He is well known and published primarily in Germany, where, still in his young 40s, he is already a member of the prestigious Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Kermani attracted attention to his writing for the first time with a biography of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, the great Egyptian reformist and hermeneutic (also featured in the issue n.125 of our Reset magazine), which was co-written with Abu Zayd and published in 1996.

An editorialist for the German weekly Die Zeit and the author of many books, the complete list of his work can be found on his personal website at www.navidkermani.de. Kermani has mainly studied Iran, the relationship between Europe and its Muslim immigrants (his most recent book on this subject is called Who is we? Germany and its Muslims, C.H. Beck, 2009), tolerance and other theological-religious subjects mainly concerning Islam (an excellent choice in English is The Terror of God, John Wiley & Sons, 2011).

In 2000 he won the prestigious Ernst Bloch Förderpreis and in 2011 the Buber-Rosenzweig medal. A critic of the social-political interpretation of the Koran, he believes that Islam and its holy book do not present great impediments to the development of democracy any more than other religions and their sacred texts, if interpreted in a certain way. In Kermani’s opinion, the problem of the ambiguous and often controversial relationship between the contemporary Muslim world and the democratic West has less to do with the Islamic religion than with the imbalance in economic-political relations between the First, Second and Third Worlds, often made worse by the West’s reticence to allow Muslim countries and people to participate in the democratic progress, including Muslim immigrants in Europe and America.