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Osama bin Laden is Sleeping with Fishes

Three Questions to Ahmad Milad Karimi

Julia Jürgens 
In the series New German Stories, which was launched in January 2014 as part of the Academy program, Ahmad Milad Karimi, Professor of Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism at the University of Münster, presented his book Osama bin Laden is Sleeping with Fishes (Osama bin Laden schläft bei den Fischen) at the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin on March 10, 2015.

On 9 March 2015 Julia Jürgens did a short interview with Ahmad Milad Karimi and asked him the following three questions: 
 

In your autobiography you bring together Western popular culture and the history of Islamic intellectualism, the translation of the Koran and your PhD thesis on Hegel, Persian mysticism and a penchant for mafia films. If I may make a question of your book’s subtitle: What does Marlon Brando have to do with the pleasure you take in being Muslim?

That is a secret of the book, a secret concealed first and foremost by the fact that there is always more to people than the pigeonhole we like to keep them in.

Six years ago you published your new translation of the Koran. What motivated you to take up such a challenge and add a new translation to those already in existence?

The Koran is more than simply a book—it is the poetry of God. The Koran is rhythmic and melodious. It has a beat and a timbre. Every pause for breath is emotional and pregnant with meaning. The way in which the Koran comes into being by creating a resonant space at each reading touches the heart. The Koran is thus an act of beauty and a means to experience God. And it was this, which shaped my decision to translate the Koran, to translate it in such a way as to foreground this spirit, this experience also in the German version.

You and your family fled the war in Afghanistan in 1992. For over a year you were in the hands of traffickers, on an odyssee that took you to New Delhi and Moscow before you finally reached your destination, Germany. In the light of this experience, how do you view “Fortress Europe’s” current policy on refugees and asylum seekers?

What would Europe be without its refugees? The German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who took his own life when fleeing the Nazis in 1940, noted in his Arcades project that the idea of progress is rooted in the idea of catastrophe: “That ‘it goes on like this’ is the catastrophe.” The real catastrophe is the attitude of the general public to those who are forced to flee, to those who are in search of humanity but only rarely find it. To be able to stay here “on tolerance”, [i.e. be allowed only a provisional residence permit], to have one’s application for asylum “turned down,” to be “deported”— all these are verdicts that concern human beings. But these particular human beings are defined and treated as objects that cost money, that are a burden. By contrast, policy that respects the human rights of refugees and asylum-seekers calls for solidarity and, above all, for a comprehensive package of measures—the first of which must be the right to legal immigration. Europe will fail to meet its own standards of democracy if its asylum policy remains focused not on the needs of people in distress but on the economic interests of each of its member states.

The interview was conducted by Julia Jürgens (Academy program on migration and diversity).

book cover

Ahmad Milad Karimi Osama bin Laden schläft bei den Fischen (“Osama bin Laden is sleeping with fishes”, book cover); Herder Publishers

Citation recommendation:

Julia Jürgens (2015), Osama bin Laden is Sleeping with Fishes. Three Questions to Ahmad Milad Karimi.
URL: www.jmberlin.de/en/node/6351

Interview Series: New German Stories (12)

  • New German Stories

    From 2014 to 2017, our colleagues from the Academy program on migration and diversity held regular events at the Jewish Museum in a series called New German Stories. The guests' lives speak to Germany, past and present, as a society of migration, and the events take these life stories as a springboard for exploring these themes. Beforehand, the guests were almost always interviewed. We have compiled these interviews for you here.

  • Karamba Diaby is sitting on a staircase, wearing a blue suit with a red check tie.

    Karamba Diaby

    “We should close this representation gap”

    Interview
    26 May 2017

  • Portrait of an elderly lady with a bun

    Anita Awosusi

    On her book Our Father – A Sinti Family Recounts

    Interview
    6 Feb 2017

  • Black and white portrait of a young man with glasses in half profile

    Ármin Langer

    “The boredom of peaceful coexistence”

    Interview
    18 Oct 2016

  • Portrait of a woman with glasses who smiles and looks directly into the camera.

    Marion Kraft

    “The part Black soldiers played in the liberation of Germany from Nazism has been largely neglected”

    Livestream
    6 Jul 2016

  • Portrait of a young woman smiling

    Çiçek Bacık

    “We’ve always been spoken and written about”

    Interview
    13 Oct 2015

  • Portrait of a woman with a blue headscarf, lipstick and eye shadow, looking upwards to the left.

    Fereshta Ludin

    “I wish more people would look in my eyes instead of at my scarf”

    Interview
    16 Sep 2015

  • Black and white portrait of a man.

    David Ranan

    “Other but not foreign”

    Interview
    6 Jul 2015

  • Detail from a book cover: it shows a fish wrapped in newspaper, with its head and tail fin visible.

    Ahmad Milad Karimi

    On his book Osama bin Laden is Sleeping with Fishes

    Interview
    9 Mar 2015

  • Portrait of a woman with glasses who smiles and looks directly into the camera

    Alina Gromova

    Generation “kosher light”. Young Jews of Russian descent in Berlin

    Interview
    8 Sep 2014

  • An older woman with glasses and headscarf (left in the picture) is talking to a younger woman who also wears glasses and is standing at the right edge of the picture.

    Canan Turan

    Kıymet or: A cinematic tribute to my grandmother

    Interview
    4 Jul 2014

  • On the cover you can see a photo of three playing children

    Urmila Goel and Nisa Punnamparambil-Wolf

    InderKinder
    Dealing creatively with ethnic classifications

    Interview
    19 Mar 2014

  • Three women in profile at a table, smilingly signing books

    Alice Bota, Khuê Pham, and Özlem Topçu

    “New German stories”

    Interview
    29 Jan 2014

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