How Arabi Malayalam is scripting a comeback this election season

Thiruvananthapuram:

Election campaign graffiti for M B Rajesh, who is the LDF candidate in Palakkad, has brought to discussion a script which had been popular in the state till a few decades ago.


The graffiti seeking vote for M B Rajesh invited flak on social media for the ‘use of Arabic for minority appeasement’. However, the script used in the graffiti was Arabi Malayalam, a variant form of the Arabic script. The script, which is used for written and oral communication among Muslims, has its origin that dates back to pre-Islamic period.

Sherrif Kakkuzhi Maliakkal, associate professor at University of Calicut, in a social media post stated that he learned the script at the age of four, two years before his formal education began.

Stating that Arabi Malayalam was the most used script during 19th century, Maliakkal said even Chelakkodan Ayisha, the brand ambassador of Kerala’s first literacy movement, learned Arabi Malayalam before she started learning Malayalam.

N K Jameel Ahamed, researcher in Arabi Malayalam, said it was absurd to term Arabi Malayalam as a language of Muslims. “Until 300 years ago the script in the region was not accessible for all. The foreigner traders who arrived in the state had no other option but to write down Malayalam in their own script. Such scripts include Suriyani Malayalam and Portuguese Malayalam. Arabi Malayalam is such an attempt to write Malayalam in Arabic. An Arab person may be able to read Arabi Malayalam, but, may not be able to comprehend,” he said.

Linguistic experts said using the script for graffiti could indeed be an attempt to connect with the Muslim community. They also said that the graffiti has lot of spelling mistakes.


WRITING ON THE WALL: A graffiti seeking vote for LDF candidate in Palakkad, M B Rajesh, invited flak on social media for the ‘use of Arabic for minority appeasement’. The script, in fact, has its origin dating back to pre-Islamic period