Early Life and Education
Schimmel was born to Protestant and highly cultured middle-class parents in Erfurt, Germany on 7 April 1922. 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 age of 17, during the period of Nazi Germany. She received a doctorate on late medieval Egypt at the age of 19. Following this, she was drafted by the German Foreign Office while continuing with her scholarly work in her free time. At the age of 23, she became a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Marburg, Germany in 1946, where she earned a second doctorate in the history of religions in 1954.
She was deeply influenced by her teacher Hans Heinrich Schaeder when she was pursuing undergraduate studies at the University of Berlin. He suggested her to study the Divan of Jalaluddin Rumi.
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