WHY THE AJAMI IS NEITHER ARABIC NOR ISLAMIC

By Mohammed Adamu

An Online friend of mine, Victoria Javeh has sincerely asked, on her Post, to know why, even in spite of the present opportunity for a ‘re-design of our currency’, ‘Arabic’ has still not been taken off the Naira. And although I had previously done a more comprehensive piece in my defunct Column, Javeh’s sincerity motivated me to scribble a reply to her, and which -with necessary emendation- I reproduce below:

Preamble:
“Yes the non-English ‘words’ on the Naira are Arabic -to the extent only that they are made up of Arabic alphabets. But not so the semantics (or meaning) that they embody. To that extent they are simply ‘ajami’ -not Arabic. And the reason is not farfetched. It is like scribbling with the English alphabets to convey an intelligible message in Youruba -e.g. to write the Yoruba word éléyí using the English alphabets e, l, e, y, i. This cannot be said to be English. Rather it is Yoruba, written with English alphabets. Do not take, do not add!

No More Arabic Than English:
Meaning for example, that a couple of Arabic alphabets on the Naira merely combining to form the Hausa phrase ‘Naira Goma’ (Ten Naira), will still be no less Hausa (in semantic essence) than the ajemized word ‘éléyí’ is Yoruba! Or if we insist on the contrary, then ‘Naira Goma’ rendered in Arabic alphabets cannot be any more so (Arabic), than ‘éléyí rendered in English alphabets, is English.

No More Islamic Than Christian:
And if a combination of Arabic alphabets intelligible only to the Arabo-literate Hausa is necessarily ‘Islamic’ merely because it shares the same alphabets with the Quran, then by the same stretch of logic a combination of English alphabets (e g the Igbo word ‘kedu’) intelligible only to the Anglo-literate Igbo has also to be ‘Christian’ for the reason that it draws from the same pool of linguistic elements as the Bible!

But is it? Certainly no! It is merely a fact of history that when the colonialists came they had met a majority of Northerners already literate in the ‘ajami’ system of education (just as they had met the Muslims with a comprehensive Islamic legal system) with the Arabic alphabets as the centerpiece of both systems.

And just as the denominational lingua of our national currency is still necessarily dual (catering as well to the Anglo-literate Nigerians as to the Arabo-literate ones) , so is our Criminal Justice System still necessarily a dual one anchored on an Anglo-sourced ‘Criminal Code’ that operates in the South and a largely Shariah-biased Penal Code in the North.

Intelligiblity And The Ajami:
Fact is, a preponderant number of Hausas especially in the rural North still uses both the ajamized Hausa and (or rarely) the pure Arabic, as means of written and oral communication in a secondary language. But the ajami is neither wholly Arabic nor is it any near anything Islamic. And there is no better proof of that than that whereas the ajami is hundred percent un-intelligible to the Arabs, so is pure Arabic also not necessarily intelligible to every Muslim who understands the ajami!

The same way that the Anglo-ajemized Yoruba word ‘éléyí’ or the Igbo ‘kedu’ are neither intelligible to the English man, nor will every Yoruba or Igbo man who can colloquialize the English alphabets to write ‘éléyí’ or ‘kedu’, necessarily Anglo-literate -even though English alphabets are the syntactic substructures used in the formation of those words.

Epilogue:
And as it is therefore obvious that there are many Arabo-literate Hausas who benefit from the presence of ajami on the Naira, I have been asking especially those who are crusading for its removal: ‘what benefit exactly does its presence on our currency obviously stand in the way of? I have still not been given an intelligent answer!