Torsten Tschacher
Freie Universität Berlin
The Limited Universal: Arabic through a Tamil Lens
The impact of Arabic-Islamic philology on vernacular textual practices appears largely as an unconstrained success story, leading to widespread adoption of Arabic script, linguistic thought, and literary theory among non-Arab Muslims. This spread was aided by the fact that many vernacular idioms used by Muslims were not yet, in Sheldon Pollock's term, 'grammaticized'. But how did Arabic-Islamic philology fare in a context where the local language possessed a philological tradition of its own? In this presentation, Torsten Tschacher discusses the place of Arabic in Islamic textual traditions of the Tamil language and the tensions arising from Arabic's status as both a limited literary idiom and a universal language of scripture.
Torsten Tschacher is Assistant Professor of Muslim Culture and Society in South Asia at the Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the history and textual traditions of Tamil-speaking Muslim societies in South India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. His most recent publications include "Can 'Om' Be an Islamic Term? Translations, Encounters, and Islamic Discourse in Vernacular South Asia", South Asian History and Culture (2014), and "From Script to Language: The Three Identities of 'Arabic-Tamil'", South Asian History and Culture (forthcoming 2017).