Harvard Class Ring
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Harvard Class Ring
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- American philanthropist who left his library and half his estate to the Massachusetts college that now bears his name (1607-1638)
- The Harvard was a Brass Era car built in Troy and Hudson Falls, New York and later in Hyattsville, Maryland over the course of the period 1915 to 1921.
- Harvard University: a university in Massachusetts
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Remembering the late Prof Annemarie Schimmel (1922-2003) – eulogy by Khalid Hassan shortly after her death
The first disciple of Rumi in our times was Allama Iqbal. In his Persian magnum opus “Javidnamah,” Rumi was his Virgil. Annemarie Schimmel, the greatest living authority on Islamic culture and civilization who passed away in February, loved Iqbal and Rumi with equal intensity.
When she came to Lahore in 1996 to deliver a lecture on “Islam and the West” at the Goethe Institute, she was hardly in her room at Hotel Avari for 10 minutes when the phone bell rang and someone requested her for a meeting. She said she was booked for every hour of the day until June 1997, which included her Iqbal Lecture in London.
She had delivered a lecture on Rahman Baba in Peshawar in Pashtu, which, together with Sindhi, she thought more difficult than her first love, Turkish. (Linguists are agreed that Turkish is one of the most difficult languages to learn.) She loved Sindh, admired its intellectuals, tolerant culture, and its great poet Shah Abdul Latif on whom she wrote a book. She remembered fondly Sindh’s foremost intellectual, Allama I. I. Kazi and his disciple Pir Hisamuddin Rashdi, and visited the Makli tombs many times. Sitting in a cafe in Bonn once, journalist Tony Rosini told me in a whisper that she wanted to be buried at Makli.
In 1982, she had requested the government of Pakistan to name a road after Goethe, the German national poet that Iqbal admired, on the occasion of his 150th birth anniversary. But Pakistan went one better. The road along the Lahore canal, from the Mall to Jail Road, was named after Goethe; but the road across the canal was dedicated to Annemarie Schimmel. She was in her mid eighties, in good health, with a mind whose clarity was astounding.
She was recognized by the Islamic world for her knowledge of Islamic civilization. When she went to Egypt lecturing in Arabic about classical Arab poetry, she was received by President Hosni Mubarak. She lectured in Yemen, Syria and Morocco, talking about a heritage that most Arabs have forgotten. In Tunis, she introduced the revivalist thought of Allama Iqbal; in Teheran, she spoke in Persian about the love of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) in Rumi, disabusing today’s revolutionary Islamists of the misconceptions made current about the great Sufis of the past. She was in Uzbekistan talking to the Uzbeks about their great Muslim heritage. “If an Uzbek speaks slowly I can understand him, and I can answer in Osmanli,” she used to say.
Her first love was Pakistan and Pakistan responded to her in equal measure. She fondly remembered the President of the National Bank of Pakistan, Mumtaz Hassan, the great teacher of philosophy M. M. Sharif, the historian S. M. Ikram, the scholar Khalifa Abdul Hakim and Pir Hisamuddin Rashdi, who welcomed her again and again to Pakistan when she was young. She recalled her Urdu lecture on Iqbal in Government College Lahore in 1963 on the invitation of Bazm-e-Iqbal. Befittingly, Allama Iqbal’s son, Dr. Javid Iqbal, is a devotee who often visited her at her residence on Lennestrasse in Bonn. When national awards were set up, she received the highest of them, Hilal-e-Imtiaz and Sitara-e-Quaid-e-Azam.
She was so completely at ease with her subject that she hardly realized that she was working so hard, teaching at Bonn University since 1961, and at Harvard University since 1970. The Islamic world did not ignore her work. She received the First Class Award for Art and Science from Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, and a Gold Medal from Turkey for her services to Turkish cultural heritage. Austria gave her the prestigious Hammar-Purgstall prize; Los Angeles had given her the Della Vida award for Excellence in Islamic Studies; Germany bestowed upon her the famous Ruecart Medal and Voss Medal for Translation; and the Union of German Publishers recently gave her their highest Peace Prize which she treasured. There are many other German awards that celebrated her work in the promotion of understanding between religions.
