Navid Kermani gets Peace Prize 2015 – SPIEGEL ONLINE

One can understand peace as the absence of violence, as a kind of gentle peace of mind, a night of evil. Or one can understand it as a state active agitation, which not only allows the dispute over principles and beliefs as well as the struggle for social and political detail, but actually demands. The very reason a civil society receives civil, because he experienced in the hard confrontation and to the surprises that thinking individuals and their contemporaries expect, his happy privilege sees.

For this variant of peace definition, the jury of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade has apparently decided this year, in which she gives the venerable award Navid Kermani: A son of Iranian immigrants who went to school in Germany and studied, with of love and faith, and contended it was fulfilling, the God and the revelation of beauty (in addition to the songs from Neil Young) are essential – and as smart as passionately provides information on all in his essays, novels and journalistic works.

From the wealth of his experience

The above all repeatedly refers positions that surprise. Not because of the Islamic scholar Kermani had no principles from which his attitudes and his thinking dined. But because he always argued as an individual, from the wealth – out of his experience – and the reflected limitations. As an individual he has his disgust formulated in an aesthetic meditation in the face of a Crucifixion picture by Guido Reni of Christian martyrdom – which he temporarily withdrawing the Hessian Culture Prize earned, for which he was nominated. (And he eventually got.)

As an individual, he has protested against the referendum on the so-called “minaret ban” in Switzerland, not only contrary to the discrimination of a religious community. But above all, very basically, with the argument that “fundamental rights, moreover, are the fundamental rights of a minority, are made in a democratic vote for disposition and thus no basic rights.”

A republican spirit

As an individual, he has brought against the judgment of the Landgericht Köln, his hometown, turned, and forbade the circumcision of infants. Kermani said at the time, here triumph “Vulgärrationalismus” against a 4000-year-old religious practice and a “most holy act”. And as an individual finally the German-Iranian Navid Kermani has its profound gratitude to the Republic, in which he lives, connected in his speech to the Bundestag on the 65th anniversary of the Basic Law with an appeal that this country take its constitution not only seriously but also to practice: “A wonderfully concise sentence – ‘Persons persecuted on political asylum’ – came in 1993 a monstrous Regulation of 275 words, the stacked without form, and were nested within each other to conceal only one thing: that Germany asylum as a fundamental right has virtually abolished. ”

Kermani is a republican spirit, is not afraid of pathos and enthusiasm not detests, who disputes spirited, closely observed and light, arguing concise. His political thinking is based on Hannah Arendt by, as he put in his acceptance speech for the same price in 2011, “what has become decrypted when made and therefore is inherently unruly”. If the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade will contribute that you carefully follow Kermani unruly surprises in the future, which is a win for all of us.