ABSTRACT This article assesses the affordances of creolization as a theoretical framework for examining the politics of difference in Islamicate multilingualism as modeled by Annette Damayanti Lienau’s Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literature. Centered around Arabic as a contact language of global significance, Lienau’s study mobilizes ‘ajam (for non-Arab peoples) and ‘ajamiyya (for non-Arabic languages) to probe the boundaries of the Arabophone world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building on Lienau’s insight into ‘ajam as a border concept, this article reads ‘ajamiyya as creolization to suggest it not as a linguistic outcome, but a mode and mark of identification with Arabic—one that is generated by the mixing of cultures, which does not necessarily coalesce into a fixed identity and gets diffracted across other contact zones. An instructive case is the formation of Ottoman literary culture in which ‘ajam not only brings its internal entanglement with Arabic but also creates its own forms of alterity. Following Lienau’s focus on the generative tension between monoglossic and heteroglossic ideologies in the modern history of Arabic, this article suggests through the Ottoman context that linguistic heteroglossia is neither a secular nor a modern value.
Mehtap Özdemir (2026) studied this question.