In a Radio New Zealand programme Asian
Report, Muslim Women’s Camp,
broadcast on the 4th of October 2011, a 13 year old girl makes what
to my ears is an extraordinary statement, “I’m from India and I was born here.”
I am sure my attitude is commonplace when
my national identity is questioned, to describe myself as, “I am a New Zealander, born in England
but have lived here fifty-two years.” My
primary identity is as a New Zealander, notwithstanding having been born
overseas. Yet here is an NZ-born girl who considers her primary identity to be
Indian.
This programme was useful in highlighting
other issues of New Zealand Muslims as they attempt to integrate without
assimilating, to become New Zealanders while holding onto a culture, society
and religion which are antithetical to so much that mainstream New Zealanders
unwittingly take for granted.
The camp participants wear hijabs when in
public. Yet one of the leaders says,
“It’s about connecting the youth to the land so that they feel because they are
here, they are Kiwi Muslims, they are New Zealanders and recognising that this
is their land as well as knowing the traditions… We are teaching them the
history of New Zealand
knowing what it is and allowing them to see themselves as part of this community.”
Yet keeping themselves apart.
The girl quoted above, and others on the
programme, make themselves identifiably Muslim by the way they speak. There is, in England, and no doubt in all
countries with high levels of Muslim immigration, a trend to a Muslim accent
which the TV character Ali G reifies. It
is an overlay on the regional accent, yet common to all regional accents when
spoken by Muslims. I’ve seen little
research on this and its origins, though I suspect it may be faux Arabic via
Middle Eastern imams who are contracted to mosques in the United Kingdom
and elsewhere. Having frequently heard
such speech on BBC news and documentaries, it seems to operate on the level of
a patois without a vocabulary, in contrast with, say, that of a Jewish or Black
enclave. Put another way, its culture is
not living or creative; it is simply one of vocalised identity.
The accent stems in part from the
shibbolethic pronunciation of ‘Muslim’ by Muslims. The ‘u’ is a sound not heard in NZ or native
English, lying midway between ‘moon’ and ‘mud’, whereas the English / New Zealand
pronunciation is as in the latter. Other
words with a similar ‘u’ sound to ‘mud’ are changed in the same direction. An example from this broadcast is ‘culture’,
and this may be due to a high use of the word in terms of their identity. While I’ve not seen this commented on, G K
Chesterton made mention of it in The
Flying Inn of 1914:
It was fully
four minutes before she could understand a word the man was saying: he spoke
English with so extraordinary an accent that she supposed at first that he was
talking in his own Oriental tongue. All
the noises of that articulation were odd; the most marked was an extreme prolongation
of the short “u” into “oo” as in “poo-oot” for “put”.
It is interesting then, to hear this accent
develop in New Zealand, making it a worthwhile pursuit for a phonetician.
Muslim
Women’s Camp was brief, just
eleven minutes, but carried insights into NZ Muslim’s attitudes to integration
which are unlikely to be commented on elsewhere. The reason for this will be difficult to
understand for people whose culture and sense of history has been diluted to
the point where they no longer recognise it.
To them, ‘all people are basically the same,” without realising that
their underlying assumption is “like me.”
They could not be more wrong.
