Annemarie Schimmel

Annemarie Schimmel
Glass plate in the Bonngasse; Bonn, Germany
Born	(1922-04-07)April 7, 1922 Erfurt, Germany
Died	January 26, 2003(2003-01-26) (aged 80) Bonn, Germany
Education	Doctorate in Islamic civilization and languages, doctorate in history of religions.
Occupation(s)	Iranologist, Sindhologist, Orientalist, Islamic studies, Sufism studies, Iqbal studies

Annemarie Schimmel, SI, HI (7 April 1922 – 26 January 2003) was an influential German Orientalist and scholar who wrote extensively on Islam and Sufism. Internationally renowned, she was a professor at Harvard University from 1967 to 1992.

Early life and education

Schimmel was born to Protestant and highly cultured, middle-class parents in Erfurt, Germany, on 7 April 1922. Her father, Paul, was a postal worker, and her mother, Anna, belonged to a family with connections to seafaring and international trade. Schimmel remembered her father as "a wonderful playmate, full of fun," and she recalled that her mother made her feel that she was the child of her dreams. She also remembered her childhood home as being full of poetry and literature, though her family was not an academic one.

Having finished high school at age 15, she worked voluntarily for half a year in the Reich Labour Service. She then began studying at the University of Berlin in 1939, at the age of 17, during the Third Reich (1933-1945), the period of Nazi domination in Europe. At the university, she was deeply influenced by her teacher Hans Heinrich Schaeder, who suggested that she study the Divan of Shams Tabrisi, one of the major works of Jalaluddin Rumi. In November 1941 she received a doctorate with the thesis The Position of the Caliph and the Qadi in Late Medieval Egypt (Die Stellung des Kalifen und der Qadis im spätmittelalterlichen Ägypten). She was then only 19 years old. Not long after, she was drafted by the German Foreign Office, where she worked for the next few years while continuing her scholarly studies in her free time. After the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, she was detained for several months by U.S. authorities for investigation of her activities as a German foreign service worker, but she was cleared of any suspicion of collaboration with the Nazis. In 1946, at the age of 23, she became a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Marburg, Germany. She was married briefly in the 1950s, but domestic life did not suit her, and she soon returned to her scholarly studies. She earned a second doctorate at Marburg in the history of religions (Religionswissenschaft) in 1954.

Later life and scholarly career

A turning point in Schimmel's life came in 1954 when she was appointed Professor of the History of Religion at Ankara University. She spent five years in the capital city of Turkey teaching in Turkish and immersing herself in the culture and mystical tradition of the country. She was the first woman and the first non-Muslim to teach theology at the university. In 1967 she inaugurated the Indo-Muslim studies program at Harvard University and remained on the faculty there for the next twenty-five years. While living in quarters on the Harvard campus, Schimmel often visited New York City, where, as a consultant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was famed for her ability to date Islamic manuscripts and objects from the style of calligraphy used in or on them. Her memory of calligraphic styles was virtually photographic. During the 1980s, she served on the editorial board of the multivolume Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan, 1988), under the aegis of Mircea Eliade. In 1992, upon her retirement from Harvard, she was named Professor Emerita of Indo-Muslim Culture. During this period, she was also an honorary professor at the University of Bonn. After leaving Harvard, she returned to Germany, where she lived in Bonn until her death in 2003. Despite her love for Islamic cultures, she remained a devout Lutheran all her life.

Schimmel taught generations of students in a unique style that included lecturing with her eyes closed and reciting long passages of mystical poetry from memory. She was multilingual—besides German, English, and Turkish, she spoke Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Punjabi—and her interests ranged across the Muslim landscape. She published more than fifty books and hundreds of articles on Islamic literature, mysticism, and culture, and she translated Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Sindhi, and Turkish poetry and literature into English and German. Her particular fondness for cats led her to write a book about their role in Islamic literature, and her interest in mysticism resulted in a book about numerical symbolism in various cultures. Her consuming passion, however, was Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Even prominent Sufis acknowledged her as one of the foremost experts on their history and tradition.

