Navid Kermani Research Articles

Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer: Questions about God by Navid Kermani (review)

Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer: Questions about God by Navid Kermani (review)

Konzepte der Interkulturalität in der Germanistik weltweit ed. by Renata Cornejo, Gesine Lenore Schiewer and Manfred Weinberg

Reviewed by: Konzepte der Interkulturalität in der Germanistik weltweit ed. by Renata Cornejo, Gesine Lenore Schiewer and Manfred Weinberg Silja Weber Konzepte der Interkulturalität in der Germanistik weltweit. Edited by Renata Cornejo, Gesine Lenore Schiewer, and Manfred Weinberg. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020. Pp. 432. Paper €50.00. ISBN 978-3-8376-5041-9. There was a time when a collection of articles on intercultural matters in the field of Germanistik would focus narrowly on "migrant literature" and its representation of cultural positioning. This volume, ambitiously including the word "worldwide" in its title and designed to be the first in a series on the topic, is evidence of the richness gained by an arrangement that lives up to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhizomatic knowledge structures. German is presented as a "relais language," a conduit with many entrances and exits which provides a loose limitation for relevance, and the collection itself is a relais place where thoughts and methodologies from different disciplines, including linguistics and pedagogy, can meet. The volume is a documentation of papers presented at the conference on Interkulturelle Germanistik in Ústí nad Labem and Prague in 2016. Subsections of the volume reflect topic strands at the conference, and six plenary talks from the six continents on knowledge production and the understanding of German studies in different areas of the world are also included. The three major sections focus on theory, intercultural linguistics/multilingualism, and intercultural literature and film. The latter is the most expansive, taking up over half of the volume, and is further divided into subsections focusing on Chamisso literature, migration and displacement, and identities and their relation to contexts. The focus of individual chapters ranges from close readings of individual works and comparative analysis of works by authors from similar intercultural constellations through broad discussions of intercultural aspects of particular geographical regions or social phenomena. The most striking feature is, perhaps, that the contributions are truly heterogeneous in authorship, methodology, focus, and level of detail, so that, by design, they occasionally appear to dissolve the superficially clear and linear structure of sections and subsections; this intrinsic dissolution of standardized presentation extends even to the interculturally shaped English of the abstracts preceding each article, which I feel is a rare and valuable aspect (in contrast, the language of the articles themselves is standard academic German throughout). While it feels problematic to choose what particular contributions should be mentioned in a review when the volume weaves such a complex web of voices, a few articles can convey a skeletal sense of that web. Paul Michael Lützeler's self-reflective [End Page 192] discussion of language policy and expectations at the GSA and various other German-promoting associations is an incisive and relevant reminder of the different political impacts of English and German in these contexts. Benoît Ellerbach's chapter on the hermeneutics of Schami's work provides a very useful discussion of terms that have been used for intercultural literature over time, as well as changes and inconsistencies in the author's own perspective on his work versus its framing by media and literary analysis. It makes a clear case in favor of letting complexities and inconsistencies reveal themselves and against resorting to reductive universalizing tendencies, whether across authors or across time. Raluca Rădulescu traces a fascinating connection between the poetic responses to experiences of Sprachkrise by Lorca, Benn, and Celan and the corresponding response in the work of José F.A. Oliver, who draws on imagery from both Lorca and Celan but reimagines its meaning. Riham Tahoun investigates how the intertextuality of a given text is developed both through its own discursive practices and its reception, using Navid Kermani's work as a base to show both de-construction (dissolution of culturally shaped semantic networks) and construction (the formation of new constellations of meaning that are both more open and more tolerant of contradictoriness). Based on several recent novels about refugees in Germany such as Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangen and Abbas Khider's Ohrfeige, another convincing contribution is Manar Omar's discussion of refugees as a literary phenomenon that places them at the balance point between being world-less and...

