Dr Jacques COULARDEAU: Would You Approve Digital Colonialization?

Monday, June 15, 2026

Would You Approve Digital Colonialization?

AI and Multilingualism Q3: How Mohammad Merajul Islam’s Experience

in Bangladesh Shapes the Book’s Perspective

https://medium.com/p/bfbcc19b9339?postPublishedType=initial

No one can know, or even understand, what life is in the Global South, in this case in Bangladesh in the Indian subcontinent in Asia. The author Md. Merajul Islam is discreet and even humble, keeping at a distance not to appear as speaking of his own situation, but rather of that of a young man from what we would call a poor family in any country in the world. Low education. Packed mud walls of their lodgings with corrugated metal on the roof, at times even only two or three layers of palm leaves, and some rats living in these palm leaves. The huts are detached most of the time or semi-detached. They have no electricity, or they have electricity with numerous cuts, particularly at night. No real scholarships to help the kids through their low education. Hardly any prospect of being admitted to a better school, and no future in universities.

As for work, unemployment is sky-rocketing with a vast proportion of men and women, young or not so young, with no jobs at all and reduced to odd jobs with very long hours, low pay, and no guarantee for tomorrow, or for healthcare. Imagine what it means for someone who develops asthma in such a tropical climate. The odd jobs are manual and have to do with all sorts of masonry, or agriculture if there is any possibility. If you want to grow some rice for your family, you have to work the paddy of someone else. You do all the work, you provide all the equipment, including the seeds and the fertilizer, and yet you have to share the harvest 50-50 with the landowner who provided the land. That is feudalism.

And we will not say more than one short sentence about the third evil in these Global South countries. It holds in one word. Corruption. That means the lower half, if not even the lower two-thirds, of the population can manage to get an Android telephone with limitations on the services. No computer or tablet, no printer, and so much other technical equipment. And yet these young people manage to get some education, even if not as high as possible, and to engage in research on their own means, with a family of their own, a wife and children. They manage to get their Master's around 27. They dream of a future of discovery, creative thinking, and spiritual elevation.

And since they are Muslims, they are the constant victims in the West of segregation, rejection, and despise. That is called islamophobia, the Muslim equivalent of antisemitism for the Jews. And they dream of Ishmael, the first son of Abraham from his wife’s Arab slave, rejected later on by Abraham after he got a son from his wife, and Ishmael and his mother were thrown into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Ishmael is the founding figure of Islam.