For her work on Islam, Sufism, and Muhammad Iqbal, a prominent philosopher, poet, and politician of British India, the government of Pakistan honored her with its highest civil awards, known as Sitara-e-Imtiaz, or Star of Excellence, and Hilal-e-Imtiaz, or Crescent of Excellence. She was conferred with many other awards from many countries of the world, including the Leopold Lucas Prize of the Evangelisch-Theologische Faculty of the University of Tübingen and the 1995 prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. This award caused a controversy in Germany, as she had defended the outrage of the Islamic world against Salman Rushdie in a television interview. Schimmel's award speech is available online in translation, entitled "A Good Word Is Like a Good Tree."

Selected works

• As Through a Veil : Mystical Poetry in Islam. New York : Columbia University Press, 1982.

• And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (367 pages).

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

• Nightingales under the Snow poetry). London and New York : Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 1994, 1997.[1]

• Anvari's Divan: A Pocket Book for Akbar. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.

• A Dance of Sparks: Imagery of Fire in Ghalib's Poetry. New Delhi: Ghalib Academy, 1979.

• A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

• Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam (302 pages). The 1991-1992 Gifford Lectures. online),

• Gabriel's Wing: Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal. Karachi: Iqbal Academy, 1989.

• Mystical Dimensions of Islam. German edition: . English translation: North Carolina University Press, 512 pages, copyright 1975, (1986),ISBN 0-8078-1271-4 . Spanish translation: Las dimensiones místicas del Islam, trad. de A. López Tobajas y M. Tabuyo Ortega, Madrid, Trotta, (2002), ISBN 84-8164-486-2.

• Introducción al Sufismo (152 pages). Barcelona: Editorial Kairós, 2007.

• Rumi's World : The Life and Works of the Greatest Sufi Poet. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2001.

• Im Reich der Grossmoguls: Geschichte, Kunst, Kultur, (2000), Verlag C. H. Beck. English translation: The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture, [Paperback], Ed. Reaktion books Ltd, London, (2004), 352 pages, ISBN 1-86189-251-9 another edition (2006).

• Look! This Is Love. Boston: Shambhala Centaur Editions, 1996.

• The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddinn Rumi. London: East-West Publications, 1980.

• Islamic Literatures of India. Wiesbaden : O. Harrassowitz, 1973.

• Mohammad Iqbal, Poet and Philosopher: A Collection of Translations, Essays, and Other Articles. Karachi : Pakistan-German Forum, 1960.

• Classical Urdu Literature from the Beginning to Iqbal. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1975. A

See also

• Malamatiyya

• Iranology

• Famous Americans in Iran

• Annemarie Schimmel Festschrift : essays presented to Annemarie Schimmel on the occasion of her retirement from Harvard University by her colleagues, students and friends / guest editor: Maria Eva Subtelny ; managing editor: Carolyn I. Cross; Cambridge, Mass. : Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, (1994); Journal of Turkish studies ; v. 018, 1994

External links

• Burzine K. Waghmar, Professor Annemarie Schimmel (April 7, 1922 to January 26, 2003), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 13 (2003): 377-79. [2]

• M. Ikram Chaghatai and Burzine K. Waghmar, Bibliography of the works of the Scholar-Hermit Prof. Dr. Annemarie Schimmel, ed. M. Suheyl Umar, Iqbal Academy, Lahore, 2004.[3]

• Burzine K. Waghmar, Annemarie Schimmel, The Guardian, Feb. 6, 2003, p. 24. [4]

• Shusha Guppy, Professor Annemarie Schimmel, The Independent, Jan. 30, 2003.[5]

• Leonard Lewisohn, Annemarie Schimmel, The Times, Feb. 6, 2003.[6]

• Annemarie Schimmel, A Life of Learning, autobiographical brochure, Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, American Council of Learned Societies, Williamsburg 1993.[7]

• Memorial Minute, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Harvard University [8]
• Biography of Annemarie Schimmel (in Persian)
• Annemarie Schimmel and Muhammad Iqbal Lecture of Khosro Naghed at Tehran university. (in German/Persian)
• Obituary notice, Iqbal Academy, Pakistan