After the speech I gave in the German parliament, which is appended at the end of this book, a friend of mine e-mailed me to say I had combined a poetic political correctness with the pathos of the socialist prophets in a tone, she wrote, that no one but I am capable of today – the same tone that the Jewish cosmopolitans of the nineteenth century had used in speaking of Lessing, Heine and the social idea of the prophets. ‘Of course they can no longer speak today (and, if they could, they would not be allowed to do so)’, my friend added, closing with the impassioned remark that I was – I will quote her again, although it will seem vain to do so in my own preface – ‘the most prodigious representative’ of the nineteenth-century Jewish cosmopolitans. ‘That is a mighty lineage you’re putting me in,’ I replied to my friend, ‘but to take up the idea you raise of representation of advocacy, there is probably something to it after all: what needs to be done in Germany is to fill, to the extent possible, with our limited means, experience and words, the space that became so vacant in the twentieth century.’

Since then, I have been mulling over our brief correspondence. Not that I would claim title to the inspiration, much less the superlative, that my friend had bestowed on me – she is not only a good friend but also, by her whole nature, an extraordinarily enthusiastic one, invariably exuberant in her sympathy, reliably overstated in her praise. But wasn’t my answer, hastily written and promptly sent, presumptuous? I affirmed the relation in which I had placed us – but who was I thinking of besides myself? – to the Jewish thinkers and writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the sense that I felt not an identity, a relationship, or even an equality with them, but a legacy, with the authority and the responsibility that arise from it.

Even before receiving my friend’s e-mail, I had noticed a pathos creeping into my texts at times, and even more into my public speeches, which not everyone immediately felt to be false; at times I had also noticed my audience’s surprise when, without much hesitation, I connected academic or current political issues with fundamental human experiences and needs, with humanness itself, and even with the superhuman. I couldn’t describe it more precisely if I wanted to; it is little more than a vague feeling that, if I were the reader and listener, I might not let another author or speaker get away so easily with what I sometimes permit myself, and what I ought to continue to permit myself, since it constitutes – for good or ill – the essence of what I have to say. That pathos is all the more remarkable since, in day-to-day life and in encounters with other people – even the people I love – I often find myself all too sober, unemotional; I seldom mention in private the primal needs and experiences that I speak of in public – too seldom, according to the occasional reproaches of the people I love. Voluntarily or not, in daily life I seem to restrain the emotionality and urgency that sometimes surprises me in my own essays and speeches. Why is that, I wondered again, and what is the source of the tone my friend was referring to, a tone that no doubt has something to do with the metaphysical orientation of my reflections?

As distasteful as I find all those interpretations that pin an author to the culture of his ancestors, for lack of a better explanation I might at one time have linked that emotionality and urgency to my Middle Eastern background. But nowadays I believe – and my friend’s e-mail points in precisely this direction, which is why I only qualified her comparison rather than rejecting it outright – my tone has a different source, a thoroughly German one. I grew up with German literature and the history of German thought – that much is true – yet only sporadically with those of the present. The lineage I followed ends with the Second World War, or at the latest with the Frankfurt School, which of course was still identified in relation to the war. The tone that my friend referred to – an unusually lofty, you might say preachy, to some ears perhaps importunately existential tone in which I sometimes talk about world affairs – does it not have, rather, the sound of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than of some Middle Eastern ancestry? I know of no contemporary Persian or Arab author who speaks or writes that way, but of a great many German-language authors, down to Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin and Thomas Mann, who without a doubt wrote more elegantly, thought more profoundly, lived more vulnerably, but demonstrated the necessity of universal political ideals (whose very universality should perhaps worry us after all) by poetically translating them into concrete terms. Yes, I place Thomas Mann in this line, and I could just as well have named Lessing or Goethe, because I am concerned here not with a specifically Jewish impetus in German literature but with a cosmopolitanism that the Jewish authors merely emphasized more often than other Germans. As a young reader I not only absorbed their ideals but evidently adopted, too, some of the pathos that my friend associated with the prophets, hence with the religious sphere.

