Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer: Questions about God by Navid Kermani (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer: Questions about God by Navid Kermani
• Joe Charnes

Navid Kermani, Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer: Questions about God. Cambridge, UK; and Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2023. Pp. 224. $25.00, cloth; $20.00, e-book.

From grieving father to young daughter: “Grandpa is gone, he’ll never tell you a story again” (p. 3). It is here that our story of theology begins—not with treatises on theological abstractions, but as intimate dialogues on life and its loss. Death and life in “conscious confrontation” (p. 3) is a story that we all, in the end, must face and that our stories of theology help us face with more grace. Kermani’s book is a truly gracious offering of storied theology that draws us into our stories through the wisdom prisms of Shia Islam and Sufi, mythic vision. It is a work of heart and a work of art; it is Kermani’s prayerful response to his father’s dying plea that he teach his own young daughter the Islam of beauty. True Islam, “our Islam” (p. 1), that light, she must see—the Islam of “compassion” [End Page 147] (p. 34), “kindness” (p. 89), “brother[hood]” (p. 94), and “peace” (p. 37). It is an Islam embracing and honoring other faiths: “The paths to God are as numerous as the breaths a person takes” (p. 184); an Islam honoring and embracing doubt: “I doubted whether God even existed” (p. 117). The work is, broadly speaking, dialogic in form, with Kermani teaching his daughter Islamic wisdom to soar—to soar in life, to soar in soul, to soar in beauty—with God as the goal. Their dialogues and studies are models for us all, meditations on awakening and surrendering to our call. It is a gentle and thoughtful guide Into the Mystic (Van Morrison).

Kermani is a poet, an Islamic scholar, and a wise guide, who begins in reflection, with “endlessness” Divine. “The Endlessness that Surrounds Us” (p. 1) is the first chapter we read, to draw our awareness into the “endlessness” of being. We are “surrounded by endlessness” (p. 5) and existential being, though we are finite creatures, needing infinity that breathes. In mystical Islam, the world is called “the breath of the All-merciful” (p. 12). Through this beautiful, mythic imagery of God as heavenly breath, God now becomes deeply available and accessible by breath. We inhale, God exhales. It is our metaphoric exchange with graceful, heavenly breath. Divine infinity and “endlessness” have now been overcome and are now relational and intimate, as we engage in breath, with the All-merciful One.

The only substantive critique I feel uncomfortably bound to offer concerns Kermani’s occasional lapses in graceful theological nuance. It is a specific criticism limited to the context of doctrinally defining the religious dogmas of others. In a work whose tenor is so broadly generous in honoring the beauty of the sacred other, these oversights present themselves in more dramatic fashion. For example, while it is absolutely true that “Every religion has . . . its disadvantages” (p. 68), the “disadvantages” Kermani describes misrepresent the traditions in question. “It’s hard to get used to the abysmal pessimism of Buddhism, which sees only pain and suffering in life” (p. 68, emphasis added). The unfortunate language and tenor of “abysmal pessimism” sound more like a Buddhist caricature than an honest characterization. After all, the theology of life as suffering is only the First Noble Truth—the Fourth Noble Truth being the light and means of liberation. Thankfully, such missteps are few and far between, and Kermani’s heart as soulful poet truly reigns supreme.

As a rabbi, there is one area of theological nuance I truly wish Kermani had explored, to greater enhance our knowledge of Islamic thought and form: How does a faithful Muslim, with a heart humbled by the Divine, navigate and negotiate the genuine and dynamic relational tension between existential doubt and [End Page 148] the Islamic ideal of theological submission? I am curious how Kermani, as a professing Muslim with a profound theology of submission, engages with a seemingly conflicting dialectic of “God wants...