4 - Between Pleasure and Terror: The Divine in Navid Kermani's Fiction

Summary

Cosmopolitanism, Religion, and the Role of Literature in Kermani's Thought

NAVID KERMANI WAS BORN in 1967 to Iranian parents in Siegen and has dual German and Iranian citizenship. He is the most recent arrival on the literary scene analyzed in this study, and his growing success is evidenced by the chair he holds at the German Academy for Language and Literature and the various lectureships and awards he has won, including the Kleist Prize (2012) for his entire oeuvre. He was also the quickest to intervene in post-9/11 debates, arguing against the dichotomization of Islam and the West in the wake of al-Qaeda's attacks in an article for the Süddeutsche Zeitung as early as September 13, 2001: “Es sind die Muslime selbst, die unter dem Fanatismus der Taliban, der iranischen Staatsajatollahs, der puritanischen Petromuslime auf der arabischen Halbinsel leiden…. Es gibt kein Wir, das westlich, und ein Ihr, das muslimisch wäre, so tatkräftig Terroristen vom Schlag Bin Ladens an genau dieser Polarisierung arbeiten, so nahe sie von der westlichen Kommentierung gelegt wird.” (It is the Muslims themselves who suffer under the fanaticism of the Taliban, of the Iranian state Ayatollah, of the puritanical ‘petro-Muslims’ on the Arabian Peninsula…. There is no us that is Western and a them that would be Muslim, as actively as Terrorists like bin Laden work on exactly this polarization, as much as it is suggested by Western commentary.) Kermani's literary debut, Das Buch der von Neil Young Getöteten (The Book of Those Slain by Neil Young, 2002), was published after 9/11, so his response to that event cannot be traced through changes in his published work. But the newspaper articles from 2001 to 2005 collected in Strategie der Eskalation: Der Nahe Osten und die Politik des Westens (Strategy of Escalation: The Near East and Politics of the West, 2005) demonstrate a profound engagement with the global impact of Islamist terrorism that is comparable with Şenocak's Das Land hinter den Buchstaben, SAID's Ich und der Islam, and the emergence of Zaimoglu's religious cosmopolitanism in Zwölf Gramm Glück.

Previous academic research into religion and spirituality in Kermani's fiction focuses on intercultural negotiations that either ironically foreground aspects of Muslim or German identity at different times for utilitarian reasons or intentionally blur religious boundaries in the name of tolerance in order to leave room for doctrinal differences.