Protest und Verweigerung/Protest and Refusal: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/New Trends in German Literature since 1989 ed. by Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke

Reviewed by: Protest und Verweigerung/Protest and Refusal: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/New Trends in German Literature since 1989 ed. by Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke Doris McGonagill Hans Adler and Sonja E. Klocke, editors. Protest und Verweigerung/Protest and Refusal: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/New Trends in German Literature since 1989. Wilhelm Fink, 2018. 293 pp. Paper, $90.00. This collection of essays examines politically engaged German literature of the post-Wall period. Such an endeavor, as ambitious as it is topical, must necessarily remain limited to a few selective trends, topics, genres, authors, and approaches. Hans Adler and Sonja Klocke’s anthology offers the broad overview it promises: the volume includes many strong contributions that purposefully respond to current debates and discuss—with great sensitivity, theoretical acumen, and ethical verve—a comprehensive selection of contemporary texts and contexts and the relationship between the two. The diverse perspectives on littérature engagée range from a discussion of Mediterranean “boat refugee narratives” (a term coined by April Shemak) in Faye Stewart’s discussion of texts by Merle Kröger and Reinhard Kleist to environmentally engaged thrillers, Öko-Krimis, in Sabine Gross’s analysis of this popular German-language genre. Gender studies and feminist theory are not a particular focal point of the collection. One essay chooses gender and another the body as a lens: Melissa Sheedy analyzes Kerstin Hensel’s transformation of the fairy-tale genre into a critique of patriarchal structures and sexualized violence, and Simone Pfleger employs body theory in the context of a larger critique of hierarchical societal structures in her approach to Antje Rávic Strubel’s [End Page 111] novel Kältere Schichten der Luft (2007; Colder layers of air). More engagement with gender in this volume would be desirable. What else does the anthology offer? Concise, circumspect, historically conscious, and theoretically informed discussions of works by Navid Kermani, Ulrich Peltzer, Ilija Trojanow, and Juli Zeh—and, by way of a conservative outlier, Uwe Tellkamp. The emphasis, as the introduction informs us, is on texts that engage critically, not affirmatively, with dominant social paradigms and power relations. The quality of the contributions is uniformly impressive, but several stand out for their scope, theoretical rigor, and well-developed methodologies, including Claudia Breger’s proposal of “engaged realism” as a way of transcending traditional discursive fault lines (such as realism versus formalism). Breger uses Kermani’s Einbruch der Wirklichkeit (2016; Incursion of reality) to demonstrate an engagement with social reality that is grounded “in an aesthetics of careful, multi-perspectival mediation” (24). Katharina Gerstenberger masterfully argues that Trojanow’s blending of fictional and nonfictional registers facilitates new perspectives for literary engagement. And Klocke’s contribution traces the subtle perpetuation of Soviet-style power structures and totalitarian nomenclature through the prism of texts by Trojanow and Strubel. Providing a solid but conventional analytical framework, the twenty-page introduction is subdivided into three short sections dedicated to generic and historical categories. The editors dutifully touch on Horace, Hegel, and numerous loci classici. Although it stumbles a bit at first (with many negatives, double negatives, and learned mannerisms), the prolegomenon includes a helpful overview of engaged German-language literature since the Enlightenment, an overview of the “ethical turn” in contemporary literature, and the assertion that the unifying aspect of all contributions lies in their shared belief in fictional literature’s particular aptitude for deliberating political content. The editors’ programmatic premises ultimately adhere to a traditional genre typology that many of the individual essays transcend. The collection’s bilingual title suggests broad accessibility to the essays collected in this volume, but the anthology addresses itself to academic audiences conversant in both German and English. The ten contributions are equally divided between essays in English and German, but the editors’ introduction is exclusively in German, as is the overall layout of the book, its content headings, and the format of its footnotes and indexes. [End Page 112] As if to counteract the linguistic lopsidedness, the short contributor profiles are solely in English. This collection builds on earlier scholarship, notably models of political authorship developed by Sabrina Wagner in Aufklärer der Gegenwart...

Religion and Literature, Identity and Individual: Resetting the Muslim-Christian Encounter

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstractions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy and west-eastern affinities developed by philosophers and creative writers, such as Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Navid Kermani.

