Dr. William Chittick Remembers: Indo-Muslim Scholar Annemarie Schimmel

Annemarie Schimmel passed away in 2003. She was the pre-eminent scholar on Islam and Sufism, and I knew her through her work on Rumi. For me, her two major works were Mystical Dimensions of Islam (a true classic in the field) and Rumi's World : The Life and Works of the Greatest Sufi Poet.

The Mystic Pen - Dr. William Chittick Remembers:

Indo-Muslim Scholar Annemarie Schimmel

by Katherine Schimmel Baki

Everyone has turned his face toward some direction, but the saints have turned in the direction without directions...(Rumi, Mathnavi v 350, Translation by Dr. William Chittick)

Existence is all dust, its luminosity coming from that moon: turn not your back toward the moon, follow not the dust! (Rumi, Divan v. 12236, Translation by Dr. William Chittick)

In a hard-driving rain, Cambridge’s streets and shops take on a glossy shine, the murky runoff creating fast-moving rivulets that flow swiftly into already over-filled gutters. On the sidewalk high above the curb, people of all ages, sizes, and nationalities cram under low-hanging awnings, newspapers folded above their heads, trying to escape the sudden downpour. I dart into what is one of my favorite Harvard Square bookstores, relieved to be able to shake off the cool dampness in a warm, dry place full of every kind of book.

If you're not careful, you could get lost in a place such as this. It is not the size of which I speak, nor any inherent fault in the floor plan, which is laid out in logical fashion. I refer only to the fact that when it comes to large quantities of neatly organized books, an intended one-hour stay could easily turn into a full day of reading. This particular place has a wonderfully complete section on almost every topic you could hope to explore on the Middle East, or any other subject you might be interested in.

As I walk amid aisles cast in golden streams of light, Edward Said’s classic book, Orientalism, jumps out at me, its signature-blue, arabesque cover prompting me to remember the author’s insightful observations on how mislaid Western perceptions of the East have created, over the course of many years, a universe of misunderstanding and intolerance.

Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle catches my eye too, but since both works fall into the “read that already” category, I feel the need to keep scanning the shelves as though seeking to find refuge in some unknown treasure.

It isn’t long until I notice a medium-sized book with an intriguing “Sayyid” green cover and realize I have found the gem I’ve been searching for all along. The title of the book - The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, and the author’s name - William Chittick, appear crisply across the cover. The English title, however, is a secondary detail because I’m now reading from right to left, carefully scanning the gold calligraphic Arabic text scrawled across the book’s cover at an upward-facing angle.

The first word, Al-Wadud, pronounced al-wadood, may be best described as a multitude of meanings compressed into one. No single word or string of words in the English language can accurately capture its full scope. But for simplicity’s sake, Al-Wadud, means the “All-Loving” and is one of ninety-nine holy names ascribed to God in the Qur’an.

Al-Wadud bears significance in Sufi literature too, because it is the goal of the true Sufi to fully comprehend and witness the all-encompassing, indescribable love of God in all His many manifestations. For the Sufi knows that His love is a love which wraps itself around each and every part of the universe, stretching far beyond what the human being can ever hope to imagine or comprehend, right down to the smallest electron whose fervent spinning has been likened to the very dance of the Whirling Dervishes themselves.

In Islam, Allah is a kind and loving God who yearns to be discovered and reveal himself to humankind. God sets out to create the world so that His desire of wanting to be known may be fulfilled. This concept is expressed beautifully in the well-known sacred Hadith Kudsi, “Kuntu kanzan makhfiyyan fa ahbabtu an u`rafa fakhalaqtu al-khalqa fa bi `arafuni - (I was a hidden treasure and loved to be known so I created the world that I might be known.)” and is a central theme found throughout Sufi literature.

This concept, God creating the world so that He might be known, is unique to Islam and offers a different perspective than the one put forth in Genesis (Gen.1:26) in which God creates man in his own image, or by further elaboration in St. John’s Gospel where creation is mediated through God’s word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1:1,14), this having more neo-platonic influences.

In the Qur’an, “He [Allah] shaped him [man] and blew into him from His spirit.” (Sura 32:9). Humankind in Islam springs to existence by divine command: “Am I not your Lord?” and unborn humankind answers emphatically, “Yes, we witness it.” (Sura 7:171)

Many years later, 13th Century French Theologian Alain de Lille (who tried most passionately to disprove the legitimacy of both Islam and Judaism in his classic tome on Catholicism), nonetheless captured in poetic form what had by then evolved throughout Europe into a type of medieval Christian “mystical thought,” when he penned in Latin:

Omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber, et picture
nobis est, et speculum.
Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
Nostrae status, nostrae sortis.
Fidele signaculum

The created beings
of the whole world are
as it were, a book and
a picture and a mirror for us,
a faithful little sign of our life and death,
of our state and fate.