To be sure, the religious references of my books and speeches often point to Islamic motifs and sources (but to the Bible almost as often), and the Muslim family I grew up in surely had its unconscious influence on me: my mother who veiled herself in a white chador for prayers, and only for prayers; my father who prostrated himself before God, even in the presence of my friends or at rest areas beside the motorway during long holiday drives; the perplexed looks of my friends or the other motorists. Those were experiences of foreignness, by all means, although not negative ones. None of my friends ever shunned me on account of my praying parents, and my experience of bilingualism was every bit as natural – although I learned this only many years later – as that of many other Germans up to the Second World War. In our house there was what you might indeed call a simple cosmopolitanism, one which, like that of the Jews, was rooted in religious tradition: in the quranic teaching that to each people a prophet is sent in that people’s language – which is why I somehow imagined Jesus as a German, or at least associated him with Germany – and in the incessantly quoted sentence of the Prophet – who was somehow Persian to me, although actually an Arab – that the paths to God are as numerous as the breaths a man draws. While the child’s concept of revelation may not have conformed to the consensus of Islamic studies, he was nonetheless greatly relieved that his friends would still be able to enter Paradise, even though their parents did not prostrate themselves before God at motorway service stations, and that at the Last Judgement it was good deeds that would count, not the exact wording of the profession of faith.

The deepest impressions on my disposition, as on any other, are those made by the images, actions and words of my early childhood. But is that why I became an Orientalist and a writer? My literary awakening was the result of the books I read, and those were, in my formative years of discovery and study, the German literature and ideas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And that German literature is not just any literature: it has specific traits, and up to the middle of the twentieth century it was steeped more than any other in transcendental matters and biblical motifs – not only God and Jesus but also death and resurrection, rapture and sacrifice; steeped in suffering both as a social and, almost to a greater extent, as a religious incrimination; and steeped in an earnestness that is itself almost holy, a seriousness that no one could deride as heartily as certain Germans themselves, since arguing with oneself has always been rather a German pursuit. Heinrich Heine for one might have skewered my books:

A living German is already a sufficiently serious creature, but a dead German! A Frenchman has absolutely no idea how very serious we Germans are when dead; our faces then become much longer still, and the worms that dine off us wax melancholy if they look at us while eating.¹

The fact that the French and the English don’t bother to translate a word such as Weltschmerz says a great deal about their perception of the Germans, but it very probably says something about the Germans too. For my part, I loved Büchner for the metaphysical desperation that he wrote into Danton, waiting in his cell for execution, and even in matters of ethics and morals in the strict sense – that is, the issues that are proper to religion – I learned more from Adorno’s Minima Moralia than from Muhammad.

While a remarkable number of French, English-speaking and Scandinavian authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries described social conditions or related psychological states with an utterly incredible realism, the best-known German poets always directed their gaze higher – the growing vacancy of Heaven notwithstanding. The Jewish cosmopolitan Heine – to him at least I will appeal in this preface because he is the most sorely missed in the rest of the book – Heine himself expressed that gaze in his inimitable way in contrasting the materialism that had come to dominate France with German philosophy, which explains all matter as just a modification of spirit (when it admits the existence of matter at all): ‘It seemed almost as if, across the Rhine, the spirit sought revenge for the insult done it on this side.’² Contrary to Heine’s prediction, however, Germany’s metaphysical grounding did not dissolve until the mid-twentieth century, when the totalitarian ideology of Nazism seemed to have discredited all overarching projects and all concepts of the collective. Broadly, German post-war literature refers demonstratively to the individual in society; it sees the human being more as a social than as an ontological entity. That was and is magnificent in many instances, and I am an admirer of it. But it was not what set me on my path.

Heine begins his poem ‘Jehuda ben Halevy’ with an allusion to the archetypal song of the Jewish people’s exile, Psalm 137, verse 6. Heine’s engagement with the Andalusian philosopher and poet ben Halevy is the most important signpost of his – not return; we cannot call it that, for Heine had not grown up religious; he seemed to be a child of the Enlightenment through and through – of his connection to the Jewish tradition, a connection by a writer formally converted to Protestantism; a connection which colours all of his late works and, at the same time, is a turn towards God the Creator of the Hebrew Bible.

The second part of the poem also begins with a quotation from Psalm 137 – the first two verses – before comparing the poet’s Jewish origins with a kettle that has long been boiling inside him, a thousand years long: a black sorrow!

