Mirza Yawar Baig – Our future is in our own hands
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One of the things that I
have always very, very strongly believed in
is that we
as individuals
are in control of our own destiny.
Allah
gave us the pen to write
whatever destiny we want for ourselves,
both in this world and the next.
We choose whether we want to go to
Jannah or Jannah,
and we choose whether to make this life
in this world Jannah or Jannah.
Nobody but nobody can force us.
People can try. People will try
at an at an individual level, at a
collective level.
But whether they succeed or fail depends on
us.
They will succeed if we allow them to
succeed, and they will fail
if we do not allow them to succeed.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
I was,
invited to a function in Hyderabad,
which was
for the it was called Taherfi's,
Taherfi's Urdu.
Taherfi's,
protection
of the Urdu language.
And many of you made many speeches, and
all of those speeches
basically said
the same thing, which is that the government
of India is doing nothing
to protect Urdu as a language,
and the government must do this and the
government must do that. And so much money
should be allocated, and this must happen that
was out.
When
my turn came to speak, I said I'm
going to be very short.
I said I am not going to make
a speech. I'm going to ask a question.
So my question is, as in all the
people here who are sitting in this room,
especially the speakers,
How many of you
subscribe to Urdu newspapers? How many of you
get Urdu newspapers in your in your homes?
Believe me,
very few hands went up.
I applaud the honest to the people.
Very few
hands. Then I said my second question is,
how many of you have children
who can read?
Even fewer
fewer hands went up.
And then since it was that kind of,
crowd,
you know, upper middle class and upper class
kind of,
people in Hazarabad,
I said, how many of you speak to
your children?
Now the point is,
yet we are sitting there
complaining and moaning and groaning
that the government of India does not protect
Urdu.
Urdu is a language.
Languages live or die based on one thing
only, and that is
the number of people
who speak
and read and write their language.
There's no other parameter.
Urdu became
the lingua franca,
became the
most popular language of the time
because
more and more and more people started speaking
Urdu.
The language of the time was Persian, was
Farsi.
That was the language of the courts.
That was the language of the intellectual
people.
Persian literature
was predominant.
People wrote
in in in universities
and so on. They wrote papers and theses
in Persian in in Farsi.
But Urdu came as
a language of the street, literally,
And
grew and developed
and
became
the predominant language.
And after that, poetry
and literature and so on started to
be created. Although, today, we have this
fantastic collection
and fantastic resource.
But, again, it seems to be going downhill
for for another reasons.
Similarly,
I was invited again
to other,
madrassa in,
in Hyderabad
on our Independence Day, Indian Independence
Day. I must have heard a lot of
speeches, and mine was the last.
And all the speeches had the same,
message, which was that
the role of Indian freedom fighters, the role
of Muslim
freedom fighters in India's
struggle for freedom from the British colonials
was forgotten, has been forgotten, is being forgotten,
is deliberately ignored, and so on and so
on.
Now
we know that
Muslims
were not just freedom fighters, but they were
predominant
both in 1857,
the First War of Independence or the Sepoy
Mutiny, depending on who's writing,
as well as
1947
about almost a 100 days later,
all the struggle that went on Muslims,
especially Muslim intellectual, Muslim
scholars,
religious scholars,
Muslim.
These were right at the forefront.
However, this history has been forgotten for the
most part. It is
being forgotten. It's being ignored. It's being,
sought to be,
you know, written
off. So this is complete.
Again, when my turn came to speak, I
asked the same question. I asked I said
I did it I did it in different
way. I I said to them
that, can one of
you give me a book
in any language other than Urdu? Because
Urdu in India is mostly spoken by by
Muslims. So we said we are not that's
not the target audience for us. The target
audience for us is people who don't who
are not Muslims. So people who don't speak
Urdu.
So I said any language other than Urdu.
So we have so many languages in the
country. I didn't know. Hindi, Telugu,
Tamil, Mariam, whatnot.
So I said any language other than a
book in any language other than Urdu,
which lists the names
and short biographies and work of Muslim freedom
fighters.
If you give me this book, I said,
I
will promise you I will undertake
to have this book included in the
secondary and high school syllabus
of all
Indian schools.
There's dead silence.
So I said, well, instead of making speeches
lamenting this fact that Indian,
that the Muslims the role of Muslims
in the Indian freedom struggle is being forgotten.
So instead of spending time mourning and groaning
about that,
if
this
madharsa
or if all the
madhars
of all the Muslim
institutions in India,
if all of you had gotten together and
produced one book
every year,
that was the 60th,
Independence Day. So I said we would have
had 60 books, not one.