But for Rumi, there were spiritual lessons to be found in every living thing and in every circumstance. He often drew from nature or from common experiences that most people could easily relate to. Using rich, beautiful, often humorous imagery coupled with an extraordinary grasp on meter, rhyme, and subject, he pulls the reader in, always toward greater understanding and with a hunger for more. This is perhaps why his popularity has only increased over the centuries and why the very best scholars of the day never tire of revisiting his work.

He had an extensive knowledge and deep understanding of both the Qur’an and of the recorded sayings of the Prophet (Hadith), continuously referring to this verse or that by seamlessly weaving a relevant phrase or expression into his own work. Often, a well-known verse would show up in a slightly different form. He was particularly fond of highlighting the infinite, all-encompassing nature of God, and shows his cleverness when he plays with the words expressed in Sura 18:109:

If the seven seas became all ink,
There would be no hope of an end (to God’s words),
And if gardens and forests became all pens,
This word would never become less;
All this ink and pen would disappear
But this word without number would remain
(Rumi, M II 3544, Translation, Annemarie Schimmel)

And so it is from within this context (now fifteen years past), when I first thirsted for the God of Islam, which Rumi describes so well, that I open William Chittick’s book, and fully enter the spiritual world of Rumi, embarking on what will become a deep love of Sufi literature: He has stirred up a world like dust: hidden in the dust, He is like the wind (Diwan 28600) … The world is dust, and within the dust the sweeper and broom are hidden (Diwan13164). Day and night, the sea keeps on churning the foam. You behold the foam but not the sea how strange! (Masnawi III 1271)

In the years that followed, I read and re-read The Sufi Path of Love. I underlined passages and fervently scribbled notes in the margins next to the others. I was enchanted by the deftness with which Chittick combines his vast scholarly knowledge of Persian and Sufism, treating the reader to a methodical unveiling of Rumi’s spiritual teachings in a thought-provoking, illuminating way. Word by word, layer by layer, like the delicate petals of a rose which slowly and invisibly fall away when given enough sun, wind, rain, and time, the reader is able to grasp subtle aspects of an otherwise hidden and highly elusive spiritual realm.

Although I had never met Dr. Chittick, I was well aware of his considerable scholarly contributions in the field of Sufi thought, literature, and Islamic philosophy. I was also aware that he did not give many interviews, and so I was all too heartened and grateful to learn that he had agreed to do this interview and speak about his dear friend and colleague, Annemarie Schimmel.

Dr. William Chittick

WRR : First off I’d like to thank you for taking time out from your very busy schedule to talk about yourself and Annemarie. You spent a number of years in Iran, first earning a Ph.D in Persian Literature at Tehran University in 1974 and then later you taught Comparative Religion in the Humanities department at Tehran’s Aryamehr Technical University, leaving just before the revolution in 1979. What was it like teaching and studying in pre-revolutionary Iran?

Dr. William Chittick: I went to Iran in 1966, right after graduating from the College of Wooster in Ohio, with the intention of studying Sufism and Islamic philosophy. I enrolled in the Ph.D program in Persian language and literature for foreign students at Tehran University. There were about twenty first-year students in the three-year program, mostly from India and Pakistan. I had studied Persian for two semesters before enrolling, and by the time I finished the course work three years later I was often passing as an Iranian.

It took me another three years to finish my dissertation, and two more to see it through the process of publication. It was a critical edition and study of a long prose work by the great Persian poet Abdur-Rahman Jami dealing with the teachings of Ibn Arabi and full of quotations from Rumi. By this time I was teaching comparative religion at Aryamehr Technical University in Tehran, an institution modeled on MIT, and drawing from my own research in Sufi theory to depict the worldviews of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Chinese and Abrahamic traditions. At the same time I was attending lectures at the newly founded Academy of Philosophy, directed by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, with professors like Toshihiku Izutsu and

Henry Corbin, as well as carrying out research in the writings of Ibn Arabi’s followers.

I have nothing but good memories from the twelve years I spent in Iran. Iranians were—and are—exceedingly warm and generous, especially when they meet someone who is interested in their culture. More than once I met people who were astounded that an American student had come to Iran to study Persian literature and Islamic thought, when all their young relatives were eager to go to the US to study medicine and engineering.

In my early years in Tehran, the traffic was still reasonable, and construction had not gotten out of hand; the city was full of tree-lined boulevards, especially in the vicinity of Tehran University, and it was a very pleasant place in which to live. I had rented a room in a house, and the walk to the university took ten minutes. The courses were relaxed and gave us plenty of time for outside activities.

