Authorities in Muslim-majority Bangladesh appear to have finally succeeded in long drawn efforts to stop men urinating in public, playing on people's respect for Arabic which is regarded as a sacred language.
The religious affairs ministry recently took to replacing signs prohibiting urination in Bengali, with identical messages in Arabic, a move that has had a visible effect in stopping people urinating on roadsides and walls, even though most people do not know the language.
A video clip which was widely shared on social media like Facebook showed people who were about to urinate on street sides holding themselves back upon seeing the Arabic signs.
The two-minute clip shows many people checking themselves at the last moment in a pious gesture of respect to the warnings in Arabic, the language in which the holy Koran is written, thinking it to be a sacred message.
The clip also carried a statement by a beaming religious affairs minister, Matiur Rahman, who suggested that people use toilets in hundreds of mosques in the capital to respond to nature's call if they did not find a public toilet nearby, instead of urinating in public. He said the campaign would continue.
He added that Dhaka was a "city of mosques and every mosque provides public toilet facilities" but yet the people developed the bad habit of urinating by the roadsides.
"We took the initiative to erase the warnings in Bangla language against urinating in public and instead wrote the same message in Arabic, you can see the result yourself - it appears to be a successful campaign so far," a spokesman of the ministry told PTI.
"I don't understand why people urinate by the roadsides. Especially when every mosque provides public toilet facilities," Matior Rahman, the country's religious affairs minister, says in the video.
The initiative came five years after authorities installed over 100 mobile toilets in Dhaka to contain a worrying rise in public defecation as the number of permanent public toilets appeared inadequate.