And if these 60 books were then
distributed forget about the syllabus and so on.
If these books were distributed,
it's literally standing at bus stations,
street corners.
This word could have been spread to millions
of people,
and nobody on the face of the earth
could have stopped that because it was to
spread To write about freedom fight freedom fighters
and to spread that information is legal. Nobody
can stop you.
Now the reason I'm saying this is because
we have 2 kinds of people in the
world. We have people who
have what I call masterful thinking, masters, and
we have people who have victim thinking.
Victims. Master and victims.
To give you,
to differentiate the 2,
a victim is somebody who, when something
negative happens, complains.
So they moan and they groan and so
on. And then they blame
somebody else for what is happening to them.
So they will say this is because of
so and so and that so and so
is always outside them.
So whether that so and so is at
a personal individual
level,
I am this way because of my mother,
my father, my wife, my husband, my child,
my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, whoever,
someone
extraordinary
or you blame
the government, you blame
the colonial system, you blame the West,
you blame the CIA, you blame, you know,
whoever. Right?
Anyone other than yourself. And if you can't
find anybody, you blame God. You say, oh,
well, you know, this is my fate.
This is my. This is what is written
for me.
This is the victim mindset. So a victim
mindset is
where
when something bad happens, something difficult happens, some
loss happens,
the person, number 1, complains
and blames somebody else.
The master mindset
is the opposite of that, where the person
may still cry and may still feel, you
know, bad and feel the pain. But
very quickly, they say, alright. So this has
happened.
What can I do to change this for
myself?
Which can include walking away from that situation.
So this is not doesn't necessarily mean that
you are you need to change,
that
materially, but even to get out of there.
Masters
own responsibility for themselves.
They say whatever is happening to me is
because of something that I did or I
chose not to do,
and I'm still in control. I can choose
to change my situation if I want.
I have to find a way to do
that.
My submission is that this is our problem
as Muslims.
We have gotten into this victim mindset. So
you would constantly hear
complaining statements.
This is what colonialism did to us.
The British cut us off from our history.
They cut us off from our language.
And if you say, hold on a second.
Who is preventing
you from
reading history right now as we speak?
Is there some the king of England, Charles
the third is standing here and saying don't
do it?
Right? Who who's who's stopping you?
Who's stopping you from reading history?
Who is stopping you from speaking in your
language?
Urdu or Arabic or whatnot. What whatever your
language is. Who is stopping you from doing
that? Who is stopping you from reading and
writing that language? Who's stopping you from
understanding your history and knowing?
Most of us don't even know the names.
Literally think about disasters. Do do this as
an experiment. Ask your friends, do you know
the name of your mother's mother?
Do you know the name of your mother's
grandmother?
So your grandmother and your great grandmother,
ask them.
We don't even know their names.
For most people, they don't know that. I'm
not exaggerating. I've died through this as an
experiment many times I've done it. I found
the majority of people, they do not even
know the names. And the reason I say
the grandmothers is because that's what gets lost
first.
Grandfather's name still some people remember, but grandmother's
names, gone.
Many never knew in the first place.
This is called a nanny or daddy or,
you know,
Amu or
or or or or Ummi or something. They
did not even know the name to begin
with. So which history are you talking about?
My brothers and sisters,
we have to understand that we are responsible
for ourselves.
So learn your language,
learn your history,
understand what we are looking at, understand what
our strengths are, understand what our weaknesses are,
and see how we can
change
our future
because that's in our control.
History is our
resource.
It is our legacy. It's our it's our
inheritance, not legacy. It's our inheritance.
The future is our legacy.
So if we take the inheritance and we
build on it,
and that is in our control.
Nobody stops you.
Nobody can change that for you.
Nobody
is standing in the way of our development
if we want to develop.
Nobody stops you from studying. Nobody stops you
from going to college or university.
Nobody stops you from from,
invention.
Nobody stops you from starting a business.
Nobody stops you from stops you from anything.
There will be difficulties.
That is how Allah created in this world.
There are always difficulties. There are difficulties there
just like you have difficulties. Others have the
same same difficulties.
Some have more, some have less.
A difficulty needs to be overcome. That's it.
And when you overcome with difficulty, it gives
you the blessing of
strength.
You feel stronger. You feel better because you
over you overcame the difficulty. But you will
sit and complain,
then nothing will happen.
So my submission, please get out
of the victim mindset.
Monitor your language.
Never complain
even to yourself.
Never complain even to yourself.
And always look for a solution and say,
this is the situation.
How can I change it
for myself and for others?