Everyday Life and Death: Mortality and Community in Navid Kermani's Kurzmitteilung

Navid Kermani (born 1967 in Siegen of Iranian parents) is a writer, Islam scholar and public intellectual of rising prominence, as evidenced by speech in the Reichstag marking the 65th anniversary of the Grundgesetz and by his connection to the Green Party’s 2017 presidential candidacy. It is for his essays and articles on Islam and the West that Kermani is most well-known and he continues to provide an authoritative counterbalance to the increasingly xenophobic and divisive rhetoric of organisations such as the movement Pegida (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) and the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland. Despite the variety of Kermani’s essayistic writing, which also deals with German literature, the current refugee crisis, and the politics of the Middle East and of India, questions of community and belonging remain its central focus. He repeatedly argues for an understanding of the complexity of identity and for a cosmopolitan idea of coexistence that involves concern for the other and the acceptance of difference, earning him the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (2015) and the Marion Dönhoff Preis für internationale Verständigung (2016), to name two examples.