German Author At Khanabadosh Cafe Speaks About Next Level Cosmopolitanism

Today I had chance to hear a German writer, Stefan Weidner at Khanabadosh Writers' Cafe, Hyderabad in a session "Meet The Author" moderated by Arfana Mallah. According to the berief introduction presented by the moderator Stefan is a German writer, translator and literary critic. He has studied Arabic and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at the universities of Göttingen, Damascus, Berkeley (CA) and Bonn.

 He has published several volumes of fiction, travel writing and essays, focusing on the relations between Islam and the West. As a translator he has presented to the German public some of the most eminent contemporary Arab poets such as Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Badr Shakir as-Sayyab, Nizar Qabbani and others.

In 2016 he published the first complete German translation of Ibn al-Arabi’s  most famous volume of poetry Tarjuman al-ashwaq. From 2001 until the closure of the magazine in 2016 he was editor-in-chief of Art/Thought – Fikrun wa Fann, a bi-annual journal published and distributed by the German Goethe-Institute in English, Arabic and Farsi. He contributes to the cultural pages of the leading German newspapers.

In his talk Stefan mentioned about the next level of cosmopolitanism, which also happens to be title of his book.

He believes that cosmopolitanism means to feel that one believes in the theory of being at home in any part of the world, as entire world was his, there shouldn't be any discomfort with other cultures and people with different ideologies.

According to him previously it was believed by Europe that they had developed and moved forward, while those who had not developed would develop and change their ideology with passing time. So let them wait, which was a form of colonialism.

"Many people have prejudices, many people don't like people who are foreigners or speak other languages or of other religion, you look differently, so they try to make reasoning as you are not supposed to be racist officially, as I told you the victory of enlightenment is science, progress and reason. Even if you have a very stupid idea about other people like racism, they have to find reasons," Weidner added.