ISLAMABAD, Feb 7: The living counter-argument against Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was how the late Annemarie Schimmel, the German orientalist and friend of Pakistan, was described by the German Ambassador in Pakistan Dr Christoph Bruemmer at a memorial reference for the late scholar in Islamabad on Thursday evening.

Speaking at the function arranged by the Pakistan Academy of Letters, in collaboration with the Pak-German Friendship Association, the ambassador spoke about her familiarizing the western audience with Islam, “proving by her sheer existence that there are no monolithic blocs bound to detest or even to fight each other.”

The ambassador describing the “enormous side effect of her work as a scholar” felt that she helped western societies to accept Muslims living in them as equals.

He explained that there were well over 3 million Muslims living in Germany, 4 million in France and “you find mosques in almost every German city, more than 50 in Berlin alone”. “It is high time to continue her path”, he remarked, adding, “the bridges of dialogue and understanding Annemarie Schimmel put up in her lifetime should not be torn down in the wake of September 11.”

Presiding over the function eminent educationist Prof Khwaja Masud said the Apollinarian and the Dionysian melt in harmony in Schimmel’s personality, where, according to him, the former represented her intellectual scholarship and the latter her zest and enthusiasm for the subject that she had chosen. He spoke of the commitment of the late scholar and the number of years that she worked on Rumi, Iqbal and Mansur Hallaj and on sufi poets of Pakistan.”Her work on Iqbal is simply tremendous”, he said.

The Charge d’ Affairs, of the Norwegian Embassy Alf Arne Ramslien (who has done many stints in Pakistan since 1969, and knows Urdu) said that he was neither a Pakistani nor German but he was impressed by the great bridge builder between different cultures that the great German scholar was.

Speaking on the occasion the PAL chairman, Iftikhar Arif, said that Prof Schimmel’s death “is a devastating blow to all those who courageously stand and actively struggle for peace and harmony among nations and civilizations”.

He thought that Prof Schimmel was a shinning star, in that very select group of Orientalists and Islamic scholars who presented Islam to the West with sincerity and intellectual integrity and without vested interests. Alluding to the common concept of fana (the path of total submission or surrender) and tark (renunciation), Iftikhar Arif thought that she was at high level of fana fil ilm.

Agha Nasir, President of the Pak-German Friendship Association, while bringing out the qualities of the late scholar asked for carrying out research on her work. He also suggested preparing a list of all those persons and scholars who know her work and to hold an annual meeting in her memory by inviting some great scholar on the subject.

Prof (Dr) Siddique Shibli of the Allama Iqbal Open University called her death an irreparable loss to Pakistan, world of Islam and humanity because the way she assimilated Pakistani and Islamic cultures and the bouquet that she prepared for humanity had the majority of flowers from the Islamic culture. He recalled his visit to her residence in Bonn, which she called the “faqir khana”, and recalled her illuminating lecture at Heidelberg University where Dr Shibli taught at Iqbal Chair at the South Asian Institute of the University.

Frau Karin Mittmann, a German living in Pakistan for many years and a close friend of the late scholar, spoke of Schimmel’s ‘sufism’, her disciplined life which made her spend four hours every day on an old-fashioned electric typewriter to write 30 to 40 pages per day, and her zest for life where she would even try to parody a khattak dance.

She also spoke of her “sufism” and said once when she went to Skardu some people asked her how could they be Sufis and still remain within the shariat. Mittman recalled, she told them that shariat was like a trunk of a tree; when you have climbed it you can view the leaves and the buds blossoming.

In a lighter vein, she also narrated an incident at the same place when on her return the scholar was about to alight the plane, the manager of the airlines came rushing in asking the Sufi Schimmel how he could save his soul. That was another matter that the manager delayed the flight by about 20 minutes!

Poet Dr Alamgir Hashmi, a professor of English, spoke of his days at Harvard when he met Dr Schimmel who was heading a chair there. She called her a continuation of German oriental tradition; for the area of Weimer that was close to her place of birth produced great writers and poets like Goethe and Schilller, and here Hafiz and Sadi were translated into German for the first time. He thought that Prof Schimmel was among the few who looked at religion as a way of cultural expression.

Dr Saeed Akhtar Durrani of the Iqbal Academy of UK spoke of the great number of books produced by Prof Schinmmel, and recalled her address on Islam in Cordoba. Mrs Laeeq Babri, whose illustrious husband is a friend of the late scholar, and who is not well these days, recalled various visits by Frau Schimmel to their house and the discussions on Sufism and Islam that she used to have. She also spoke of her love of cats.

Dr Ghazanfar Mehdi who had conducted her many a time in Multan during conferences on Bahauddin Zakaria Multani, during all of which she came spoke, said that once at one of the shrines at Uch she was shown a sword about which it was told that it belonged to Hazrat Ali. She kissed it, but later told him that it did not seem to belong to Hazrat Ali because the sheath seemed to be of Sikh origin. When asked as to why she had kissed it, she said she did so because she was told of the great personality of Islam that was associated with it.—Mufti Jamiluddin Ahmad