Voice of British Muslim Women

When the word ‘the’ brought new meaning and a re-evaluation of my mother tongue, and myself 

Iffat Mirza Rashid, Bentley

“I like the idea of knowing it, but I don’t think I want to sit in a class and learn it” is something I said to my Spanish teacher as a 16-year-old as he tried to convince me to take A Level Spanish. Fast forward a few months, on my GCSE results day, I suddenly decided to change one of my A Level options to Spanish. At the time, after our first year of A Levels, we’d drop one of our four subjects and continue with the other three. I took Spanish with the intention to drop it after a year. Fast forward to the end of that year, and I decided to keep it and drop a different subject. What I mean to say is, at no point in my secondary school career, did I plan to learn Spanish. But I think what always kept me interested enough to be able to make these last-minute decisions was that I was always attracted to a whole new world – a new realm of stories, media, jokes, history…and I knew if I wanted to access that, then learning a new language would be the way to go. 

However, what I didn’t expect or anticipate, was that by learning a new language, I’d come to know so much more about my own mother tongue, Urdu, and my adopted mother tongue, English. For someone who speaks Urdu day in, day out, it was only as I learned and pondered, the Spanish language, that I came to the realisation that Urdu has no definite article – that is, there is no word for the word ‘the’. And I thought, how strange! I use that word thousands of times a day in English, and Spanish has four words for ‘the’, depending on masculine/feminine words and singular/plural words (a couple of years later, I’d come to find out that Italian has seven!). And yet, Urdu has none – how did I go so many years of speaking a language and not noticing something that suddenly, seemed so obvious? 

It was a moment where I realised, that I don’t even know that much about myself – I know it was a small thing to notice, I’m sure it’s something that for others was more, but it was a reason for me to self-reflect. There is a beautiful verse in the Holy Qur’an, in Chapter 49, verse 14, which states: 

‘O mankind, We have created you from male and a female; and We have made you into clans and tribes that you may recognize one another. Verily, the most honourable among you, in the sight of Allah, is he who is the most righteous among you. Surely, Allah is All-knowing, All-Aware.’ 

These words of the Holy Qur’an get right to the heart of human existence, which extend so much wisdom right to the present day. I think living in the 21^st century brings a lot of strange paradoxes we need to learn to reconcile ourselves with. We live in an extraordinarily globalised world, yet we are becoming more insular. Further to this paradox, as we become more insular, we know even less about ourselves, as we refuse to self-reflect. We have more opportunities and tools than ever to learn about the world, yet we are willingly ignorant. And so, we remain ignorant about ourselves. 

In the end, language is not just about communication between A and B. It is an articulation of a whole worldview, as well as inversely, having an influence on the worldview in question. As we come to learn more about our mother-tongue, even if it is something as simple as pondering the word ‘the’, we can identify what we don’t know about ourselves, and what we must learn. And sometimes, we can only come to learn about ourselves, by first learning about others.  

It is so important to never take any knowledge you have for granted – for that knowledge to be worth anything, we must continuously interrogate and re-examine it. What we think we might know, we may realise that we only have a superficial, almost instinctive understanding of, but lack depth. Engaging with what we think we already know – after having learned something new – enriches not just our knowledge, but our whole sense of self.  

The realisation of the word ‘the’ was the first time I thought about Urdu and Spanish comparatively, and it was a thought that never really ended, as my obsession over the last few years has been reading literature and novels that highlight interactions between these two languages and the various cultures that engage with the languages. From the flippant statement I made to my teacher a decade ago, to this small realisation, I didn’t realise that I’d spend the rest of my life, trying to learn more about myself, through a reflection of my mother tongue.