Annemarie Schimmel was born on 7 April 1922 in Erfurt, Germany. She was the first woman and the first non-Muslim to teach theology at Ankara University and Harvard’s first Lecturer of Indo-Muslim Culture. In May 1945, she was detained by US authorities because of her time in the German Foreign Service and was cleared. She became Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Marburg in 1946. Appointed Professor of the History of Religion at Ankara University in 1954, she moved to Harvard for the next twenty-five years, retiring as Professor Emerita of Indo-Muslim Culture.
Awarded the Star of Excellence and Crescent of Excellence by the Government of Pakistan, she also won the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She was Honorary Professor at the University of Bonn and cofounder of the Fikrun wa Fann, a multilingual cultural magazine. She published more than fifty books on Islamic literature, mysticism, and culture, including Gabriel’s Wing (1963), My Soul is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam (1997), and Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art, and Culture (2004).