Cultural artefacts and the ‘migration crisis’: Disruptive materialities in works by Navid Kermani and Maxi Obexer

Amplified worldwide fragility and growing mobility have contributed to increased forced migration towards Europe. However, Europe’s present focus on border protection has furthered the ‘migrant crisis’ which is very much a crisis of response. News about the ‘migrant crisis’ continues to dominate political discourse in Europe and elsewhere. The discussions typically focus on Europe’s supposed solutions in the form of increased border security, new political agreements, and various forms of humanitarian aid. This article reviews four literary texts about Europe’s responses to forced migration and proposes that the literary treatment of various cultural artefacts employed in these texts critiques Europe’s current restrictionism. Two speeches by Navid Kermani, ‘Towards Europe’ and ‘On the sixty-fifth Anniversary of the Promulgation of the German Constitution’ and two novels by Maxi Obexer, Wenn gefährliche Hunde lachen (‘When dangerous dogs laugh’) and Europas längster Sommer (‘Europe’s longest summer’) make reference to several phenomenal objects and also to gestures. In and of themselves, these cultural artefacts such as beds, blankets, buses, lipsticks, T-shirts, shoes, and even the gestures of kneeling and bowing, may not possess anything disruptive. However, there is an unruly quality about them that puts a spotlight on the precarity of survival migrants who cannot access the European asylum process.

Rethinking the Arab-Islamic Tradition. On the New Translation of Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd’s "Critique of Religious Discourse" (Naqd al-Ḫiṭāb ad-Dīnī)

The article highlights the significance of the first full English translation of Naqd al-Hitāb ad-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), one of the most characteristic and important works of the acclaimed Egyptian intellectual Nāsr Hāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010). The work was firstly published in 1992 by Sīnā li-an-Našr in Cairo, coinciding with the beginning of the so-called Case of Abū Zayd (1992–1995), the campaign of Egyptian fundamentalists against the scholar. Abū Zayd’s critique of the dominant discourses and worldviews in the Arab world, created both by the Islamic fundamentalists and so-called Islamic left, has gained huge acclaim in the international academia but so far there has not been a full translation of the work into English (also taking into account the important role of the full German edition published by Chérifa Magdi and Navid Kermani in 1996). In 2018 Jonathan Wright’s translation was published by Yale University Press in the series “World Thought in Translation”. The edition was enriched by Carool Kersten’s scholarly introduction. The following article discusses the translation dilemma regarding Naqd… (e.g. problems with finding equivalents for Arabic semiotic and hermeneutical terminology utilised by the Egyptian scholar), giving examples of the choices made by the translator. Adding to it, the more general issues of the impact of Abū Zayd’s work on the contemporary rereading of Arab-Islamic turāt are analysed.

‘Jeder Mensch ist eine Menschheit’: The Subject, Grievability and Community in Navid Kermani’s Dein Name

Navid Kermani’s novel Dein Name (2011) involves the narrator’s attempt to record in writing everything that happens to him from a certain date, be it thinking about literature, doing household chores, travelling abroad as a reporter, or honouring the deaths of acquaintances. As a whole, this giant novel conveys a multifaceted sense of subjectivity so fundamentally determined by its relationality that it must remain ungraspable. However, Kermani does not merely suggest a world of incommensurable differences, atomisation and alienation, even from ourselves; he also explores forms of openness to difference beyond hierarchical ideas of tolerance and integration. In this regard, the central role that others play in the formation of the narrator’s subjectivity and how this is marked by a series of obituaries leads to the radical re-evaluation of the lives that are deemed to be grievable. The relational understanding of subjectivity that Kermani conveys and the central role of grief in the novel resonate with the thinking of Judith Butler, whose writing on these topics also tries to understand how the subject is formed through multiple relations with others and what this means for an ethical understanding of community. The link between a de-centred understanding of the subject and grievability in Dein Name has implications for our understanding of cosmopolitanism, as, through an emphasis on the imagination and on creative engagement with the world, the novel tries to reconcile the lack of any fixed ground and stable meaning on the one hand, with the need for understanding and some form of ground, however contingent and contestable, on the other.

Deifying the soul - from Ibn Arabi to C.G. Jung.

