Living in the West where Allah the Beautiful could only be named God: Book review of God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of Qurʾān, by Nawīd Kirmānī, translated from German into English by Tony Crawford

God is Beautiful : The Aesthetic Experience of the Qurʾān, by Nawīd Kirmānī, translated from German into English by Tony Crawford (Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA-USA: Polity Books, 2014), 400 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7456-5167-5, $45.00 Originally written in German: Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran, von Nawīd Kirmānī (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1999, 546 pp., ISBN 978-3406687402) (First paragraph) What a sensation before the millennium, in 1999, when the dissertation thesis of orientalist-islamologist Nawīd Kirmānī, delivered in 1997 at Bonn University, was first published in hardcover in Germany: in the heart of secular Europe, a book on the holy Qurʾān with an inclusive approach, written in a highly stylistic manner, reading suspiciously like a poem! This sensation was far from tolerance, however, when a decade later the Cultural Prize of the State of Hessen was revoked upon the claim of Cardinal Lehmann from the Catholic Church that Mr. Kirmānī wrote an essay disparaging the holy cross of Christianity.