Negotiating and marketing Muslim identity for the West: Navid Kermani's 'Kurzmitteilung'

This essay analyses Navid Kermani’s literary engagement with the interaction between
Germans and Islam in 'Kurzmitteilung' (2007). The focus is on the novel’s treatment of the
marketing of Islam for a German audience by its German-Iranian male protagonist, an event
manager. Kermani (b. 1967 in Germany of Iranian parentage) is a scholar of Islamic Studies
as well as a writer. He offers a differentiated view on Islam as object of Western counteridentification.
The novel sceptically examines today’s West in which we can no longer be
certain of who we are and in which commerce serves as ‘new’ religion. 'Kurzmitteilung' is set
after the London suicide bomb attacks on 7 July 2005: here, Kermani’s protagonist’s Iranian
identity, which many non-Muslims do not recognise, but which he contrasts with the identity
of Arabs who plant bombs in the West, comes to the fore. My essay examines how the novel
reflects on the narrator’s struggles between wanting to be truthful to his Muslim roots and
using his exotic ‘value’, both commercially and interpersonally, or dismissing Islam
altogether (he turns to Scientology). This reflects Kermani’s critical exploration of Western
cultural and religious identification in relation to Islam after ‘9/11’ and ‘7/7’.A revised version of a paper originally presented as the Silvia Naish Post-Doctoral Fellow's Lecture under the title 'Islam as Commercialized Object in Navid Kermani's "Kurzmitteilung"' at the IGRS in December 2008.