Journal of Analytical PsychologyVolume 65, Issue 1 p. 8-26 Article Deifying the soul – from Ibn Arabi to C.G. Jung† Navid Kermani, Corresponding Author Navid Kermani buero@navidkermani.de Cologne, GermanySearch for more papers by this author Navid Kermani, Corresponding Author Navid Kermani buero@navidkermani.de Cologne, GermanySearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 January 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12563 †Speech to the conference of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), Vienna, August 2019. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume65, Issue1February 2020Pages 8-26 RelatedInformation

Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity by Navid Kermani

Reviewed by: Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity by Navid Kermani Florian Hild (bio) Navid Kermani (trans. Tony Crawford), Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity (Polity, 2017), 272 pp. Errata Navid Kermani contains multitudes: born in Germany to Iranian parents, he is a practicing Muslim who is at home with Goethe and Hannah Arendt just as much as in reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Cologne’s football stadium. Stephen Greenblatt called Kermani “one of the greatest Muslim writers and thinkers in the Western world.” He is a novelist, an orator, a thoughtful commentator on current events, and one of the rare voices that speaks with love and erudition about the Middle East and the West. Just as Goethe turned outward to write the West-Eastern Diwan from 1814–19 when all of Europe turned inward, Kermani seeks and lives the exchange between Orient and Occident at a time when Western authors give lip service to “intercultural dialogue” but often lack knowledge of the East and sometimes even of ourselves. “Shapeless fogs don’t encounter each other,” Hermann Hesse said, and Kermani gives shape and substance to both Islam and Christianity in his recently translated book, Wonder Beyond Belief. In this beautiful book (whose German title Ungläubiges Staunen literally means “wonder without belief and which Kermani originally wanted to call My Own Christianity), a fictionalized Kermani, assisted by an equally artful Catholic friend, makes his idiosyncratic way through Christianity by meditating on 40 works of Christian art. In these three- to 17-page essays, ranging from the first known depiction of the Madonna to a screenshot of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, kidnapped and probably executed by ISIS in 2013, Kermani engages with the Christian faith in an irreverently pious and affectionately skeptical way. As it meandered leisurely past sculptures of an ugly Jesus, ancient mosaics, churches, Da Vinci, Gerhard Richter, Albrecht Dürer, and many more beautifully reproduced works of art, Wonder Beyond Belief taught me more about Christianity and Islam than seems possible in such a deceptively light and breezy read. The book invites [End Page 684] jumping around, re-reading, comparing, and meditating on the many literary and theological gems Kermani offers to readers. After I read Wonder Beyond Belief and took the liberty of asking Mr. Kermani which essays he’d like to see translated into English first, I suggested a striking one about a crucifix. His response was: “No, not ‘Cross,’ please.” This aversion to sensationalizing his work or himself seems typical: Kermani resists categorization, avoids talk shows, and prefers to give long radio interviews instead; a prostrated Muslim under a cross was not the first impression he wanted to give an American audience. He suggested “Love II” instead: a meditation on El Greco’s Christ Bids Farewell to His Mother. “I thought I saw two lovers, or, to be precise, two who love each other not like mother and son,” he writes. Mary as the archetypal mother is venerated in Kermani’s Islam, and many chapters in Wonder Beyond Belief deal with maternal love. In “Love II,” though, Mary looks too young to be a mother and Christ does not look like a son. “Only someone who knows she is entirely safe with her lover looks with such self-abandonment. And indeed he looks at her with eyes that simultaneously covet and protect. This is less a savior than someone who himself was saved by love.” Kermani then describes the contradictory nature of the painting’s title and its apparent content. At one point in “Love II” he writes that “as an outsider, that seems a bit strange to me,” referring to the inconsistency of the farewell motif and the biblical account of Jesus’s last days. It is precisely his outsider’s perspective, the incredulous awe he feels when contemplating Christianity through the lens of art, that gives Kermani’s book the refreshing and stimulating power which leaps off every page. The naïve and curious narrator of Wonder Beyond Belief can wonder where an insider can’t. He ends “Love II” by wondering about El Greco’s wonder regarding the mother and her divine son: “Is it not bewildering that the very two human...

Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture, special issue of Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik ed. by Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart

Reviewed by: Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture, special issue of Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik ed. by Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Erika Berroth Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart, editors. Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture, special issue of Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 47, nos. 1–2, 2014 (recte 2017). 179 pp. Paper €45.00. Framing Islam offers seven articles representing cutting-edge scholarship on a topic of ever increasing relevance: the multifaceted representations of Islam and Muslim identities in German literature, film, and popular culture. All contributors work in US higher education contexts, adding to and engaging with scholarship coming out of Germany and from scholars who identify as Muslims. Realities in Germany, where multiple generations of Muslims have backgrounds and histories in diverse geographies, do not prevent their representation as a homogeneous mass. In interdisciplinary and intersectional readings, scholars provide insights into how the diverse representations of Muslim identities and of Islam are constructed and connected to a real or imagined spectrum of reactions of fascination and fear. The editors' introduction provides a rich context for the subsequent discussions of individual works, genres, and authors. Acknowledging the sustained presence of Islam and its pivotal role in the German imagination since the eighteenth century, as well as the variety of Muslim identities and belongings in German culture, the introduction highlights [End Page 155] the impact of contemporary national political discourses that include Islamophobia, the racialization of faith, and stereotyped perceptions. Close readings and critical analyses reveal deep and intricate cultural connections and powerful tensions. The first two articles draw on Enlightenment traditions. David Coury's "Ways of Belonging: Navid Kermani and the Muslim Turn in Contemporary German Literature" demonstrates how humanistic traditions in Kermani's oeuvre counter Islamophobia. Coury examines how Kermani, recognized as one of Germany's most prominent scholars of Islam, envisions Muslim ways of belonging in a post-secular and post-national Germany in children's books, fiction, and in his essayistic work. Priscilla Layne's "Between Play and Mimicry: The Limits of Humanism in Verrücktes Blut" investigates resistance to the racialization of Islam in a play by Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, where plays by Schiller and Molière serve as intertexts, debunking discourses deeming Islam incompatible with German values. Similarly, in "Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media," Berna Gueneli's case studies of Fatih Akin's films, episodes in the Tatort crime series, and Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel's Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black virgins) emphasize that Islam needs to be decoupled from ties to a particular ethnicity. With "'Don't Panic, I'm Islamic': Voicing Resistance through Documentary," Olivia Landry turns to the genre of documentaries. She demonstrates the genre's potential as resistance narrative and integrates pop-culture strategies as evocative verbal gestures opposing racist Islamophobia. In "'Islam Light': Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms," Heidi Denzel de Tirado's analysis of representations of teenage Muslim girls in German sitcoms reveals second-and third-generation "Islam Light" Turkish-German identifications and their connections to discourses of belonging around the contested concept of Leitkultur. Islam as a marketing brand is the topic of Lindsay Lawton's "Truth in Advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around 'Muslim' Women's Memoirs." Lawton reflects on the commodification of best-selling memoirs by women who describe nuanced varieties of engagements and experiences with Muslim faith. Although they can be seen as post-Muslim women, they are lumped together and marketed as Muslim women victims of religious violence, thus reiterating the trope of Islam as a threat. Faye Stewart's insightful analysis in "Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone's Fremde Haut" reveals the compounded and complex challenges the [End Page 156] Iranian gay Muslim woman protagonist faces in a homophobic and Islamophobic environment. Close readings of significant scenes reveal Muslim identities coming into and out of focus as multifaceted and fluid, contributing to understanding queer Muslim pluralism and intersections of queer identities with Islamic faith. This volume...

Review of Navid KERMANI, God Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran

Review of Navid KERMANI, God Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran

Impressions from the Frankfurt Book Fair

The Frankfurt book fair (FBF) was held from October 14 to 18, 2015 and once again proved to be the biggest event in publishing worldwide. No FBF without politics. The invitation of Salman Rushdie to give an opening lecture in which he defended the freedom of the word led to the withdrawal of Iranian publishers under protest. Navid Kermani was chosen for the Peace Award. In his moving and knowledgeable speech he characterized the communication problems the Western world continues to have with Islam, at the same time investigating and openly impeaching the roots of the various ongoing wars in the Middle East.

