Professor Annemarie Schimmel

Islamic scholar with mystical qualities

Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic scholar: born Erfurt, Germany 7 April 1922; Professor of Indo- Muslim Culture, Harvard University 1970-92 (Emeritus); died Cologne 25 January 2003.

Annemarie Schimmel was one of the world's foremost scholars of Islamic culture, in particular Sufism, its spiritual dimension, and its expression in Persian classical poetry.

Apart from Latin, Greek, and half a dozen European languages, she knew Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Hindi well enough to write and teach and lecture in them. She wrote more than 50 books and innumerable articles and essays for journals and encyclopaedias on Islam, Sufism and Islamic art and literature. But her greatest passion was the 13th-century Persian mystic poet Jalaloddin Rumi. Her books on the poet and her translations of his poetry ignited the enthusiasm of poets such as Robert Bly and Dick Davis, whose renditions of Rumi's work have made him universally known and a best-seller in America – in a recent interview Madonna said that her favourite poet was Rumi.

Schimmel was born in 1922 in Erfurt, in central Germany, to pious, cultured parents. Her father's interest in religions and love of poetry influenced her early readings, but it was her encounter with Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819) and the poet Friedrich Rückert's translations of Arabic and Persian poetry that captured her imagination: she became fascinated with Islamic history and culture, and at 15 began to learn Arabic.

While at the University of Berlin she produced verse translations of Rumi and Mansur al-Hallaj (a mystic poet accused of heresy and executed in Baghdad in 922), and in 1941 she obtained a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies. She began work as a translator for the German Foreign Office, pursuing her scholarly interests on the side. Her break came in 1945: she was invited by Friedrich Heiler, the historian of religions, to lecture at the University of Marburg on Persian and Arabic poetry.

Despite her knowledge of the languages, art and culture of the Islamic world she had never been to an Islamic country or met anyone from that part of the world. Then a conference in Holland on the History of Religions in 1950 brought her into contact with great scholars from East and West, in particular the French mystic Louis Massignon, an expert on Hallaj, who became her mentor. Soon after she obtained a second doctorate from the University of Marburg on the History of Religions, while her discovery of the poetry and philosophy of Mohammad Iqbal, the Indian Muslim poet (one of the founders of Pakistan, who wrote both in Persian and Urdu), led to her becoming his greatest specialist in the West.

Annemarie Schimmel wrote prolifically all her life, authoritative, accessible books and articles that appealed both to specialists and laymen. She travelled all over the world to teach and lecture at universities, in various languages. After several years at the universities of Ankara and Bonn, she was offered the Chair of Indo-Muslim Culture at Harvard, where she remained until her retirement in 1992. It was a happy and fertile period which combined pedagogy with creativity.

After her return to Germany in 1993, she settled in Cologne, and continued to write and lecture all over the world. She received many honorary doctorates from various universities both in the Islamic world and in the West, and numerous honours and prizes, among them the German Book Trade Peace Prize in 1995 – an award which attracted controversy, since she had expressed disapproval of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses at the time of the fatwa in 1989.

Her substantial oeuvre includes Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975), The Triumphal Sun: a study of the works of Jalaloddin Rumi (1978), As Through a Veil: mystical poetry in Islam (1982), A Two-Coloured Brocade: the imagery of Persian poetry (1992) and Deciphering the Signs of God: a phenomenological approach to Islam (1994).

Annemarie Schimmel was an inspiring teacher. Her profound knowledge and enthusiasm attracted many students to her discipline, and the generations of scholars she trained at Harvard are today teaching at universities all over America and in Europe. She had devoted admirers, among them the Prince of Wales, for whom she had great respect and affection.

Her lectures were always full to capacity, and to attend them was a very particular experience. Petite and elegant, she stood up, closed her eyes and talked ad lib, transporting her audience. After exactly one hour she opened her eyes and with a shy smile and a memorable quote – a line of poetry or an apposite aphorism – brought the audience back to earth and the lecture to an end.

She had the genuine humility and courtesy of the true mystic, wore her vast erudition lightly and suffered fools gladly. She described herself as a "learner", and believed that "there is no end to learning". For her learning was "transforming knowledge and experience into wisdom and love, to mature – as according to Oriental lore the ordinary pebble can turn into a ruby provided it patiently takes into itself the rays of the sun".

Shusha Guppy