Annemarie Schimmel mastered six Oriental languages and fused Lutheran Christianity with Sufism.
Evidence
From the 1930s onwards German Orientalism went into a marked decline. Brockelmann and Schaeder were among the few major figures to continue to teach and research during the Nazi period. Schaeder’s star pupil, Annemarie Schimmel (1922–2003), was a fabulously prolific author and translator. She learnt Arabic at the age of fifteen and became comfortable not only in Arabic, but also in Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Sindhi, as well as most of the useful European languages. (In an idle moment she also translated one of my novels into German.) Schaeder taught her to love Goethe and Goethe’s pastiches of the medieval Persian poet, Hafiz of Shiraz. Early on in her academic career, she also came under the influence of Massignon. She wrote widely on Islamic matters, but it was on Sufism that she concentrated. Though she was a devout Lutheran, there seems to have been a decidedly Sufic flavour to her Christianity. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 495
Categorization
- SHARE: Annemarie Schimmel learned Arabic at fifteen, worked in six Oriental languages, and lectured from memory with her eyes shut — perfect trivia for a humanities PhD friend.