The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt
"It is impossible not to admire Kermani's range, his energy and his boundless intellectual generosity and inventiveness."New Humanist"Above all, Kermani's work is permeated by a profound intellectual ecumenism. This is a scholarship marked by a spirit of creative enquiry."The Australian"A masterful work."Journal of Shi'a Islamic Studies"Highly recommended. An excellent exposition of the problem of suffering and how monotheists have attempted to make sense of it without denying their own humanity and without letting God off the hook."Muslim World"In this passionate, scholarly, and brilliantly written book, Navid Kermani explores a powerful half-hidden current within the theology and poetry of all three Western monotheisms: a brooding, irrepressible quarrel with God. The heroes ofThe Terror of Godare neither pious figures who submit to divine providence nor atheists who deny that the universe has any creator or design. Kermani is fascinated instead by those who quarrel with God and protest vehemently against the cruelty, injustice, and unspeakable misery of the world He made. At the center of a vast network of kindred spirits - from Sophocles to Samuel Beckett, from Job to Dante to Heine - stands the remarkable figure whom Kermani brings most vividly to life: the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Faridoddin Attar."Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University"Why does God permit humans to suffer? Navid Kermani attacks this question with unflinching honesty in his reading ofThe Book of Sufferingby the great Persian poet Fariduddin Attar. Kermani places the Sufi's quarrel with God into a deep literary and philosophical conversation, ranging from Job through the Qur'an to modern philosophers and the Holocaust. This mesmerizing reflection on a fundamental existential dilemma provides no easy solutions, but it lays out the problem with remarkable elegance and clarity."Carl W. Ernst, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill