Navid Kermani is a writer and Islamic scholar who lives in Cologne, Germany. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his literary and academic work, the most recent being the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal in 2011.
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 of The Terror of God are 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<p> Why does God permit humans to suffer? Navid Kermani attacks this question with unflinching honesty in his reading of The Book of Suffering by the great Persian poet Faridud