakistan is in the grip of honour and parliament has become its guardian. Only tragedy will follow. French statesman and political philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755) preferred virtue to honour. The operatic principle of a coercive state is honour; the operatic principle of democracy is virtue. Honour is primal; virtue is civilized.

Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) thinks the “last man” has now achieved his destiny because he no longer feels compelled to defend his honour in a liberal democracy. The “first man” that he located in Plato’s Republic died in order to defend his honour. Tragedy was created in this quest for honour.

Honour is felt by the state as sovereignty. This is where the primitive feeling of honour finally rests. If the state is internally weak, it can hardly defend its external sovereignty. In consequence, it feels dishonoured. Fukuyama in State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (Profile Books 2004) writes:
“Weak governance undermines the principle of sovereignty of which the post-Westphalian international order has been built. It does so because the problems that weak states generate for themselves and for others vastly increase the likelihood that someone else in the international system will seek to intervene in their affairs against their wishes to forcibly fix the problem. Weak here means a lack of institutional capacity to implement and enforce policies, often driven by an underlying lack of legitimacy of the political system as a whole” (p.129).

Honour and shame are interlinked. Sometimes they are two sides of the same coin. In Urdu, ‘sharm’ (shame) can stand in for honour. The English word ‘honour’ has no known root but has come from Latin. In French, a derivative from honour, ‘honte’, can stand in for shame. But in English, ‘honesty’ is derived from honour.

Shame is taken to mean something negative, but in Urdu ‘sharm’ is actually ‘honour’. It is only when someone loses shame that he becomes dishonoured. The negative meaning is developed from the common usage of feeling ‘sharm’ or the sense of (lost) honour. Urdu ‘sharminda’ is negative and also means unclothed, as in ‘sharminda-e-maani’ (revealing the real meaning). Shame is also “nang”, which is close to nanga (naked) in Urdu. In English, shameless would indicate that ‘shame’ itself is not negative.

In Arabic the word ‘haya’ is ‘shame’, and honour is derived from it. Arabic etymology traces it from ‘hayy’ (to expand or contract). One of the names Allah is Hayy (He Who Gives Life). One sense is that whatever contracts to the touch is alive. Arabic ‘hayat’ is life but ‘hayyat’ is ‘snake’ because of its movement in contractions. When you feel shame, your muscles contract. In Hebrew, ‘khoot’ means muscle, but the word for shameless is ‘khootspah’. This has come into English as ‘chutzpah’ meaning a kind of brashness akin to courage.

‘Lajja’ (shame) in Sanskrit seems to be cognate with ‘lag’ (touch). It is possible that the feeling of shame was a muscular reaction to touching. The English expression ‘touching’ (causing emotion) carries the same implication. The plant touch-me-not is called ‘lajawanti’. It is quite possible that Sanskrit got its word for shame from physical sensation, just like Arabic.
Honour leads to extreme action. It seldom hurts the powerful but hurts the weak man who feels it. In the world of states, the weak state feels it more and expresses it through an obsession with sovereignty. As Montesquieu first found out, honour is the trait of the less civilised. Honour is embedded in irrationality; Montesquieu equated virtue with rationality.

