The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West

About this book

A story virtually unknown in the West about two of the Middle Easts most remarkable figuresOmans Sultan Said and his rebellious daughter Princess Salmecomes 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. Thats 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 charactersfrom Sultan Said and Princess Salme to the wildly wealthy slave trader Tippu Tip and the indefatigable British antislavery crusader Dr. David Livingstone. The Sultans Shadow is a brilliantly researched and irresistibly readable foray into the stark brutality and decadent beauty of a vanished world.