Annemarie Schimmel

Annemarie Schimmel, SI, HI, (April 7, 1922 – January 26, 2003) was a well known and very influential German Orientalist and scholar, who wrote extensively on Islam and Sufism. She was a professor at Harvard University from 1967 to 1992. Schimmel was born to Protestant and highly cultured middle-class parents in Erfurt, Germany. 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", her mother made her feel she was the child of her dreams and her home as full of poetry and literature, though her family was not an academic one. She began studying at the University of Berlin in 1939 at the...