Ajami Comparatism

Taking Annette Damayanti Lienau’s recently published book Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures as a starting point, this forum explores possible points of convergence between comparative literary studies and ajami studies, broadly understood. Contributors working at the intersections of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Javanese, Malay, Spanish, and Wolof studies were invited to reflect on the broader implications of Lienau’s engagement with ʿajam and its derivatives. Two main questions were posed: How does the concept of ajam relate to the notion of creolity and the Derridean notion of differance? How might we trace the histories of ajam as a loanword in non-Arabic languages of the Islamicate world? The approaches motivated by these questions are marked by differently specific temporal, geographic, and linguistic emphases, but the forum’s general aim is to place ajam, rather than other key terms used in Lienau’s book (“arabophone,” “counter-imperial”), in the foreground and to situate it alongside adab and other recently recovered terms of an “Arabic theoretical lexicon” that trace the Islamic genealogies of comparative literary studies.1An Arabic term derived from the root ع-ج-م, ʿajam is used to refer to non-Arabic speech and designates an ethnolinguistic boundary between Arabs and non-Arabs.2 During the early period of Islamic expansion outside the Arabian Peninsula, it was used as an ethnolinguistic marker for Persian speakers, and “[l]ike the Greek βάρβαροι (barbarians), [it] carried connotations of feeble-mindedness and cultural inferiority.”3 Its binary use in the Qur’anic verses 16:103, 26:198, and 41:44, in contrast to the term ‘arabī, assumes central significance in Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: on the one hand, the Qur’an self-referentially claims Arabic as a clear, manifest medium (lisān ʿarabī mubīn) of revelation in contrast to the foreignness, indistinctness, and opacity it associates with other languages coded as ʿajamī, an ambiguity that later theological discourse sought to resolve by advancing ethnocentric claims about Quraysh and fuṣḥā.4 On the other hand, the sublimation of Arabic as a universal medium of prophetic revelation remains in tension with other Qur’anic verses that affirm the plurality of “groups and tribes [shu ʿūb wa qabāʾil]” (49:13) and “the diversity [or differences: ikhtilaf] of your languages and your colors” (30:22; qtd. in Lienau 13).Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference considers the seventh-century Qur’anic revelation a foundational event with enduring implications for the modern present. Foregrounding what we might, following Derrida, call the “double bind” constituting Arabic as a sacred language, the book traces how the tension between ʿarab and ʿajam, linguistic hierarchy and parity, and monolingualism and plurilingualism is reconfigured across Muslim colonial contexts in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal during the long nineteenth century.5 Opening with an account of European philological writings on the difference between ʿarab and ʿajam, Lienau’s book turns to anticolonial writers and activists who offered divergent responses to colonial linguistic policies. Whereas early twentieth-century figures such as Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke in West Africa and Hamka in Indonesia reclaimed Arabic as a counter-imperial medium and symbol, later postcolonial writers influenced by their legacies rejected both Europocentric and Arabocentric hierarchies and affirmed local vernaculars for devotional and everyday purposes, often by drawing on the Qur’an and the Hadith tradition that celebrated linguistic and racial plurality.Drawing on methodological scholarship in sinophone studies, Lienau’s conclusion, “Comparative Literature and Transregional Arabophone Studies,” proposes a globalized, “polycentric” methodology for arabophone studies, one that calls for “greater comparative attention to Arabic as a transregional language and script connected to both an imperial past and a colonially subaltern history” (279–80). Read through the book’s linear, teleological arc, arabophone emerges as a term of sublation, subsuming without resolving centuries-old tensions between ʿarab and ʿajam. While the concept of the arabophone valuably deprovincializes both Middle East and North Africa (MENA)-focused Arabic studies and europhone comparative literature, the book’s most significant and original contribution lies, in this editor’s view, in what might be called its ajamization of comparative literature. This CLS forum may be read as an afterword to Lienau’s book, one that substitutes the term “ajami” for “arabophone” in Lienau’s conclusion’s title, so as to suggest some implications of an ajami comparatism.How does the ajamization of comparative literature contribute to the discipline? As Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference demonstrates, ajami as a methodological approach envisions a temporality of “literary history and literary modernity” that is at once linear and recursive.6 Far from being confined to the past, the event of the Qur’anic linguistic revelation functions as a structural device throughout Lienau’s study. While much of the book examines the impact of European colonial policies on language politics, this event is only a second crucial moment in the longue durée of Islamicate literary modernity, structured by the aporia between arab and ajam that shapes the modern subject’s relation to language and writing. Ajami comparatism will suggest that the discipline of comparative literature ought to be historicized not only in relation to European Orientalist philology but also in relation to an older, entangled plurality of poetic and philological traditions, one that includes Arabic but is neither limited nor commanded by it.Ajami as methodology provides us with a concept of relationality whose stakes are best understood by positioning it against many decades of scholarship at the intersection of area studies and comparative literature. It is fair to say for three decades or more, literary theory and close reading have together defined comparative scholarship, and our discipline has appealed to scholars in area studies because it has offered space for engaging methods from literary and social theory. Whereas the theoretical masterworks institutionalized in comparative literature in the late 1990s and early 2000s are those of a now-familiar canon of French structuralism and poststructuralism, more recent scholarship has provincialized this canon by foregrounding concepts drawn from Arabic and Persianate rhetoric (balagha) and adab.7 While engagement with