Why “Ajam?”

The word Ajam has been utilized in many different contexts — from Iran to Yemen to Sub-Saharan Africa to Andalusia — to refer to the spaces of “others.” “Ajam” came to refer to anything “foreign” or “strange.” 

Meaning “mute” in Arabic, Ajam (عجم) was originally applied to those unable to speak Arabic properly. Arabic is historically written with only consonants — the vowels are omitted, and one must already know the word in order to understand how it should be pronounced.

As opposed to an “Arab” — which means “one who is able to correctly pronounce unwritten vowels” — an “Ajam” mumbled those tricky vowels, since Arabic wasn’t their first language. 

The term “Ajam” has come to signify different things in different contexts. Once used as a slur in the Arab World, today it is used by Persian-speaking communities in the port towns of the Persian Gulf to describe themselves. In Kurdish regions of Iran, meanwhile, “Ajam” denotes dominant Persian-speaking communities.

We use the term Ajam not as an ethnic designation but instead as an embrace of alterity. We focus on its meaning as the “other,”  the edge, offering a different way to see what is privileged as the norm. 

Being on the edge allows one to see the center from a different perspective, and to maintain connections in every which direction that don’t privilege those already at the center. It is only by thinking from the margins that we can truly begin to understand and contextualize the center.

In Ajam, we see a heritage to be proud of: in the mixing and otherness, the heterogeneity and heterodoxy, we see a way to remind ourselves that we can best understand the “center” by standing at the periphery. 

The debates that took place in the lands of Ajam — all those worlds that developed at the edges of monolithic definitions of cultures, people, and civilizations — help us rethink and reimagine worlds where fluidity, fusion, cosmopolitanism are the norm, not the exception.

We at Ajam Media Collective use “Ajam” as a way to reclaim a word too often thought of as pejorative, while simultaneously drawing attention to how the state of Ajami “otherness” helps us imagine alternative worlds. By using Ajam, we’ve employed a tacit pun, forcing our audience to reckon with the previously silenced perspectives of the margins even as we help deconstruct the idea of a margin or periphery to begin with.