‘They will colonize us… invade us...enslave our children and their children, eat the juvenile tuna swimming in our seas, take over our resorts and preach Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and a whole of other ‘isms’ to our children to the extent that they will completely obliterate even the last bastion of ‘iman’ within us’. For more than one reason, I believe that this thought is almost ubiquitous in our country - its there in the papers, the harangue of our politicians, our Friday sermons and our Majlis debates.
C’mon, wait a gosh darn second. Who wants to colonize us? Who wants to invade us? Who wants to preach the ‘sms’ to us? The answer is NO ONE. (I’d like to remind you again that I’m someone with very average cognitive powers).
I think as a nation we’ve paid already paid a huge price for this ‘xenophobia’ thingy. My father was unable to learn the language I’m bogging now because the authorities back then made him and our people believe that learning this ‘faranjee / vilaathu’ language would make him a ‘kafir’. Our policy makers haven’t been able to debate on the issue of 99 year resort leases only because of their ‘xenophobia’. It is also one primary reason why we have lagged behind in our legislative, judicial, political and civil society developments. We haven’t been able to open up our country to foreign investments (I’m talking about a number of legislative and regulatory bottlenecks here) like several other countries have done also because of our fear of foreigners. We’ve been pussy-footing on several important economic reforms and liberalization of a number of areas for FDI for the same reason. I know I don’t need to remind you here about all that Dubai has done and the economic benefits they are reaping from their openness to foreigners.
C’mon, wait a gosh darn second. Who wants to colonize us? Who wants to invade us? Who wants to preach the ‘sms’ to us? The answer is NO ONE. (I’d like to remind you again that I’m someone with very average cognitive powers).
I think as a nation we’ve paid already paid a huge price for this ‘xenophobia’ thingy. My father was unable to learn the language I’m bogging now because the authorities back then made him and our people believe that learning this ‘faranjee / vilaathu’ language would make him a ‘kafir’. Our policy makers haven’t been able to debate on the issue of 99 year resort leases only because of their ‘xenophobia’. It is also one primary reason why we have lagged behind in our legislative, judicial, political and civil society developments. We haven’t been able to open up our country to foreign investments (I’m talking about a number of legislative and regulatory bottlenecks here) like several other countries have done also because of our fear of foreigners. We’ve been pussy-footing on several important economic reforms and liberalization of a number of areas for FDI for the same reason. I know I don’t need to remind you here about all that Dubai has done and the economic benefits they are reaping from their openness to foreigners.
1 comment:
Interesting observations indeed and I share in your sentiments... But I reckon it has more to do with racism than xnophobia. Maldivians really are insanely racist. For example, societal attitudes towards even other South Asians is less than admirable. However, like you said, the "white" western "kafirs" bear the brunt of this racism. We seem to collectively observe that anything western is bad and anything middle eastern/arabic is entirely justifiable and to be cultivated.
Our language continues to suffer because of this aversion to western thought and languages. It was ok to adopt the arabic word "kaarisaa" for disasters but not ok to adopt the almost universal word "computer" - we had to go and create the silly word "masnooee sikundi" for it...
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