__________________
Vive la Démocratie

Burma — or Myanmar — is killing its Muslims, with the state and the Buddhist majority involved together in this brutal pastime. The Muslim minority is not accepted as Burmese citizens. They are a people without a state unless the world persuades the Burmese government to stop the genocide.
The Muslims of Burma call themselves the Rohingya. They are 800,000 strong. Burma has a population of 48 million. Because Muslims were not accepted, they kept migrating with not much success. There are 300,000 of them in Bangladesh and 24,000 in Malaysia. The world is resisting Burma’s request to take charge of them. Their origins are uncertain mainly because of the varying versions of their genesis.
History speaks of them as living in the Arakan region of Burma, today called Rakhine. After a recent massacre, when a television channel interviewed the victims, they spoke in Urdu. But their speech is actually supposed to be another Indo-European language linguistically related to the Chittagongian language spoken in the southernmost part of Bangladesh bordering Burma.
Next door, Bangladesh has always been reluctant to absorb the Rohingyas. The British Raj exported a lot of Muslims to Burma and even exiled the last Mughal king there. The capital of Rangoon figured in the Urdu songs produced by the Mumbai film industry. Lahore’s industry of Urdu literary journals also flourished on the basis of the Muslim reading public in Burma.
One etymological version is that the word Rohingya is the Arabic word ‘rahm’ meaning ‘mercy’, which is clearly far-fetched as an attempt to dub the Burmese Muslims as Arabs settled in Burma since the 8th century CE. The tale goes like this: an Arab ship was wrecked off the Burmese coast and the surviving Arabs asked for the ‘rahm’ (mercy) of the local king.
There is another story tracing the etymology to Pakistan or Afghanistan. The ‘roh’ in Rohingya means ‘mountain’ in Sanskrit and the region of mountains in northwest India was known as Roh. The Rohila Pathans of Rohelkhand in India also trace their origin to this region. But the word ‘rohingya’ appeared only recently, in the 1950s. So, we don’t know exactly where the origin of the Burmese Muslims can be located.
The word ‘rohdas’ in Sanskrit means mountain. Is the name of a Pakistani place called Rohtas related, perhaps?
The sense of mountain or hill is derived from the sense of mounting, rising and growing. Indian music has a word for the rising note: ‘arohi’. The literal meaning of ‘aroha’ is ‘to mount’. Hindi also adds the word for horse (‘asva’) to mean ‘rider’. Thus, ‘arohi’ becomes ‘asvaroha’, meaning someone mounted on a horse. In Persian, we have the word ‘savar’ for ‘horse-rider’, also written ‘asvar’ to point to ‘asva’ the horse in it. Music notes ascend (arohi) and descend (avarohi).
I can’t resist commenting on Rohi, the desert that inspires our greatest Seraiki poet Khwaja Ghulam Farid. My dictionary says that here ‘roh’ means ‘seed’ because it helps in making anything grow (ascend). My hunch is that Rohi was seen by its people as the origin of life. I could be wrong.
If the Rohingya are mountain or hill-dwelling people, it is more likely that they moved from the hills of Chittagong in Bangladesh to Burma because they spoke a language that did not fit into the language-based nationalism of that state.
It is possible that the military junta changed the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar to remove any association with India. Burma sounded too much like a Hindi word. It was, in fact, derived from the name of the majority Bamar ethnic group. Myanmar is considered to be the literary form of their name.

__________________
Vive la Démocratie

The annual pilgrimage

This year’s Eidul Azha was no different from the one last year because of the rising price of the sacrificial animal. The original animal was sheep but we shifted to goat because of our preference for goat mutton. Now, we have shifted again to cow and camel, collectively shared by a number of contributors. The ritual is central to our faith.
Eidul Azha is also rightly called Big Eid because of the collective ritual of Hajj and the more universal ritual of animal sacrifice: Azha points to the distinctness (clarity, brightness) of this Eid.
Hajj has the root ‘hjj’. In Urdu, there are many words originating from this root and meaning many things, apparently quite apart from one another. The root ‘hjj’ means to intend to do something. The root also implies intending to do something big.
Thus, the intention to make a pilgrimage to Makkah is called ‘Hajj’. Because of the annual nature of the ritual, the Holy Quran also uses Hajj to mean year. The root also means something else. It means intending to block something from happening.
It is from this sense of blocking something that you have the Urdu word ‘ehtijaj’. It means protest. If you raise an objection to something you are doing ehtijaj. Objection itself means to throw something in as if to block.
Reasoning itself can be an intention to block. We have the Urdu word ‘hujjat’ (reasoning) from it. The Holy Quran is itself called the final and clear hujjat (baligha). In many contexts, we use hujjat to mean objection. It is used even to convey a sense of hesitation.
When a need is given reason it is called haajat. A person who is in need is called ‘muhtaaj’. It means that he has hujjat for wanting something. A Persian formulation makes it hajatmand. A more formal way of saying need is ehtiaj.
In the Bible, there is a prophet named Haggai. The root indicated in Hebrew is somebody born during a festival. If you pursue the root further, it takes you, like always, to Syriac. There, it means make a pilgrimage and have a feast.
Hajj always had a strong association with feasting. That is why the ‘big feast’ happens for Muslims on Eidul Azha, at the conclusion of Hajj. A person who does Hajj is called al-haaj. We make it informal by saying haaji. At times, we don’t take the haaji title seriously and may even use it sarcastically.
I am at times alerted by the hagio- prefix in English words. When someone wrote Hagia Sophia to describe a famous mosque in Turkey, I thought it had something to do with Hajj, but that was not true. The formulation was Latin.
Hagio- comes from Greek, meaning holy or sacred. It led to expressions like stand in awe of or to worship someone. Originally, the writer of the lives of saints was called hagiographer.
Today, if you write a very revering comment on someone it would be called hagiographical. The art of writing praising biographies has attracted the epithet, hagiography.
Anything Greek will take us to the Aryan or Indo-European group of languages. In Sanskrit, the same hagio- prefix can be seen in the word ‘yajna’, meaning worship or sacrifice. Dozens of Hindi names are derived from this word. It is also pronounced jagia at times. The Parsis have it as Yasna in their old Avestan language.
One thing is certain. The basis of worship has always been sacrifice. The ritual of Hajj is a great mystery in which sacrifice is the central act at the popular level. Correctly, however, for Muslims, the stay at Arafat is the central act of Hajj.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/459315/t...al-pilgrimage/

__________________
Vive la Démocratie