The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt * By NAVID KERMANI, translated by WIELAND HOBAN

The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt * By NAVID KERMANI, translated by WIELAND HOBAN

Islam in the West: Perceptions and Self‐Perceptions of Muslims in Navid Kermani's Kurzmitteilung1

ABSTRACTThis essay analyses Navid Kermani's literary engagement with the interaction between Islam and the West in his novel Kurzmitteilung (2007). Kermani (b. 1967 in Germany of Iranian parents) is a scholar of Islamic Studies as well as a writer; he critically examines how Islam often serves as an object of Western counter‐identification. The essay explores how the novel, which is set after the London suicide bomb attacks on 7 July 2005, treats the perceptions and self‐perceptions of Muslims at the beginning of the twenty‐first century, focusing on its German‐Iranian narrator, the event manager Dariusch. My analysis considers Dariusch's ambiguity: he claims a residual cultural identity as an Iranian Muslim, which he contrasts with the identity of Arabs who plant bombs in the West, yet he is not a practising Muslim; he criticises the Western commercialisation of Islam, thereby making his own reverse division between the hypocritical West and misconstrued Islam, but is complicit with this commercialisation in his professional life. Finally, Dariusch dismisses Islam altogether (he turns to Scientology). More broadly, this essay also critically explores the position of Islam in the West and its contribution to Western cultural and religious identification after ‘9/11’ and ‘7/7’.Dieser Aufsatz untersucht Navid Kermanis literarische Auseinandersetzung mit der Wechselbeziehung zwischen dem Islam und dem Westen in seinem Roman Kurzmitteilung (2007). Kermani (1967 als Sohn iranischer Einwanderer in Deutschland geboren) ist sowohl habilitierter Islamwissenschaftler als auch Schriftsteller; er stellt sich kritisch die Frage, wie sich der Westen häufig im Gegensatz zum Islam identifiziert. Der Aufsatz untersucht, wie sich der Roman, der nach den Londoner Bombenanschlägen des 7. Juli 2005 spielt, mit der Wahrnehmung und Selbstwahrnehmung von Muslimen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts auseinandersetzt. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem deutsch‐iranischen Erzähler, dem Eventmanager Dariusch. Meine Analyse beschäftigt sich mit Dariuschs Ambiguität: Er beansprucht eine in Resten vorhandene kulturelle Identität als iranischer Muslim, die er der Identität von Arabern, die Bomben legen, entgegensetzt, aber er ist kein gläubiger Muslim; er kritisiert die westliche Kommerzialisierung des Islam, wobei er seine eigene umgekehrte Trennung zwischen dem heuchlerischen Westen und dem missdeuteten Islam vornimmt, aber er ist an dieser Kommerzialisierung in seinem Beruf beteiligt. Letztendlich lehnt Dariusch den Islam völlig ab (er wendet sich Scientology zu). Dieser Aufsatz setzt sich im weiteren Sinne ebenfalls kritisch mit der Position des Islam im Westen und seinem Beitrag zur westlichen kulturellen und religiösen Identifizierung nach ‘9/11’ und ‘7/7’ auseinander.

Religion und Ästhetik: Dreieinhalb Sondierungen in einem weiten Feld

For some time, practical and systematic theologians have tried to understand and form the relation between Christian religion and aesthetic experience. This essay asks whether classical forms of religion have an aesthetic potential that is relevant for a modern mind. To address the question, the essay analyzes recent publications by a Muslim orientalist (Navid Kermani), a Jewish literary critic (Leon Wieseltier), and a Roman Catholic author (Martin Mosebach). Following upon this analysis, the concluding discussion focuses on whether these three conceptions of a modern-classical aesthetic of religion are relevant for Protestant religious life.

N AVID K ERMANI , Iran: Die Revolution entläßt ihre Kinder (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001). Pp. 262. Ca$20.00 cloth.

Regular readers of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung will certainly have come across the name of Navid Kermani during the past six years. Until last year, one could have followed developments in Iran by reading his articles, which were sympathetic to many opposition leaders whom he was allowed to interview on the spot. Experts also know Kermani from his doctoral thesis on the aesthetics of the Qurءan ( Gott ist schon. Das asthetische Erleben des Korans , Munich, 2000). He is now a long-term fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and has used the first part of his stay to revise thoroughly some of his contributions in order to publish them as a book.