There is nothing cheerful about this – all right, we’ll call it a return; it is almost two horrifying centuries, if not light years, away from the bright colours of today’s migration literature. Heine bringing the Jews into his poetry is like Aeneas carrying his invalid father out of the burning city – yet with the twist that Heine himself had to fall deathly ill before his ancestors’ faith appeared plausible to him. In his first public expression of his ‘great transformation’, a response in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung to a report on his illness, Heine wrote:

Very often, especially during severe convulsions of the vertebral column, a doubt comes over me whether man is indeed a two-legged god, as the late Professor Hegel assured me in Berlin twenty-five years ago. In May of last year I had to take to my bed, and I have never risen from it since. In the meanwhile I confess that a great revolution has taken place in me. I am no longer a godlike biped; I am no longer ‘the freest German since Goethe,’ as Ruge called me in better days; I am no longer the Great Pagan No. II, who was likened to the vine-crowned Bacchus, while men called my colleague No. I the Grand-ducal Jupiter of Weimar; I am no longer a comfortably stout Hellene, rejoicing in life, gayly looking down with a smile on the serious Nazarenes; I am now only a poor, dying Jew, a wasted figure of woe, a wretched being!⁴

As I reflected further on my brief correspondence with my friend, the question became more and more detached from my own writings: weren’t the cosmopolitans she was referring to themselves merely representatives? They, or perhaps their parents, had left the ancestral Jewish milieu, the ghetto, and had attained both a high degree of emancipation and a higher position in society, at least in their own literary and academic circles. But if we remember that, as recently as Ludwig Börne’s childhood in late eighteenth-century Frankfurt, even the oldest and most respected Jews had to step off the pavement and bow deeply before an approaching Christian, regardless of his age and standing – even before Christian children and beggars – then we can form some idea of the images, sensations and words that made the deepest impression on their minds. And Heinrich Heine, who, as the nephew of a wealthy banker, had experienced only comparatively subtle forms of discrimination, was always conscious of his background. Addressing a friend in the summer of 1850, he said:

A strange people – for thousands of years constantly beaten, constantly crying, constantly suffering, perpetually forgotten by God yet still cleaving to him, more tenaciously and loyally than any other people in the whole world! If martyrdom, patience and loyalty, endurance in calamity, if all this is ennobling, then these people are nobler than a lot of others. The history of the Middle Ages . . . shows us not a single year that is not marked for the Jews by tortures, autos-da-fé, beheadings, extortions, massacres. The Jews suffered more from the followers of Christ . . . than ever under the most brutal and primitive Poles and Hungarians, Bedouins, Iazyges and Mongols! Oh, how lovely is the religion of love! You probably know that in Rome, the Metropolis of the Faith, for two hundred years . . . the Jews were forced to run races on the last day of the Carnival, naked, in a loin-cloth, for the delectation of the mob.⁵

Heine’s experiences of foreignness, which unlike mine were decidedly negative, engendered more of course than a responsibility for his people’s tradition and a mandate to represent his people. That Jewish scholars advanced the Enlightenment by their very resistance to assimilation was in part an act of loyalty towards the Enlightenment itself, against the narrow Protestant version of it, against the practice of ascribing character to nations and against hypertrophic rationalism. Consequently, before the Holocaust, their pathos, if we bear in mind the word’s literal sense of ‘suffering, pain, disease’, was rarely related only to the discrimination, the oppression, of their own people. It was the suffering, the pain, the disease of all creatures that drove them; it was their cry for redemption and justice that made them successors of the biblical prophets. None other than Heinrich Heine, in his disturbingly religious late poems, thematically and stylistically encompassing Orient and Occident – for all its injustice towards his earlier poems, there is a grain of truth in Karl Kraus’s famous remark that Heine had to fall mortally ill to become a poet – none other than Heine introduced the perspective of the oppressed, the vanquished, in German literature. Yet he did not become the voice of his people in that field; rather, Heine testifies to the disasters of other, foreign peoples: the Moors and their last ruler, Boabdil of Granada, in ‘King of the Moors’; the Mexican Indians who fell victim to the Spanish conquistador Cortez in ‘Vitzliputzli’; and the sub-Saharan African slaves in ‘The Slave Ship’. That means, to return to our own vantage point, that we do not have to have experienced comparable discrimination and oppression to become pathetic in the literal sense. In this respect, perhaps the Jewish cosmopolitans even advocated – as representatives of the Enlightenment project – the universal love of Jesus, secularized in the idea of equality. Then every poet would belong to the tribe of the Asra, ‘they who perish when they love’, as Heine says of the Sultan’s beautiful daughter in his still more beautiful poem.⁶ In any case, however, along with the Judaeo-Arabic heritage of the Enlightenment, Heine and scholars of Judaism after him felt a duty to uncover its Islamic heritage as well. And it would be a good thing if Muslim authors today, whether religious or not, would reciprocate by standing up for Europe’s Jewish.

