Short answers, pulled from the story.
Annemarie Schimmel was born on the 7th of April 1922 in Erfurt, Germany. She grew up in a middle-class Protestant household where her father Paul worked as a postal worker and her mother Anna came from a family with deep ties to international trade.
In 1954, Annemarie Schimmel was appointed professor of the history of religion at Ankara University in Turkey. She became the first woman and the first non-Muslim to teach theology at the institution and spent five years in the capital city of Ankara.
Annemarie Schimmel taught at Harvard University for twenty-five years starting in 1967 to inaugurate the Indo-Muslim studies program. While living on the Harvard campus, she frequently visited New York City to serve as a consultant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Annemarie Schimmel received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1995 after defending the outrage of the Islamic world against Salman Rushdie in a television interview. Her award speech entitled A Good Word Is Like a Good Tree reflected her belief in the importance of dialogue and mutual understanding between different cultures and religions.
Annemarie Schimmel published the book Introduction to Cats of Cairo: Egypt's Enduring Legacy in 1995 to explore the role of cats in Islamic literature. The book was later reissued as Cairo Cats: Egypt's Enduring Legacy in 2005.
Annemarie Schimmel died on the 26th of January 2003 in Bonn, Germany after retiring from Harvard in 1992. She received the Sitara-e-Imtiaz and Hilal-e-Imtiaz from the government of Pakistan among other international honors.