'When your grandpa was in hospital, he asked me one night to promise him that, when he had gone from us, I would teach you Islam - our Islam: the Islam I grew up with ... In that dark, impersonal room, he was thinking of you.' This is why one father began to teach his daughter night after night not only about his own religion, but about that which unites all believers, about God and death, about love and the infinity that surrounds us. This highly personal book is not only a magical literary masterpiece, but also a rich resource of knowledge, and this because Navid Kermani dares to venture into the darkness in order to give expression to our confusion. And because his way of talking, his openness, his knowledge which derives from his immersion in two cultures, are so unique, so light and so deep.
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Navid Kermani is a writer and scholar who lives in Cologne, Germany. He has received numerous accolades for his literary and academic work, including the 2015 Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association, Germany's most prestigious cultural award.
©Julian Baummann/www.julianbaumann.com
'Navid Kermani's Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer is a beautifully written meditation on the philosophical challenge all mortal beings must encounter. With the invariable passage of time, the particularities that inform each individual's experience of and in the world - our feelings, dreams, hopes, disappointments, accomplishments and failures - are lost to the winds of change. We are surrounded by endlessness - that is, the sense of absolute nothingness that envelops our transient being. Capturing this existential challenge succinctly, the author writes, "Sooner or later each of us realizes with a chill that nothing of us will last. Then we begin to doubt: does life really go on somehow when a person dies, as our parents always said?" Kermani's book is a timely and poetic reflection on how religion, in the end, addresses this question by establishing an intimate relationship with God, the infinite being that imparts enduring meaning to our finite existence. This is a work that is both deeply personal and fittingly universal.'
Elliot R. Wolfson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Elliot R. Wolfson, University of California, Santa Barbara