both modern European theory and classical literary traditions is methodologically indispensable, comparatism should not be reduced to theory alone, for at its core it entails an ethics and a politics of relationality. The significance of ajami as a relational concept lies in its affordance for imagining a comparative common emerging from border spaces. In this respect, it may productively be brought into contact, and into constellation, with the concepts of creolity and creolization in Caribbean studies, which register hierarchical relations of imperial power and entanglement and affirm the forms of creativity and (un)translatability that emerge across uneven linguistic contact zones. Combining the approach of Lienau’s study with the historical and anthropological scholarship of Fallou Ngom and other scholars of African ajami studies, we might suggest that just as creolization has served as a generative method in comparative literary studies, ajami, together with its corollary ajamization, might be made an analytic framework for understanding the comparative common of the world’s languages.8As with the concept of creole, the methodological promise of ajami rests in its unfixability. In addition to its distinctive history and usage in Arabic, ajam also has a long and separate history as a loanword in the vernaculars of the Islamic world. In African Muslim contexts, ajami describes the modified Arabic script used to write African languages, including Swahili, Wolof, Hausa, Fula, and Mandinka, among others. Though the Arabic sense of the term as “foreigner” can include Turks, in classical Ottoman Turkish sources, acem predominantly refers to the Persianate world, distinguishing it from the Arabic cosmopolis. As Mehtap Ozdemir writes in her forum contribution, “Ottoman acem illustrates how ‘ajam not only resonates with Arabic’s internal tension with its others, but also creates its own waves of alterity.”9 In Ottoman usage, acem was most often paired with and defined against a rumi identity: first used in early Arabic and Persian sources to refer to the eastern Roman lands, the term was later adopted by Turkophone settlers and conquerors in Asia Minor to describe their land of settlement.10 Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, rumi was increasingly deployed to mark the refined linguistic and cultural sensibilities of a learned Ottoman elite, who cultivated a high register of Turkish through extensive borrowing from Arabic and Persian, understood to have “sweetened” a “vulgar” Turkish.11 These entangled differentiations of acem from rumi and türki further shaped the discursive field of aljamiado writing, especially among the Greek-speaking Ottoman Muslims who produced a substantial body of pious literature in the Greek language written in the (Perso-Arabic) Ottoman script. Originally derived from the Arabic ʿajamiyya and employed by Spanish Muslims to distinguish their vernacular writing from Arabic, aljamiado now names a body of Muslim literary and religious writing composed using Arabic script in europhone languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Serbian, and Albanian.12 William Strobel’s recent study of the language politics of the seventeenth-century Tuhfe-i Şānī be zebān-ı yūnānī (The Gift of Şani in the Greek Tongue), written in Demotic Greek in the Ottoman script for Greek-speaking Muslims, is another compelling instance of the ajami comparatism imagined in this CLS forum.13 Working across the divide between the modern and the premodern eras, an ajami comparatism can encompass both the rhetorical study of ajamiyya as a (Persianate) literary style, within the comparative poetics of the Islamicate world, and the philological and grammatological study of ajami texts as registers of linguistic relationality. Through its dispersal, fragmentation, and transformation into variants that register different linguistic and cultural hierarchies, the mutable loanword ajam, together with its derivatives, offers a shifting ground of comparison and a valuable entry point into a rich plurilingual literary archive extending from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish to Greek, Spanish, and Wolof.The forum’s essays reward reading both individually, on their own terms, and in dialogue with the themes emphasized in this introduction. Through a reading of the biographical and literary itinerary of the eighth-century poet Abū ʿAṭāʾ al-Sindī, Alexander Key’s essay examines the tension between ʿarab and ʿajam in the arabophobe archive, showing how adab aesthetics both mediate and resist the incorporation of the ajami outside, while situating the analysis within contemporary debates on imperial Weltliteratur and its critique. Turning to Islamic writing practices in the Indonesian archipelago, Ronit Ricci observes that though the term ajam does not appear as an organizing principle in early modern debates, practices of interlinear translation from Arabic into local languages reflect a tension between parity and hierarchy registered by the arab-ajam opposition explored in Lienau’s work.Mehtap Ozdemir’s and Maru Pabón’s essays reflect on ajam’s relation to creolity and creolization and position these terms in a constellation. Tracing the Ottoman Turkish usage of acem, Ozdemir suggests the implications of what Lienau calls “sanctified heteroglossia” in a plurilingual Islamic context, rejecting any association of dialogized heteroglossia and polyglotism with secular modernity. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of “the great order of the literary as a kind of virtual and inaccessible normativity, and of our own methodological attempts as varieties of creole,” Ozdemir imagines a creolized common of ajami comparatism that displaces Arabocentrism.14 Through a careful reading of Lienau’s study informed by foundational works on creolity by Raphaël Confiant and Édouard Glissant, Pabón explores its implications for arabophone Caribbean and Latin American studies. The forum closes with Tobias Warner’s reflection on the afterlife of a popular Wolof ajami verse, “bépp làkk rafet na” (every language is beautiful), widely attributed to the early twentieth-century poet Muusaa Ka, a disciple of the Sufi Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba discussed by Lienau. Like the notion of ajam, which resists service as a fixed ground, the origin of this popular verse, appearing in diverse written and oral forms and celebrating Wolof against europhone and Islamic script and linguistic hierarchies, is also impossible to secure. Yet precisely through its indeterminacy, which allows for invocation by diverse linguistic communities, this verse offers ground to an ajami comparatism affirming the beauty of every language.