Be Careful What You Mean, If You Know What I Mean!

At the Tallberg Foundation in Stockholm, President Nasheed spoke about “Saving Paradise”, and I joined him in a Panel Discussion thereafter. After a while, we opened the floor for discussion and a gentleman in a grey jacket on the far left raised his hand. The moderator said, “Yes, sir, the coloured gentleman in the back, please go ahead.” The gentleman promptly joked, “Well, we are all coloured one way or another,” and proceeded to ask the question.

The incident reminded me of a few incidents where I had had difficulty using the right word.

I remember a conversation I had long ago with a young Maldivian who was going to school in India. We could never agree on what the word “indigenous” meant! He insisted that it meant “made in India”, and when I explained to him that it meant that something was native to a country or produced in that particular country, he simply uttered, “exactly!” We were in India and there was no way I could win the argument.

But I seemed to have learned nothing from that experience. A young Maldivian, I must say quite an educated person, angrily confronted me on the street one day, in February 2005, claiming that I had used disparaging language in reference to his beloved party, the MDP, in a BBC interview. He was furious and accused me of calling MDP a “suthulhi goani” – or, gunny bag! I told him that I said no such thing, but he insisted that I had called his party a “gunny bag” or "jute bag"!

Well, I told him that I had not used any insulting language but simply said that MDP was a “rag bag”. And rag bag simply means an assortment of unconnected things.

The point I was making was that, at that time, in my view,( and I see it differently today), MDP were a diverse group who shared a common hatred of Gayoom but not much besides, if you consider that there were mullahs and secular liberals in the party.
Rag bag is not a pejorative term. Granted that “rags” are not complimentary; and neither are bags, perhaps. But a rag bag is not just the addition of two words. I told him that “rag bag” was an idiom, although by now I was feeling a bit like an idiot for having used this particular idiom.

Some words have serious consequences. On 16 September 2001, speaking from the White House, President Bush said, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take a while.” This immediately sent shivers through the Middle East and Europe, where the “crusades” referred to the wars over holy lands between Muslim Middle East and Christian Europe. Bush insisted that it was not a war against Islam, but the word played into the hands of the Jihadists in the Middle East. The statement was played time and time again over the airwaves in the Middle East, and it evoked fears of a clash of civilisations.

The term “secular” is also a similarly loaded word. For most Muslims, the word evokes enemy images, a forceful trampling upon of the rights of Muslim communities, of forced exile, imprisonment, torture and worse. Isn’t that what happened in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and Iraq? “Secular modernisers” ravaged Muslim communities and were autocratic, repressive and brutal. In Europe, however, the experience was quite the reverse, and the European secular ideal rose out of the death and destruction of the religious wars. Experience had taught Muslim communities that secularism produced dictatorships, although intrinsically there is no such association. So when secular liberals in the Maldives talk with Islamists on this subject, they are talking past each other.

“Emergency rule” was another such term. I reckon many of the Old Guard were quite at ease with the use of the term. After all, that is the norm in Egypt. But for me, and for many of my peers, “emergency rule” brings to mind the things that happened in India in 1975-77, when India was under emergency rule. I am sure the Old Guard never understood that many people had developed allergies to emergency rule.

Today, “privatisation” is becoming a confusing word in the Maldives. For some it is a reference to the Chicago School and Milton Friedman, and to a proven strategy to increase prosperity for all. For others, as recently argued by Dr Riffat Afeef in an article in Miadhu, it evokes images of imperialism, greed and corruption. It would be good to clarify what we mean exactly in this evolving debate, before the people develop allergies to it.

When President Nasheed used the term “nulafaa” during the recent parliamentary campaign, I thought he meant “mean”. But I was surprised that many of his own supporters translated that to mean “ruthless”! Democratically-elected presidents do not have the wherewithal to become ruthless; but all politicians can be mean. And that is not the same thing.

Anyone for a red herring?

Ahmed Shaheed for the OSA