ABSTRACT The vast Arabic lexicographical tradition defines Ajam as the opposite of Arab, establishing a stable binary throughout the premodern Islamicate archive and into social media today. This essay focuses on a poet from Sindh, Abū ʿAṭāʾ al-Sindī, whose eighth-century lyric directly addressed race and identity and who became part of the Arabic canon. Abū ʿAṭāʾ wrote inside the imperial structure of the Arabic poem, a structure that—like the lexicographical and literary archive itself—contained affordances for both Ajam and Arab. Both his figure as a poet in the archive and the lexical definitions of Ajam are opportunities to read the vectors of empire, text, and language across time and space and to consider how we construct the comparative.
Alexander Key (Fri,) studied this question.