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The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West
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About The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule At The
Product Description A story virtually unknown in the West, about two of the Middle East’s most remarkable figures—Oman’s Sultan Said and his rebellious daughter Princess Salme—comes to life in this narrative. From their capital on the sultry African island of Zanzibar, Sultan Said and his descendants were shadowed and all but shattered by the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century East African slave trade. “As shrewd, liberal, and enlightened a prince as Arabia has ever produced.” That’s how explorer Richard Burton described Seyyid Said Al bin Sultan Busaid, who came to power in Oman in 1804 when he was fifteen years old. During his half-century reign, Said ruled with uncanny contradiction: as a believer in a tolerant Islam who gained power through bloodshed and perfidy, and as an open-minded, intellectually curious man who established relations with the West while building a vast commercial empire on the backs of tens of thousands of slaves. His daughter Salme, born to a concubine in a Zanzibar harem, scandalized her family and people by eloping to Europe with a German businessman in 1866, converting to Christianity, and writing the first-known autobiography of an Arab woman. Christiane Bird paints a stunning portrait of violent family feuds, international intrigues, and charismatic characters—from Sultan Said and Princess Salme to the wildly wealthy slave trader Tippu Tip and the indefatigable British antislavery crusader Dr. David Livingstone. The Sultan’s Shadow is a brilliantly researched and irresistibly readable foray into the stark brutality and decadent beauty of a vanished world. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Bird brilliantly tells of the 19th-century rise and fall of an Omani ruling family, its role in the enormous Indian Ocean slave trade and, unwittingly, through the Princess Salme, the Christianization and colonization of east Africa by Germany. Oman's Sultan Seyyid Said Al Busaidi was generous with his own people but cruel and ruthless with his enemies, He built alliances with the British as he built a lucrative slave trade in his capital of Zanzibar. After Said's death, his favorite daughter, Salme, an independent woman who flatly refused to obey the mores of her day, eloped with a German businessman who soon died in a fluke accident. Bismarck used Salme and her family to gain a foothold in the slave trade; by the time of Salme's death in 1924, her Omani ruling family's fortunes had declined, German power had risen, and the slave trade in Zanzibar had been abolished. Drawing on Salme's autobiography and letters, journalist Bird ( Neither East nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran) presents a first-rate cultural and political history that opens a window onto this little-known corner of modern history. Maps. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist By the middle of the nineteenth century, the trans-Atlantic slave trade had declined dramatically. At the same time, however, the eastern Africa-Indian Ocean slave trade had increased. At the center of this trade was the island of Zanzibar. The island and the adjacent mainland coast were controlled by the ancient principality of Omani, located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. Bird, a former travel writer for The New York Daily News, supplies a wonderful account of this slave trade and the remarkable Omani family that controlled it. This is a broad-ranging saga filled with fascinating but not necessarily admirable characters. Some, including David Livingstone and Henry Stanley are familiar to Westerners; others, such as the master slaver Tippu Tibb, are interesting characters but at the same time repellent rogues. The most important and enigmatic is the Sultan Said, who gained power in 1804 at the age of 15 and instituted a series of surprisingly liberal reforms and practiced a tolerant form of Islam, receptive to outside influence. Yet he pres
