The Terror of God

Navid Kermani is a wonderfully creative literary critic and historian specialising in Arabic and Persian literature of the classical period. His earlier work on the aesthetics of the Qur’an was an excellent contribution to the field of Qur’anic studies. The present book under review is a challenging and timely intervention in contemporary thought, analysing the important, most neglected and much reviled tradition within monotheisms of the literary revolt against God, the complaints and litanies of ‘speaking truth’ to the ultimate power, that is the divine, exemplified in the biblical story of Job and in the medieval example of the Musibatnamah of the famous Persian poet Farid al-Din [Attar. The fundamental problem of evil, the existence of both natural disasters such as earthquakes (natural evils) and of moral failures such as genocide (moral evils) have since, at least, the Enlightenment provided the primary argument against the existence of God, or a singular deity. Arguably, polytheisms, whether henotheisms or at the minimum non-monotheisms, have less of a problem here – failings of a human, supra-human and natural kind can be explained by the existence of different and even squabbling gods – even the Qur’an recognises this aspect of a non-monotheistic order even if it regards it as a fault. Monotheisms tend to see themselves, or that is what the main narrative seems to suggest, as singular discourses of the power of God whose diktat cannot be violated. This idea of the divine could be construed from the divine names themselves that are depicted in the calligraphies at the beginning of each chapter: al-qahhar, the subduer; al-darr, the afflicter; al-khafid, the humiliater; al-jabbar, the compeller; and al-muqtadir, the dominator.