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One of the challenges with successfully teaching Urdu to kids is the decline of the language (or it's use/promotion/value). Native Urdu speakers don't care for it themselves and have not promoted it in Indo-Pak itself.

For example:

- Try finding Urdu fiction books for kids of all ages, starting from kids learning to read. There has been no development in this area. The only books available are the same ones from 40 years ago and those are more suitable for kids from like 8-9 years and up. What about kids ages 4 and up? You can't find anything for this age group. Contrast to English and you will find a wealth of literature targeting kids from an early age to help them learn to read. Although driven by business/profit, there are a wealth of different book series/characters that encourage kids to read e.g. Harry Potter from more recent times (Chronicles of Narnia, Hardy Boys, etc. from older times). There is no equivalent in Urdu. How are kids supposed to build their vocabulary?

- Try finding games/activities/apps that teach kids Urdu. You will not find anything. Contrast to English, you will find plenty of resources e.g. Leap Frog books with the reading pen, flash cards, online apps such as Reading Eggs, etc.

- Try finding modern cartoons in Urdu. Other than Dawat e Islami's excellent Ghulam Rasool cartoon series, you will not find anything (if you do, it will be very limited).

 

Regarding teaching the kids Arabic, my two cents from another post:

Basically, learning a different language needs to be as organic as possible - daily, practical use in real-life situations. Ideally go live in an Arab land for a year while the kids are young (easier said then done, I know).

 

Arabic and English, both written and spoken with a heavy emphasis on eloquent speech. There are plenty of Arab speakers in the UK to learn from. Leeds is good as is London or even Birmingham. Do we have Sunni Desi background ulema in the west who are fluent in spoken Arabic?

And how will our young tell their peers about Islam if not with great eloquence, wit and speaking to the level of the audience? Urdu will not help here though we owe much to the vast work of Ulema from the India/Pakistan region.

 

i can't imagine that would be the case for Ottoman Turkish, which is why the murtad ataturk did away with the script and replaced it by latin script. it's an open secret that he did it so that the coming generations will be completely detached from the Islamic knowledge corpus of their predecessors

even if the entire corpus of Ottoman Turkish religious literature is extant and not burnt down by murtaddeen, just imagine the amount of effort it would be to find all that literature in various libraries/warehouses etc and an even bigger task to convert it to awam-readable form

the Ottoman empire lasted for 620 odd years. they were devout Muslims and outstanding Hanafis who revered the resting places of the pious, and stood up to recite salam on the Prophet 3alaihis salam, something the Turks do to this day. let zameel-besharam say all Turkish Hanafis are misguided followers of hawa.

just struck me - that is precisely what's happening to us now. our youf is detached from the script, won't be long before they lose a major chunk of the literature. just as is the case with Turks, only some major and important works will be roman-scripted, and the rest will be confined to history

 

On a slightly digressive note, even back in 1960s Sahir Ludhianvi was moved to pen the following poem lamenting Urdu's treatment at the hand of establishment. In 1969 Indira Gandhi's Congress government was paying the lip-service to Urdu by celebrating Mirza Ghalib’s centenary on grand scale (to burnish its pseudo-secular credentials).

Sahir called out the state hypocrisy and lamented thus:

ikkīs baras guzre āzādi-e-kāmil ko
tab jā ke kahīñ ham ko 'ġhālib' kā ḳhayāl aayā
turbat hai kahāñ us kī maskan thā kahāñ us kā
ab apne suḳhan-parvar zehnoñ meñ savāl aayā

sau saal se jo turbat chādar ko tarastī thī
ab us pe aqīdat ke phūloñ kī numāish hai
Urdu ke ta'alluq se kuchh bhed nahīñ khultā
ye jashn ye hañgāma ḳhidmat hai ki sāzish hai

jin shahroñ meñ gūñjī thī ġhālib kī navā barsoñ
un shahroñ meñ ab urdu benām-o-nishāñ Thahrī
āzādi-e-kāmil kā elaan huā jis din
ma'atūb zabāñ Thahrī ġhaddār zabāñ Thahrī

