West-eastern divan

pp. 147-165

in: Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among civilizations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Abstract

Even in this awkward translation, readers of these lines can still detect the hand of one of the great literary geniuses of the Western world: Johann Wolfgang Goethe. What many readers will not readily perceive, however, is the fact that the lines are a variation of Qur"anic verses, more specifically of these verses of the second Sura: "To God belongs the rising and the setting of the suns, and wherever you may turn, you find God's face."¹ Slightly varying the Qur"anic words, Goethe extends the scope of God's "face" from East and West to North and South—a rephrasing that is likely to resonate strongly with contemporary readers living in (what is often called) the "age of globalization." Still, what may startle or disorient the same contemporary readers is the deep religiosity reflected in Goethe's lines, a religiosity bordering on religious 'surrender" (which is the literal meaning of Islam). Clearly such religiosity concurs ill with the popular image of Goethe as a self-possessed Olympian patterning his life on pagan-Greek models; it also agrees poorly with his image as a fellow-traveler of modern enlightenment or enlightened modernity—especially in view of the fact that the latter is often identified summarily with such ailments as logocentrism, egocentrism, and Eurocentrism.