Annemarie Schimmel

• 1. Introduction

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  Annemarie Schimmel was born in Erfurt, Germany, on the 7th of April 1922, the daughter of a postal worker named Paul and his wife Anna. She later described her father as, in her own words, a wonderful playmate, full of fun. By 17 she had entered the University of Berlin, in 1939, in the middle of the Third Reich. Two years later she earned a doctorate on the standing of a caliph and religious judges in medieval Egypt. She was still only 19, and examiners rated the thesis magna cum laude. That was only the start. The household she grew up in was Protestant, comfortably middle class, and not academic, but nothing in it predicted where she was headed.

  What was it about Islam's mystical side that pulled a provincial German teenager so deeply in, and never let her go? And what happened decades later when she spoke up in defense of a controversial author? That act put one of her most prestigious honors under public attack.

• 2. War And A Doctorate

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  Anna, Schimmel's mother, came from a family with ties to seafaring and international trade. Her daughter would grow up surrounded by books instead, a life far from her mother's world of ships and trade. Schimmel said her mother made her feel like the child of her dreams, and she remembered a childhood home filled with poetry and literature.

  At 15, having already finished high school, Schimmel spent half a year working for the Reich Labour Service before turning to university study. In Berlin, one teacher shaped her path more than any other: Hans Heinrich Schaeder. He steered her toward the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, a major work by the poet Rumi. Not long after finishing her doctorate, the Federal Foreign Office drafted her. She spent the next few years working as a translator, continuing her own research in her free time. On the 1st of April 1945, in the final weeks of the war in Europe, she submitted her Habilitation. That was the advanced credential required for a German professorship.

  In May 1945, once the fighting in Europe had ended, American authorities detained her for several months. They wanted to investigate her wartime work for the German foreign service. She was eventually released, and by 1946, at 23, she had become a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Marburg University. A brief marriage followed in the 1950s, but Schimmel found that domestic life did not suit her, and she returned to her research. In 1954 she completed a second doctorate at Marburg, this time in the history of religion. That same year, the degree opened the door to a professorship far from Germany, in Turkey.

• 3. Ankara's First

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  Ankara University put Schimmel in a chair she was not expected to hold. She became the first woman, and the first non-Muslim, ever to teach theology there. She spent five years in the Turkish capital, lecturing in Turkish itself rather than German or English. Schimmel immersed herself in the country's culture and its mystical currents, deepening a fascination that had first surfaced back in Berlin. That reputation soon carried her across the Atlantic, to a new posting at Harvard University.

• 4. An Eye For Calligraphy

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  At Harvard, Schimmel inaugurated the university's Indo-Muslim studies program in 1967 and remained on the faculty for the next 25 years. She lived in quarters on the Harvard campus itself, but she was a frequent visitor to New York City. There, as a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she built a reputation for dating manuscripts and objects from the style of their calligraphy. Colleagues described her memory for those calligraphic styles as almost photographic.

  During the 1980s she sat on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Religion. That 16-volume work was published by Macmillan in 1988 under the direction of Mircea Eliade. In 1992, when she retired from Harvard, the university named her professor emerita of Indo-Muslim Culture. During that same period she also held an honorary professorship at the University of Bonn, the German city where she would later settle for good. She left Cambridge for Bonn, where she lived until she died on the 26th of January 2003.

• 5. A Private Faith

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  Both Muslims and non-Muslims repeatedly asked Schimmel the same question: was she herself a Muslim? She preferred an evasive answer. Only someone unsure whether they were a good Muslim, she liked to say, could really be one. That refusal to be pinned to a single label extended to her professional life too, which crossed language after language.

• 6. The Consuming Passion

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  Schimmel was fluent in far more than her native German; she also worked in English, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi. Across her career she published more than fifty books and hundreds of articles on Islamic literature, mysticism, and culture. She also translated Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Sindhi, and Turkish poetry and literature into both English and German.

  Her fondness for cats led her to write about their place in Islamic literature. She later contributed an introduction to a photographic book called Cats of Cairo. Her fascination with mysticism also produced a very different book, one about numerical symbolism across cultures, published in English as The Mystery of Numbers. She also cofounded Fikrun wa Fann, a multilingual cultural magazine, folding her linguistic range into a new project entirely. That devotion to Sufism, and to the Pakistani poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal within it, would soon draw recognition from an entire country.

• 7. Honors And A Reckoning

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  Pakistan awarded her its highest civilian honors: the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, or Star of Excellence, and the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, or Crescent of Excellence. Both recognized her work on Islam, Sufism, and Muhammad Iqbal. In 1995 she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of the country's most prestigious literary honors. The award turned controversial because Schimmel had defended, in a televised interview, the Islamic world's outrage over Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Her acceptance speech, titled A Good Word Is Like a Good Tree, is still available online in translation.

  Earlier honors had already piled up. In 1965 she won the Friedrich Rückert Prize from the city of Schweinfurt. In 1978 she gained foreign membership in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. West Germany awarded her its Grand Order of Merit in 1989, and Turkey its own Order of Merit on the 25th of October 1996. Universities in Sind, Quaid-i-Azam, and Peshawar in Pakistan, along with Uppsala University in Sweden and Selçuk University in Turkey, all granted her honorary degrees.

  In 2005, two years after her death, the city of Bonn engraved her name into its Walk of Fame. It was a permanent marker on the streets of the German city where she had spent her final years.