Author
Prof Nomad
Prof Nomad (Ahmar Mahboob) is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney and Fellow of the National Talent Pool; President of Pakistan’s Programme for Highly Qualified Overseas Pakistanis.
The Diamond Jug Part 1 Imagine that there is a jug made of diamonds And full of life-giving fluids sitting on a table. Now, imagine that someone comes along And says: This jug and everything in it is mine. The owners of the jug reject this claim. A long battle ensues. Finally, the thieves leave. But, instead of the precious jug They leave behind a number of glasses Of different shapes, colours, and sizes. Each filled with toxic looking And foul-smelling contents. What can the owners of the jug do now? The past is lost: only…
Regaining Balance: Relearning religion Why is it that while religions teach peace, people kill and exploit each other in the name of religion? A one-line answer to this question: The term religion leads to a confusion between two things: 1) practices (action/verb), and 2) a category (entity/noun). The notion of religion as a category evolved during European colonisation as the colonisers, who travelled by sea, captured more lands and peoples, who had different practices. The term religion itself was adapted from one or more…
That’s right. For all the books that humans have written and read across time, we don’t really know much about the world that we live in. And, given the material and social contexts that so many of us live in, there is little reason for us to trust knowledge marketed to us by our colonial masters.
If our knowledge is increasing every day (as measured by the number of research publications), why is it that we see such high levels of social and environmental injustice around the world?
This essay is based on an understanding that European colonisation was carried out through both physical and socio-semiotic violence. This socio-semiotic violence includes the formation of new concepts and categories in English, e.g., ‘country’, ‘language’, and ‘religion’; an introduction of new forms of education and literacy; and, using these categories and processes to divide up and influence peoples’ beliefs and practices. While the Europeans physically retreated from their colonies starting the middle of the 20th…
If we can learn to identify how our paradise is being kept hostage by a dependence on colonial approaches to literacy and education, then, it is possible for us to gain independence from colonial powers by developing and using alternative approaches
The unmaking of paradise: Literacy as Trojan Horse-II by: Prof Nomad Our valley changes with seasons. Each as beautiful as the other. The dynamics of landscape, of life, of beliefs keeps shifting and changing – each image a perfection in itself. Then, we see large wooden vessels floating through the oceans and arriving at the entrance to our paradise. Vessels full of humans, even if they look a bit different from the ones in paradise. Full of welcoming curiosity as ever, the valley shared all that it had. At first these…
Boli symbolised our relationships with others. Boli varied when one related with different people, beings, and non-living things; relationship to living things and relationship to places/locations
What can an alternative classificatory system and nomenclature for language look like?
Macaulay’s belief* that we “cannot at present be educated by means of mother-tongue”.
