Mystical Islam and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary German Literature: Openness to Alterity by Joseph Twist (review)

Joseph Twist's Mystical Islam and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary German Literature: Openness to Alterity focuses on Islamic mysticism in the works of Zafer Șenocak, SAID, Navid Kermani, and Feridun Zaimoğlu in order to offer a deconstructive interpretation of what he calls the "post-9/11 Muslim turn in German literature" (142). Twist follows Karin E. Yeılada and Yasemin Yıldız's studies on the problematization of Muslim identity in Europe and argues that the writings of the four authors mentioned above reveal the "reforming potential already present within the Islamic tradition" (8). Unlike organizations such as Deutsche Islam Konferenz that emphasize dialogue between cultures with presumably fixed identities, literature has the power to challenge institutional forms of Islam and to deconstruct both orthodox formulations of Islamic faith and secular frameworks of cosmopolitanism. Twist puts the authors in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, who in his Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (2008) dismantles the identitarian thinking of monotheism. This logic of monotheism, Nancy argues, continues to operate in contemporary atheism and in the logic of globalization. In this book, Nancy suggests that monotheism in Islam and Judaism in its "triple determination" should be deconstructed in future studies (33). Inspired by Nancy's work, Twist discovers the philosophical force in the authors of Muslim background, who offer an "immanentist notion of the divine as an alterity that opens in the world but seems paradoxically to point beyond it" (145).

Twist applies Nancy's critique of globalization to Enlightenment formulations of cosmopolitanism, which rely on universal principles and human rights. This restrictive model of universalist cosmopolitanism has been contested by scholars such as Ruth Mandel and Tom Cheesman in their studies of Turkish German culture and literature. Claiming that this formulation of cosmopolitanism is espoused by liberals in Germany in their treatment of Islam, Twist offers the vision of Şenocak and others as a better ideal that respects heterogeneity, fluidity, and interpenetration of identities and cultures. "Romantic cosmopolitanism's emphasis on our interrelatedness through love," as explored in Zaimoğlu's novel Liebesbrand (2008), for example, provides a solidarity that goes beyond Enlightenment universalisms (102). The homogenizing tendencies of the Enlightenment and monotheism are thus criticized by each author with regard to different historical and political configurations such as postwar Germany, Turkey's history of secularization, and Iran's theocracy.

The most compelling analyses in the book focus on the interlacing of different literary and philosophical archives ranging from Minnesang and Sufism to Brecht and Rilke in the works of the four authors. Twist's interest is not in direct representations of Muslims in these works, but in this intertextual richness. Rather than focusing on the essays of Şenocak, for example, he turns his attention to the "enigmatic symbolism" in his poetry, a genre that has been mostly neglected in studies of minority literature (26). Similarly, he focuses on Zaimoğlu's Liebesbrand rather than a text like Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006) that deals directly with Islam in Europe. He pays close attention to Şenocak's use of the Frankfurt School in criticizing the Enlightenment, while Zaimoğlu, he argues, follows in the footsteps of early German Romantics, whose view of cosmopolitanism is rescued from the "trivialized" and "marginalized" state and then used by Zaimoğlu to "undermine any monolithic and uniform view of national Leitkultur" (81). The term "touching tales," which Twist borrows from Leslie Adelson's works on Turkish German literature, acquires a religious meaning when he unpacks the indebtedness of the authors to Sufism and Islamic mysticism. Unlike orthodox formulations of Islam, Sufism, he claims, does not receive the attention it deserves, although its emphasis on sexuality, embodiment, immanence, and ambiguity has the potential to "[make] Islam more suitable for a postmodern present" (53). He detects Sufism's reformative potential not in its tolerance of other faiths but in its questioning of the separation between...