Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference

How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal

Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic's global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anticolonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas.

Annette Damayanti Lienau presents the largely untold story of how Arabic, often understood in Africa and Asia as a language of Islamic ritual and precolonial commerce, assumed a transregional role as an anticolonial literary medium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining how major writers and intellectuals across several generations grappled with the cultural asymmetries imposed by imperial Europe, Lienau shows that Arabic-as a cosmopolitan, interethnic, and interreligious language-complicated debates over questions of indigeneity, religious pluralism, counter-imperial nationalisms, and emerging nation-states.

Unearthing parallels from West Africa to Southeast Asia, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference argues that debates comparing the status of Arabic to other languages challenged not only Eurocentric but Arabocentric forms of ethnolinguistic and racial prejudice in both local and global terms. Annette Damayanti Lienau is assistant professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. "Highlighting the complex entanglement of language, race, and religion, this brilliant book illuminates an entire anticolonial framework for comparative literature. From Egypt to Indonesia to Senegal, Lienau draws our attention to the sacred and secular valences of the Arabic language across transregional communities. Powerful, imaginative, and inspiring-a transformative rethinking of the grounds of world literary study."-Michael Allan, University of Oregon



"Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference is a fascinating and important study of a global Arabophone literature that served as a crucial marker of Muslim identity and asserted belonging to Islamic culture for colonial subjects from sub-Saharan West Africa to Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This ambitious book substantially expands the horizons of global Arabic as an essential modern literary language."-Karla Mallette, University of Michigan



"Combining a broad linguistic range and exciting methodological innovations, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference is a compelling, original, and insightful book that meticulously unfolds a new understanding of global Arabic as a space of comparison."-Tobias Warner, University of California, Davis "For Lienau, the idea that Arabic is a closed language, resisting translation by virtue of its status as the Islamic language of prophetic revelation, is manifestly belied by the modern history of Arabic and its relation to literatures across cultural and linguistic divides. . . . [Lienau] forcefully illustrates that the Orientalist position of Islam's antagonism toward diversity and Quranic Arabic's essential untranslatability are rooted not in historical fact but racist fantasy."---Henry Clements, Public Books