State of Emergency

This book ventures into the world beyond Lampedusa: the crisis belt that stretches from Kashmir across Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Arab world and beyond, to the borders and coasts of Europe. Celebrated author Navid Kermani reports from a region which is our immediate neighbour, despite all too often being depicted as remote and distant from our daily concerns. Kermani has visited the places where no CNN transmitter truck is parked and yet smouldering fires threaten world peace. In his widely praised, wonderfully agile and careful prose, he reports on NATO's war in Afghanistan and the underside of globalization in India, on the civil war in Syria and the struggle of Shiites and Kurds against the 'Islamic State' in Iraq. He was the only Western reporter present at the suppression of the mass protests in Tehran, travelled with Sufis through Pakistan, talked with Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, and observed the disastrous Mediterranean refugee route in Lampedusa.

 Kermani's gripping reports allow us to understand a world in turmoil, to share the suspense and the suffering of the people in it. As if by magic, he brings individual lives and situations to life so vividly that complex and seemingly distant problems of world politics suddenly appear crystal clear. Our world too lies beyond Lampedusa.

Review

"Those who want to see the day-to-day lives of human beings in the crisis regions of the Middle East - lives that don't make the news - should read Navid Kermani's sensitive reporting. Reports you won't soon forget."Deutschland-Radio"Kermani's well-researched and sensitive book reveals how violence is born. It also reminds us that far away victims and perpetrators have one thing in common: they're human beings, just like us."Süddeutsche Zeitung"Intense, colourful, emotional, subjective."Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung"Among the most thoughtful intellectual voices in Germany today."The New York Review of Books"After reading this book, one puts it down glad to have been both touched and taught"Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag“Kermani’s style is nuanced and kindly, poetic and philosophical, he zooms in and out of perspectives like a novelist and is drawn to irresolvable tensions like a conceptual artist.

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. State of Emergency is a humane and timely reminder that there is no one Islam, no one set of Islamic views, values and beliefs, just as there is no one Western creed.”Geographical