Arab and Non-Arab on the Manuscript Page: Thoughts on Annette Damayanti Lienau's Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference

The article engages with Annette Damayanti Lienau’s Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference. Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures, a book that explores the role of Arabic in novel and suggestive ways. Lienau considers Arabic, long viewed outside the Middle East primarily as a language of devotion and theology, as a counter-imperial language in both African and Southeast Asian contexts. Viewing these so-called peripheries of the “Muslim World” through the prism of Arabic she uncovers, alongside differences, shared processes, tropes, and attachments. At the heart of the book is a term that constitutes a “counterterm” to ʿarab: ʿajam. At its most basic, it came to designate “non-Arab” or “non-Arabic,” but across time and place it has proven more complicated, speaking to pluralist ideologies that address the need for translation within a diverse umma and to Arabic’s movement across great distance and boundaries. The essay examines the latter two aspects of the idea of ʿajam as shedding light on the practice of interlinear translation from Arabic into local languages in Indonesia, and asks what the implications of Lienau’s important study might be for understanding this linguistically and culturally transformative translation phenomenon.