All in all it was an idyllic few years in graduate school—especially when I compare my own experience with what I see in young people these days, under great pressure to succeed in a highly competitive environment. I learned an enormous amount in my twelve years in Iran, much of it by osmosis, and I still draw on that experience in all my teaching and writing. I cannot imagine how any graduate student today could get the same sort of training without spending ten years abroad—but where are such opportunities now?

WRR: You are originally from Connecticut. At what point in either your childhood or your early adult life did you know that you were destined to spend the rest of your life pursuing a career in Persian literature, religion, and Sufism?

Dr. William Chittick: The direction I was going never became completely clear to me until several years into my stay in Iran. Looking back, I can see that I followed a clear and logical trajectory, but at the time, it was simply one thing leading to another. I had no real sense of purpose in going to college¬¬¬¬, simply that it was the thing to do. I took a variety of courses, but nothing caught my imagination. I first realized that “religion” might have something of significance to say to us moderns during a year spent at the International Christian University in Tokyo, which I attended because I had the opportunity to go and because Tokyo sounded like a more interesting place than Ohio. While there I got my first exposure to a really foreign language, and I was fascinated by courses on Buddhist art, with field trips to Kyoto and Nara.

Back at college in Ohio, I was seriously bored by the concerns of my professors and peers and jumped at the opportunity to spend another year abroad, at the American University of Beirut. By now I was a history major, so I took courses on the history of Islamic societies. Through those I became aware of Sufism, and I spent a great deal of time writing a paper on the topic for my home college.

These studies gradually alerted me to the fact that maybe I was right to have had this rather inchoate sense that modern society was—to use one of Annemarie’s favorite metaphors—a “morgh-e besmel,” that is, a chicken that had just had its head cut off. I had been able to find no sense of real direction or purpose in my family, friends, and acquaintances, much less in society as a whole. My exposure to Sufi teachings provided me with a viewpoint from which to gain some distance from conventional views of reality.

I chose to go to Iran after graduation because of contacts made in Beirut that assured me that I could pursue studies in Sufism and Islamic philosophy. This was a personal, even existential, decision, not a career choice. Only much later did I realize that I could have my cake and eat it too. Becoming established as an academic, however, was not exactly easy, especially since I was outside the old boy’s network, and this was long before 9/11 made Americans aware of how woefully ignorant they are of the Islamic world.

WRR: How did you first learn of and later come to meet Annemarie?

Dr. William Chittick: Given my exposure to Sufism in my undergraduate days, and my pursuit of a Ph.D in Persian literature, I became aware of Annemarie’s work rather early in my studies, but she never came to Iran in those years, so I never had the opportunity to meet her.

I returned to the U.S. in 1979, after leaving Iran rather precipitously and unexpectedly (hindsight is something else). My wife and I stayed with my mother in Connecticut for a couple of years, during which time I finished off two books that I had been working on in Iran. But I spent most of the time reading the works of Rumi. Annemarie’s book on him, The Triumphal Sun, had appeared in 1978, and that relieved me of tackling many issues that she had already covered. The result was my Sufi Path of Love, which I finished writing in 1981.

Just about this time I was finally able to find an academic position as an assistant editor with the Encyclopedia Iranica at Columbia University, so we moved to New York City. I had corresponded with Annemarie, sending her a copy of an article I had written. When I heard that she came regularly to New York to decipher inscriptions at the Met, I invited her to lunch at our humble—really humble—room in a rather ratty apartment in the Columbia neighborhood. She graciously accepted, and that was the beginning of our friendship. From that time on, we met her in various places about once a year until she retired from Harvard, and a couple of times she came to visit.

WRR: What do you think drew her to the works of Rumi and what aspects of either her upbringing or personality made her especially suited to understanding and translating those works?

Dr. William Chittick: I assume that what drew her to Rumi is what draws so many—beauty. Not only the beauty of Rumi’s poetry when recited or sung and the beauty of the Mevlevi tradition that he inspired, but also the beauty of his soul, which shines through his works. No one else in the Islamic tradition has combined beauty in practice and character with a thorough theoretical explication of the true nature of beauty. Despite the rigorous discipline Annemarie imposed upon herself—up every morning early at her typewriter, working constantly—or perhaps as an antidote to that rigor, she focused her work on the beautiful manifestations of Islamic culture in poetry, calligraphy, music, and thought. It is no accident that her students and colleagues dedicated a Festschrift – or written memorial - to her, called God is Beautiful and He Loves Beauty.

Read the whole interview.

Tags: The Mystic Pen, Dr. William Chittick, Indo-Muslim Scholar, Annemarie Schimmel, Islam, Rumi, Sufism, Katherine Schimmel Baki, Wild River Review, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Religion, books, culture, The Sufi Path of Love, The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, spirituality