Annemarie Schimmel was born in Erfurt, a town that fell to East Germany after the Second World War, in the family of a civil servant who greatly loved poetry and philosophy. She recalled reading the German classics at home, including the poetry of Rilke. Her interest in the Orient grew out of the classical trend of treating oriental themes in German poetry and drama. When she was seven, her parents already knew she was a special child on whom normal laws of upbringing couldn’t be applied. At 15, she was able to get hold of a teacher of Arabic who h
JAMES McCUNE SMITH, MD
He is the first African-American to earn a medical degree and to run a pharmacy in the United States. Smith wrote forcefully in refutation of the common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. His friends and colleagues in this movement were often famous, and consisted of many noted abolitionists, including, Frederick Douglass.
He couldn’t go to medical school in New York, so James McCune Smith went to Scotland for his degree and returned home to treat the city’s poor.
The degree he earned in 1837 made him the nation’s first professionally trained African-American doctor. He set up a medical practice in lower Manhattan and became the resident physician at an orphanage.
Celebrated during his lifetime as a teacher, writer and anti-slavery leader, Smith fell into obscurity after his death in 1865 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
His descendants who only recently learned they had a black ancestor, will honor Smith at his Brooklyn grave. It will be marked with a new tombstone.
"He was one of the leaders within the movement to abolish slavery, and he was one of the most original and innovative writers of his time," said John Stauffer, a professor of African-American studies at Harvard University who has written about Smith and edited a collection of his works.
The story of why Smith was nearly overlooked by history and buried in an unmarked grave is in part due to the centuries-old practice of light-skinned blacks "passing" as white to escape racial prejudice.
Smith’s mother had been a slave; his father was white. Three of his children lived to adulthood, and they all apparently passed as white, scholars say.
Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Greta Blau of New Haven, Conn., said that none of his descendants was told that they had a black ancestor, let alone such an accomplished one.
Blau came across her family connection while taking a course in the history of blacks in New York City. It was there that she came across the name James McCune Smith, which rang a bell. The name was inscribed in a family Bible belonging to her grandmother, Antoinette Martignoni.
Blau consulted with Stauffer, and they did some research and determined that the James McCune Smith who was known as America’s first black doctor was indeed her forebear.
"I never, ever would have thought that I had a black ancestor," Blau said. She added, "We’re all really happy. … He was a really amazing person in so many ways."
Smith lived and died during a time in America when little attention was given to the achievements of black people. Smith’s children refused to promote their father’s legacy and even shunned their African-American heritage.
While hardly a household name, Smith was well known enough that a public school in Harlem was named after him. Danny Glover portrayed him in a video produced by the New York Historical Society.
Smith also was the first African-American to publish scholarly studies in peer-reviewed medical journals, Stauffer said. He also wrote essays countering theories of black racial inferiority that had currency then. He was a friend and associate of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and he wrote the introduction to Douglass’ "My Bondage and My Freedom."
Smith set up a medical practice and a pharmacy in what is now Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. He also was the resident physician at the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
The orphanage burned to the ground in 1863 amid riots by white working-class immigrants over the Civil War draft. Smith and other prominent African-Americans fled to Brooklyn, then a separate city.
The asylum was re-established at a new location and survives today; it’s called Harlem Dowling.
Smith championed educational opportunities as a founding member of the New York Society for Promotion of Education of Colored Children. He also helped organize New York’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave act of 1850, which decreed that slaves who escaped to the North be returned to their owners.
Stauffer said Smith’s reputation suffers in comparison to Douglass’ because he was not a fiery speaker like Douglass.
"He didn’t have the public persona," Stauffer said. "He preferred writing."
Carla Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland who has written about Smith in a forthcoming book, "Black Gotham: An African American Family History," said Smith did not share Douglass’ dramatic history of escape from slavery.
"He did not live the life of a slave," Peterson said. "He could not write a slave narrative."
But she said Smith was "incredibly significant."
"He’s remarkable for what he could do for his community," she said