Suddenly this book’s title, Between Quran and Kafka, took on a new meaning. Of course we had chosen it for its alliteration, which the publisher thought was catchy. But, at the same time, the Quran and Kafka really did designate two poles between which my writing oscillates: revelation and literature; religious and aesthetic experience; the history of the Islamic and the German-speaking cultures; the Orient and the Occident. But the Quran in particular, and Kafka’s works in particular, were important points of reference to me for many years: unique and exemplary, neither imitable nor surpassable. Reflecting on the representative role my friend had ascribed to me, I suddenly discovered that ‘Kafka’ could also stand for something entirely different from what I had had in mind and, likewise, that ‘Quran’ was not limited to the metonymic sense of ‘Islam’ or ‘the Orient’. Kafka can also mean a way of participating in German literature, upholding it all the more resolutely for being ever uncertain of one’s social and political affiliation. Kafka signifies something foreign, marginal, never quite belonging – something which is genuinely European and yet which transcends Europe. And the Quran – and the religion and the culture of Islam along with it – has a meaning, in my writing and my life, like that of the Torah to the Jewish thinkers and writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: it means a forthright affirmation of difference, of the facet of permanent exile, if you will, in my situation; an insistence, religious or not, on the continuing relevance of metaphysical questions in a radically secularized environment; and it also means, all my contemporaneity notwithstanding, a loyalty to my parents’ and grandparents’ canon and, hence, to pre-modern, non-European narratives and modes of narration.

Yes, I say affirmation, I say insistence and loyalty, and I am talking about conscious, almost demonstrative choices. Not unlike Kafka, who grew up reading Goethe and Stifter and appropriated the Jewish traditions as a student might – only gradually, relatively late, and then very avidly – I partook of German literature as my own and was an especially motivated student of it, perhaps not in spite but because of my origins. Although the culture and religion of Islam, which were taken very seriously in the home in which I grew up, in my Iranian family – but the young seem to have a reflex that repels what is important to their parents, as we learn when we become parents in our turn, if not before – I appropriated Islam only gradually, relatively late, and then very avidly, as a student. If the title were taken as indicating a temporal sequence, meaning that I started at one pole and then arrived at the other, this book would have to be called the reverse – ‘Between Kafka and Quran’ – for, when I think about it, it was via Kafka that I arrived at the Quran. It was originally an aesthetic interest, formed by my literary and essentially German reading, that drew me to Islam, and onward from there to all aspects of religion. But then the title would not have ended on the long, open vowel, and that was more important to me than a biographical logic which no one would have noticed anyway.

The friend who sent me the e-mail is named Almut Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, and she is herself the model of a Jewish cosmopolitan. In her new book House of Taswir she records a gesture that is paradigmatic of the spokesman’s role. In old Herbert Stein’s bookstore in Jerusalem, Almut found the Quran translation by the rabbinical scholar Lazarus Goldschmidt in its first edition of 1916. It begins with the words:

‘The Flight’ is of course Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca, the beginning of the Islamic calendar. ‘The Incarnation’ denotes the Christian calendar, not simply by its pragmatic abbreviation ‘AD’, but by explicit reference to the substance of Christian dogma. What a beautiful, surprising gesture on the part of a great rabbi to use the two neighbouring calendars – simultaneously and with equal rank, while omitting that of his own tradition – and to take their theology seriously!⁷

Almut wrote to me that she, too, would elaborate on the idea in her e-mail, which had been just as hastily written as my answer. In the meantime, readers will judge for themselves whether there is anything to the notion of the writer as a representative, which would be an honour but much more a responsibility. Whatever the judgement may be, that role in Germany is appallingly vacant.