jis ahd-e-siyāsat ne ye zinda zabāñ kuchlī
us ahd-e-siyāsat ko marhūm kā ġham kyuuñ hai
'ġhālib' jise kahte haiñ urdu hī kā shā.ir thā
Urdu pe sitam Dhā kar 'ġhālib' pe karam kyuuñ hai

ye jashn ye hañgāme dilchasp khilaune haiñ
kuchh logoñ kī koshish hai kuchh log bahal jaa.eñ
jo vāda-e-fardā par ab Tal nahīñ sakte haiñ
mumkin hai ki kuchh arsa is jashn pe Tal jaa.eñ

ye jashn mubārak ho par ye bhī sadāqat hai
ham log haqīqat ke ehsās se aarī haiñ
'gāñdhī' ho ki 'ġhālib' ho insāf kī nazroñ meñ
ham donoñ ke qātil haiñ donoñ ke pujārī haiñ

 

There's nothing sacrosanct or precious (notwithstanding its richness, depth etc.) about Urdu per se; but there's no other regional language besides Persian which has as large a corpus of Islamic scholarship as Urdu. Near totality of classic (and original) Islamic scholarship is contained within Arabic, Persian, Urdu (and may be Turkish, which I reckon would be relatively leaner in comparison to the volume produced in Urdu).

If Arabic is not "naturally" accessible to desi muslim laity (due to their own apathy) and Persian is too remote/archaic (from desi viewpoint), then Urdu is the next best medium to access the classic/original Islamic scholarship. It will take centuries of effort for English (or any other regional language) to catch up and create comparably large corpus.

Urdu is not just a matter/marker of ethnic identity; we muslims (not just desis) have too much to lose by ignoring/burying its legacy and contribution to Islamic scholarship. We owe it to the forthcoming generations to keep that legacy alive.

 

Teaching kids Arabic is a must, I feel. We don't need to go heavy in nahw or sarf early on, that can come later. But if you can afford an Arabic tutor for once or twice a week, I think that's worth the investment.

As for teaching your mother tongue at home, I think that should be done anyway. Purely because it's a skill that may be useful. For example, if your mother tongue is urdu, at least the kids can access urdu speaking scholars in the future. If your mother tongue is Bosnian or Russian and there aren't a lot of scholars to access in those languages, no problem. Insha Allah, your child will become the scholar who speaks Bosnian or Russian. In the same way that we are beginning to fulfil the need of scholars in the English language. Your child may become a translator of the ilk of a Gibril haddad into Polish or something, if that's your home language (not endorsing haddad's views, only his skills as a translator which are top quality).

 

Be it English or Urdu your upbringing is what will help you ultimately
If you look at india and now Pakistan too, TV dramas have totally changed the way people think. These dramas are worse than some English one's.

If we speak about culture and morals than, I think at the moment india has a very Hindu-ish culture (movies,songs and dowry being the major one). Muslims first thing after praying eid Namaz go and sit in cinemas whole day.

So to say urdu or any language will help them connect to their heritage, with the intention of not becoming anglicized, wouldn't be appropriate.

If open minded here means more liberal and modern. Than I agree.

 

Earlier the translations/transliterations were done with the objective to do tabligh and reach wider audience. Now it is out of sheer desperation to survive as publishing house (otherwise they wouldn't sell more than few copies).

I see that first hand whenever I visit bookshops in Matia Mahal, Delhi and find most lay customers asking mainly for transliterated copies. For instance, last month I was there, a customer came asking for roman english transliteration of Kanz ul-Iman tafsir, and admitted that even English translation wouldn't be comprehensible to his family.

As it is, ~70% of the contemporary Sunni Urdu books published in India are copies of books authored by Pakistani ulemas. Nothing wrong with it, except that it tells about the sorry state of home-grown scholarship.

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In late 80s, Minoo Masani (a right-wing idealogue) commented in his opinion column that Urdu was a dying language in India. Many Muslims reacted with indignation back then, but sadly years of deliberate attempt by state to sideline Urdu and internal apathy have proven him right.

 

In England, the vast majority of Pakistanis are born to parents either from the Punjab or Azad Kashmir region. A significant amount of the parents from back home dont know urdu at a good level. They speak pothwari or mirpuri or whatever its called

 

this copy of the devbandis fazaile amaal hindi is the 5th edition published in 1998 - https://ia902808.us.archive.org/4/items/FazailEAmaalInHindiVolume1/Fazail e Amaal in Hindi (Complete-Volume 1).pdf

 

only in the west?

i can safely say for people born and raised in UP 50-60% of the people in their 50's and early 60's can't write urdu, reading is only by difficulty and guesswork based on spoken language

people in their 40's and under are far worse - it may be getting close to the 80-90% mark (my observation, not a statistic)

the sad thing is most muslims from most strata of society are losing it - the middle and upper classes are losing out due to convent and english medium education; the lower class is losing it to the hindi medium government schools. so the only hub of urdu is the family home or the masjid or the muslim-run madrasa for the poor kids

i believe this has been going on since the 90's

this copy of Kanzul Iman is from 2006 - https://archive.org/details/KanzulImanHindiTranslationtafsir/page/n2/mode/1up

 

In non-Arab households, most parents should at least try to teach Arabic to the level that the child can read qaida and Qur'an Majeed with tajweed (that is, if the parents are themselves proficient enough to do so).

But I am assuming that by "teaching Arabic" here, you mean to teach comprehension of the Qur'anic Arabic. That will be beyond most average desi parents, but can be arranged through tutors (either online or in-person). Most elementary evening/weekend madrasah classes can't teach much beyond tajweed, recitation and hifz.

Teaching Arabic comprehension to kids will require a more formal tuition set up. I can't reasonably expect an "average" child (in non-Arab household) under 8 years to be able to start grasping sarf and nahw rules (and other building blocks for comprehension).

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I strongly support the view that parents should teach their kids the mother-tongue (especially so, if the mother-tongue is Urdu which is so rich in Islamic scholarship). Tragedy is that most desi parents (living abroad and in the west) neglect teaching Urdu (even to the level of comprehending conversation). If you ever come across a first/second generation bengali or a south-Indian family (to lesser extent, gujrati), you will invariably find that their kids know and understand the respective mother tongues. Most Urdu-speaking families are pathetically lagging in the effort to teach their kids to understand Urdu (at the very least to be able to understand an Urdu bayan). Writing and reading Urdu (I reckon) eludes 90-95% of kids born to Urdu-speaking parents in western countries. Perhaps, Urdu-speaking parents' cultural or ethnic identification is less moored to roots.

Even in India, the ability to read Urdu is shrinking so alarmingly that nowadays Islamic book publishers in India are resorting to publishing romanised english or devnagri hindi transliteration of select books.


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It's well acknowledged that multi-lingual children generally perform better academically and/or extra-curricularly. So not teaching mother-tongue under the fear that child will be confused or too burdened is a serious parenting failure. Learning from my own parenting failures, I always advise young desi parents on conversing with kids in Urdu. If you manage to teach your eldest child, the younger ones will find it easier to learn (since they spend more time playing with elder siblings than with parents). If the eldest child doesn't learn, there's no hope whatsoever that younger ones will miraculously pick up Urdu despite any late course correction.

 

not necessarily. look at the modern, liberal, pakistanis (any language) living in pakistan - they're much more 'open-minded' than a family living in birmingham for 50 years

although arabic is the language of islamic learning, culture and ethics among arabs too vary from the traditional islamic to the extraordinarily secular and liberal (and this is growing rapidly)

it may even be counter productive in some cases of over attachment to language/culture - for a sizable population of muslims in india, it's sickening to see the phoniness of the 'mahan' indian culture (even the muslim subculture) and language over-riding sound islamic tradition and fiqh - for example, a popular misnomer in many "close-knit" or joint families is 'bhabi maa hoti hai, maa se purdah nahin hota'

arabic is needed, coupled with urdu or any home language (for any reason), with a proper learning of shari3ah, or else islamic culture, tradition, ethics will be lost regardless

my 2 cents