The main focus of her scholarship was Sufism, on which she composed what remains (for its size) the most comprehensive historical and doctrinal study on the subject: Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975, and often reprinted).
She was the leading expert on the supreme Persian Sufi poet, Rumi (d.1273), who was, she said, �an unfailing source of inspiration and consolation� to her. She wrote several important studies of him, including The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (1978), I am Wind, You are Fire: Life and Works of Rumi (1992) and a German translation of his Discourses. In basing her knowledge on intuitive heart-savour (dhawq), Schimmel shared the approach of her beloved Persian Sufi poets. Her intellectual learning was steeped in an ocean of warm and intense feminine sensitivity and feeling.
She had also learnt the old Sufi trick of dictating passages from the secret book of the heart (�And I weave ever new silken garments of words / only to hide you . . . � as she says in one of her poems), so that audiences fell at her feet as she discoursed without notes in English, German and Turkish (and with notes in Arabic, French and Persian). When she lectured, she would close her eyes tightly, clutching her handbag lightly, and reel off the chronicles of kings, the verses of poets and seers, the tales of lovers, and the accounts of mystical theology and doctrine of Islamic mystics and philosophers with eloquent fluency, sometimes for hours on end.
Professor Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic scholar, was born in Erfurt, Germany, on April 2, 1922. She died in Bonn on January 26, 2003, aged 80.Obituary in the Times of London
