Page 117 - Non-violence and peace-building

Non-violence and Peace-building in Islam

literature on the subject in Russian. This engendered a
sea-change in attitudes towards the Russian language in
America. America began to arrange to obtain Russian
scientific journals and to translate them into English. All
important scientific treatises in Russian were rendered
into English.
This sudden importance that the Russian language
acquired in America was not a result of any group
staging demonstrations or making demands. Rather, it
was because the language was able to prove that it was
useful and, therefore, deserving of such attention.

The same is true for the Japanese language today. Till
the mid-20 century, not many people in the West cared
th
to learn Japanese. But today, scientific treatises written
in Japan are quickly translated into Western languages
and enjoy great respect and popularity in Western
countries. This is because of Japan’s amazing progress
in the field of electronics. Western scholars realize
that their understanding of electronics will remain far
from complete unless they are able to read the latest
researches being conducted in this field in Japan. This
is one reason why there are so many scholars of the
Japanese language in the West today. By proving its
importance and usefulness, the Japanese language has
won for itself a very respectable position in the West
that it did not enjoy before.
The actual problem with Urdu is that the corpus of
Urdu writings consists largely of just two genres: one
is poetry, and the other is religious sermons, written
in a preachy mode. In today’s scientific age, these two
genres have lost their importance. There is now no

116