Sayyida Salme (Emily Ruete)

Who is Sayyida Salme (Emily Ruete)?

Sayyida Salme bint Said Al Said, later known by her married name Emily Ruete, was a princess of the Omani Al Said dynasty, born in Zanzibar in 1844 as one of the many children of Sultan Said bin Sultan, who ruled a joint Omani-Zanzibari state stretching from Muscat to the East African coast. Raised in the royal palaces of Zanzibar, she received a traditional upbringing steeped in Quranic study, Arabic literacy, and the customs of the Omani court. In the 1860s she began a relationship with a German merchant, Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, and in 1866 she left Zanzibar, converted to Christianity, married him in Hamburg, and took the name Emily Ruete. After his early death left her in financial hardship, she wrote "Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar," published in 1886, widely recognized as the first known autobiography written by an Arab woman. The book offers a rare firsthand account of daily life, court politics, and the position of women inside a nineteenth-century Omani ruling household, and it remains a primary source for historians of Oman, Zanzibar, and the Indian Ocean world. She died in Jena, Germany, in 1924.

Sources: Wikipedia: Emily Ruete · Library of Congress: "Memoirs of an Arabian princess, an autobiography" · Emily Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (1886)