The Terror of the Lord

The “Book of Affliction” written by Attar, the classical Persian poet, is perhaps the darkest poetry ever written by a human being. Attar’s view of the world is radical and annihilates all consolation and comfort. He unfolds a cosmos of suffering on a grandiose scale; his sarcasm is insane. Kermani uses the “Book of Affliction” as a point of departure to tell the story of a religiosity that acknowledges and loves God, but harbors wrath against him, a counter-theology which begins long before Job and continues long after Georg Büchner. It runs through many religions, but in a shrouded, previously unexplored sense it connects Judaism, Islam and European modernity – the Old Testament, Sufism and German literature at its darkest. Navid Kermani’s almost magical power casts the spell of heterodoxy over his readers. In a world where war and hunger, earthquakes and tsunamis still manifest as they do in our time, the patent despair that this heretical piety professes may be more appropriate than the answers offered in sermons on Sundays and holidays.