Islam in the West: Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Muslims in Navid Kermani's Kurzmitteilung.

This essay analyses Navid Kermani's literary engagement with the interaction between Islam and the West in his novel Kurzmitteilung (2007). Kermani (b. 1967 in Germany of Iranian parents) is a scholar of Islamic Studies as well as a writer; he critically examines how Islam often serves as an object of Western counter-identification. The essay explores how the novel, which is set after the London suicide bomb attacks on 7 July 2005, treats the perceptions and self-perceptions of Muslims at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on its German-Iranian narrator, the event manager Dariusch. My analysis considers Dariusch's ambiguity: he claims a residual cultural identity as an Iranian Muslim, which he contrasts with the identity of Arabs who plant bombs in the West, yet he is not a practising Muslim; he criticises the Western commercialisation of Islam, thereby making his own reverse division between the hypocritical West and misconstrued Islam, but is complicit with this commercialisation in his professional life. Finally, Dariusch dismisses Islam altogether (he turns to Scientology). More broadly, this essay also critically explores the position of Islam in the West and its contribution to Western cultural and religious identification after '9/11' and '7/7'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]