Navid Kermani

An interesting book. Navid Kermani is a German of Iranian background, born in Germany. He is writing about Islam and religion in general for his 12-year-old daughter. Some of it is amazingly simple and at the same time deep. At other times not.

Both he while growing up, and his daughter now had Roman Catholic religion classes at school, with the result that he knows the Bible and not just the Koran. However, while he often says that you can't put everyone in a religion into one pot, he often speaks of Christianity when he really means Roman Catholicism, and seems unaware of certain differences in how dogma would be expressed now as opposed to twenty years ago. He also ignores aspects of Islam that don't fit his arguments.

Many of the Koran quotes he gives are very beautiful, and certainly more understandable than the translations I have tried to read.

The problem is what sort of rating to give. Parts are certainly worth 4 1/2. Others would not quite make a 3. I guess I'll stick with 3 1/2, as with all its faults, I think this book is worth reading.… (more)

This book was commissioned in an unusual way. The author’s father, an Iranian physician who had immigrated to Germany years earlier, was on his deathbed. He extracted a promise from his German-born son to teach Islam to his young daughter, the dying man’s granddaughter.
Kermani was already the author of several books on Islam and Christian-Muslim dialogue, but this was different. How to catch and hold the attention of one’s own child, on the cusp of puberty? The result is a slightly-fictionalized record of their conversations, although the child’s questions and responses only appear indirectly.
The Islam Kermani depicts is multi-faceted. He draws not only on the Quran but on Sufi mysticism, particularly the poet Rūmī and the mystic scholar Ibn Arabī. The result is a tolerant and merciful way of life based on a sense of wonder. This is reinforced by frequent reference to the insights of quantum mechanics.
Kermani acknowledges the other face of Islam, the violent, authoritarian, intolerant side, but maintains that this reflects neither the Quran nor the best of the long tradition of interpretation.
He also draws frequent comparisons with Christianity and Judaism, always respectful and open-minded. As a result, I not only came away with a view of Islam quite different from the form that captures news headlines but also insights into Christianity from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider.
Nevertheless, the form of the book, which was wide-ranging, like an actual discussion, made it difficult at times to pay attention or retain what I’d read. At other times, a thought would strike me so forcefully that I had to stop and savor it for a while. One example is when he likens the universe to a long poem God sings to mankind. Thus, the long-term effect of this book will be to have served as a way of whetting my appetite to read and learn more from other sources, including more books by this author.… (more)

I love the "literary synthesis" essay subgenre, where an author who's widely read and deeply thoughtful traces the connections between literature and the broader world at their leisure, unlocking hidden insights from silent texts with the help of their brethren. Kermani is ethnically Persian but culturally German, and so most of these essays link elements of German culture, particularly the great authors of the past, to their Islamic counterparts, in often surprising but always logical ways. The Koran is the fundamental text of not merely Islam but also Islamic culture; this gives Kermani plenty to talk about in regards to its influence, although he regrets its near-hegemonic dominance. German literature has no comparable single text, but certain authors come up again and again, most prominently Kafka. Kermani talks very personally about what Islam and Germany mean to him, but like all worldly writers, his interests are far too broad to be confined: not only does the title neatly sum up the major preoccupations of the book, it balances his Iranian heritage and German birth, and also faith and doubt, belonging and alienation, and parochialism and universalism.

- "Don't Follow the Poets!". The power of the Koran owes something essential to its original language, as seen by the plentiful conversion-by-poetry stories. However, the special relationship between religion and poetry in Islamic tradition could be considered a weakness as well as a strength, especially when you consider that modern spoken Arabic has diverged from Koranic Arabic in different ways in different countries. Classical Arabic's beauty hangs over modern Arabic in a positive way, providing endless inspiration thanks to its ambiguities, but also a negative way, with over-literal interpretations risking stagnation: Osama bin Laden spoke Arabic in a plain, austere way that mirrored his fundamentalist religious views.
- "Revolt against God". Dante's Divine Comedy can be seen as a response to Islamic literature, above all the Persian Fariduddin Attar's The Book of Suffering. Many Islamic writers had surprisingly diverse theodicies and attitudes to the "submission" at the heart of Islam, as individuals have similar reactions to the tribulations of life no matter their religion, much as we can see in the different ways the Book of Job is viewed. Though much of the modern Christian and Jewish literary traditions sees themselves as apart from the Islamic tradition in terms of individual independence vs submission, the universal urge of defiance (Kermani's most-lauded cultural signifier) crosses boundaries.
- "World without God". King Lear is Shakespeare's finest work, because of how it parallels the great Biblical drama of Job in its exploration of sorrow, resolution, loss, and loyalty without repeating it; in fact its secularization might even put it above its religious competitor. As George Orwell pointed out, even famed Shakespeare-hater Leo Tolstoy appreciated how Shakespeare put human agency above divine destiny, and even when our explanation for our calamities shifts from the caprices of God to the vagaries of nature/fate (cf. Julius Caesar's "The fault is not in our stars... but in ourselves"), we are still masters of our own fate, even when it hurts.
- "Heroic Weakness". The minor 1759 play "Philotas" by Gotthold Lessing, where a captured prince decides that his death rather than being ransomed will give his country a decisive advantage in a war, offers a useful framework to discuss modern terrorism, not only 9/11 but also crimes in Germany by both supposedly "Germanized" Arabs and "native" Germans. Often people decide that the conflict between your cultural heritage and your ethnic/religious heritage often can't be reconciled; Thilo Sarrazin's infamous book Germany's Self-Destruction emphatic declaration that Muslims can't ever be anything but Muslim is contrasted with Hannah Arendt's melancholy agreement that for Jews are often forced to place their Jewish identity over every other aspect of their selves. To Kermani, all ideologies beneath universalist humanism are beneath any civilized person - patriotism, religion, and ethnonationalism are all deadly traps.
- "God Breathing". The act of breathing - inborn and automatic, yet capable of being voluntarily overridden for brief periods - provides a good metaphor for the eternal question of free will vs human choice. Goethe, the archetypal German humanist, wrote a lot about everything, but in his poem Talisman, among other works, his use of the breath metaphor is a perfect way to think about the spirit of God.
- "Filth of My Soul". Heinrich von Kleist, a German playwright who committed mutual suicide with his platonic girlfriend (!), wrote the play Amphitryon, which contains a scene wherein at a crucial moment the heroine Alcmene, struggling to express her feelings of love, utters a single word: "Ach!" A simple, single word, but in context of the play, as well as compared to the varied depictions of love in von Kleist's other works, it offers an excuse to discourse on the nature of love and its expressions, which range from the brutal devouring of Achilles by Penthesilea to more refined sighing, as in the writings of the great Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi.
- "The Truth of Theatre". Shiite passion plays, known as taziyeh, honor the death of Hussein at the Battle of Karbala. The conventions of the taziyeh are contrasted against the theories of Berthold Brecht, in particular the alienation effect. Brecht rejected much of the philosophical underpinnings of Western drama, especially the emotional catharsis theories of Aristotle which form the implicit backbone of most conventional Western plays, but even though Brecht's works strike observers as very different due to his emphasis on artificiality, taziyeh is often a level beyond Brecht in both in its rejection of the Western model and its use of mythic/historical energies to produce emotional impacts. This is especially due to the role of the audience, which responds to this Shiite origin story in a way that has no contemporary in secular Western theater. It is extremely curious why he does not compare taziyeh to Christian passion plays, however.
- "Liberate Bayreuth!". Yet another Wagnerian conversion story, though Kermani can't get over the lameness of the period staging, feeling that it's unworthy of the grandeur and power of the music. The transcendent effects of some of the greatest music ever written struggles in its settings partially because of its being straitjacketing by the conventions of the past; anti-naturalism produced in an era of naturalism. There's also a funny dig at the operatic pretensions of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd, although he's wrong... The Wall rules!
- "Swimming in the Afternoon". Much like how second-generation Americans often feel not-quite-fully grounded in American culture, Germany can inspire the same ambivalence in its recent arrivals. Kermani feels that way, and so did Kafka: no matter how Kafka wrote, he was tormented by identity - Hapsburg, German, Czech, Jewish? Defining a national literary culture is always tricky, especially when it's one that wants to have an international aspect as well, and even more especially if it's German, which has been separated, united, divided, and reunified in so many ways throughout history, and whose many writers have often been defined as much by their opposition to German politics as much as by their love for German culture. It would be only too fitting to declare Kafka the ultimate German writer, who only escaped the Holocaust by dying too young.
- "The Duty of Literature". The early 20th century Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat was one of those cranky, scandalous, outré writers whose iconoclasm has become much more attractive with the passage of time. His life has many parallels with Kafka, and he was fascinated by his German counterpart, but their artistic sensibilities did not always overlap - Hedayat's stories were much more grounded in everyday life than the more abstract settings of Kafka. Hedayat's interest in Kafka was primarily in Kafka's grim portrayal of the world, an interest made more poignant to the reader by his own suicide, but much like Kafka's reputation has survived his early death, so has Hedayat's.
- "Towards Europe". Poets, Stefan Zweig chief among them, had been singing the praises of Europe as a single entity long before politicians had the vision, even as its nations were still vigorously persecuting their greatest artists over distinctions that now mean nothing. But while "Europe" now means something to the residents of its current member states, you only have to look at the refugee crisis to see how it means something far different to its neighbors to the south. In one sense, Europe's defenses against unchecked immigration are perfectly rational, but in another they are an abandonment of the dreams that helped create it. Refugees are trading the certain death of their homes for the potential death of the crossing of the seas; while the urge to wall oneself off is understandable, one need only look at Europe's history to see where that urge leads. You don't have to be religious to favor accommodating the refugees, you just have to look at the lives and works of the great Europeans of the past.
- "In Defence of the Glass Bead Game". Hermann Hesse's final novel The Glass Bead Game was much derided upon its release, but its vision of a sterile, uncreative world where people play meaningless games all day is, shall we say, not without interest in the modern world. This essay is kind of a downer; Kermani makes many comparisons between our own time and the fictional land of Castalia in the novel, but shies away from the obvious conclusion that we're at the end of our creative tether. I don't agree, but I can sympathize with that conclusion.
- "The Violence of Compassion". On the occasion of being awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize, how the rights of man (based on the idea of universal rights) are balanced against the rights of the citizen (based on a nationalist conception of identification with a particular state), with reference to the American and French Revolutions, as well as Arendt's relationship to Zionism. Are revolutions always providers or guarantors of liberties, or to truly benefit their participants do they require preconditions, like relative equality, that modern revolutions like the Arab Spring lack?
- "Tilting at Windmills". At an event honoring the writer Martin Mosebach, a comparison of his novelistic style with Cervantes', and a questionable (?) what really matters in novels:

"The structure [of his latest novel, The Moon and the Girl] is frighteningly perfect – and yet that is not what thrills this eulogist, for one, about the laureate. Naturally we younger readers want the explosion, not the perfection; what interests us about the plot is most of all the digression. But, on the other hand, something emerges further in The Moon and the Girl that was not yet present in the early novels, with their fairly endearing characters, and that only in West End, in A Long Night at the latest, takes on the unsettling quality I find indispensable in literature: what emerges is malice. It is no accident that The Moon and the Girl contains the first cold-blooded murder in a Mosebach novel. Literature has to be malicious, it has to hurt; for the sake of humanity itself, it has to be merciless in its view of human beings."

- "One God, One Wife, One Cheese". Kermani's recollections of Hushang Golshiri, an Iranian poet who was a bit of a character.
- "Sing the Quran Singingly". The Koran is meant to be read aloud, and though oral recitation of the Bible/Torah is also important in their respective traditions, the act of speaking what is technically the word of God is more important in Islam. Germans have worried about Muslim efforts to spread Islam in a manner akin to Christian proselytizing, but as the research of scholars like Angelika Neuwirth has confirmed, audience participation is key to the Koran's effect.
- "On the Sixty-Fifth Anniversary of the Promulgation of the German Constitution". Big thanks to modern Germany for being great.
- "On Receiving the Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association". His memories of Father Jacques Mourad, a Catholic priest in Syria who was kidnapped by ISIS amid their efforts to re-establish a caliphate. Moderate Muslims struggle with these horrors, seeing that some of the greatest victims of fundamentalists are moderates, yet also reaching out for the humanity of those of other religions caught up in this disaster. Seeing this internal struggle exposed is shameful, but also a reminder of shared humanity.

I have never read any of his fiction, but he is unquestionably a superb essayist.… (more)

I was intrigued by the concept of this collection of essays: a series of short, inter-linked meditations on various pieces of (mostly) medieval and Renaissance Christian artworks written by a devout Muslim. I'm not a believer, but as someone raised Catholic in a country in which most people are Christians, it's impossible for me to approach this art as an outsider in the way that Navid Kermani can.

Wonder Beyond Belief certainly challenged me in some respects—how to grapple with the ideas of someone who says that he loves and admires Christianity but who rejects ecumenical pablum (fair enough) and states flat-out that Trinitiarianism is a pagan concept and that Christianity is heresy? I'm an atheist who has profound issues with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and yet I found myself with knee-jerk emotional responses to some of what Kermani wrote—there's something for me to sit with there. I'm sure that Kermani is writing in part to induce such responses—in the acknowledgments he says that sometimes in discussing artworks he "intentionally preferred interpretations or views that are controversial (to say the least) in the pertinent academic fields" because he is "often more interested in believed truth, and in aesthetic truth, than in what is considered historically true". Fair enough—even if an approach that my historian self fundamentally can't enter into.

But for me, what turned out to be my biggest problem with this book, and something that Kermani doesn't seem to consider at all, is gender: how the fact that he's a guy shapes how he views art depicting female subjects. Is there a strong strain of eroticism in Catholic art? Undeniably! Do we have medieval and early modern accounts of responses to that art which mingle the sacred and the sexual in ways which make many modern readers uncomfortable? Sure! But to refer to a fairly innocuous depiction of St Ursula as showing a "gold-tressed, plump-cheeked, buttonnosed pouter", or to Mary holding her cloak as "pressing her fingers moreover on the point just above or at the edge of her pubes, depending how wide Mary’s pubes [...] are [...] a manifestation of the Devil perhaps, her body slightly turned, her feet in a sidestep, her hips slightly tipped, her genitals practically held out towards poor Bernard"? There's being irreverent about sacred cows and then there's just being weird about women. Throughout this book there's a distinct strain of the latter.… (more)