Illuminating, sobering, irritating: Navid Kermani's brilliant reports make the seemingly irrational aspects of the Orient understandable, rendering the foreign unsettlingly familiar. He takes us through regions of the Islamic world that are currently in the spotlight, from Egypt to Indonesia: the Middle East as well as Central Asia, Iran as well as Pakistan. While he describes individual situations and people with precision, the conclusions he draws always extend beyond the subject of his report. They are analyses of our world that arise from concrete experience.