The Sultans Shadow One Familys Rise At The Cross Roads Of East And West Christiane Bird by Christiane Bird 9780679603764, 067960376X instant download after payment.

THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS BOOK BEGAN WITH AN ALLUSION TO the “Arab slave trade” in an article I was reading. My curiosity sparked, I searched the Web, when I came across several references to a woman named Seyyida Salme, or Emily Ruete, and a book she had written, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess.

Wondering what an Arabian princess had to do with the slave trade, I began to read what proved to be the story of a remarkable nineteenth-century Omani woman, raised in a harem on the African island of Zanzibar. The daughter of a powerful ruling sultan and a Circassian slave, Salme had scandalized the royal family—and the entire island—by eloping with a German businessman, converting to Christianity, and fleeing to Hamburg. Three years later her husband died in a freak accident—trampled beneath a horse tram—leaving her alone in a foreign land with three small children and dwindling economic resources. The strong-minded princess was not one to be undone by circumstance, however, no matter how tragic, and she fought doggedly to regain her status, eventually coming to the attention of Germany’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He then used her as a pawn in his bid to establish colonies in East Africa.

As for the slave trade, it had been the basis of nineteenth-century Zanzibar’s economy. Salme had grown up in the shadow of what was then the busiest slave market in the Indian Ocean. The island had been home to tens of thousands of slaves, imported to work its many clove plantations, and had shipped tens of thousands more slaves farther north to other Muslim lands.

Captivated by the drama and scope of Salme’s story, I decided to look for her autobiography. Much to my surprise, it was in print, and I ordered a copy. Later, I learned that Salme had begun writing it in Germany in 1875, when she was thirty-one years old,2 and had completed it in 1886. The first known autobiography published by either an Arab woman or a Zanzibari, it debuted in Germany that same year. Two