Emily Ruete (Sayyida Salme)

Salme bint Said Sultan (30 August 1844 – 29 February 1924), known after her marriage as Emily Ruete, was a Princess of Zanzibar and Oman, the youngest of the 36 children of Said bin Sultan, and the author of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (1886), the first published autobiography of an Arab woman. ^{1 2}

Salme was born at Zanzibar on 30 August 1844, the daughter of Sultan Said and Jilfidan, a Circassian who had come through the slave trade and become a consort of the sultan. She grew up bilingual in Arabic and Swahili in her father's palaces, first at Bet il Mtoni and then in the house of her brother Majid bin Said, who taught her to ride and to shoot. ¹ She secretly taught herself to write, an unusual skill for women in her culture at the time. When her father died in 1856 she was declared of age at twelve and received her paternal inheritance; on her mother's death in 1859 she inherited three further plantations. ¹

When her brothers Majid and Barghash disputed the throne in 1859, Salme favoured Majid in her sympathies, but because she could write she became, at fifteen, the secretary of Barghash's party. A British gunboat helped end the rising quickly and Barghash was exiled to Bombay for two years; Salme later reconciled with Majid, which earned her Barghash's lasting enmity. ¹

In Stone Town she became acquainted with her neighbour, the German merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, and became pregnant by him. In August 1866, after the pregnancy had become obvious, she fled aboard the British frigate HMS Highflyer to the British colony of Aden, where she took Christian instruction and was baptised before her marriage on 30 May 1867; her first son, Heinrich, born at Aden in December 1866, died in France on the way to Germany. ^{1 2}

The Ruetes settled in Hamburg and had a son and two daughters, but Rudolph died in a tram accident in 1870, leaving her a widow in difficult economic circumstances after the authorities denied her inheritance claims. ¹ In those years she wrote her memoirs in German: Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin was published in 1886 and translated into English in 1888, giving an inside picture of life in Zanzibar between 1850 and 1865 and of her family. ¹ In 1993 van Donzel published an expanded edition containing the Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs and Syrian Customs and Usages. ²

After her widowhood she was caught up in Chancellor Bismarck's colonial plans, amid speculation that her son might be installed as Sultan of Zanzibar, and she revisited Zanzibar in 1885 and again in 1888 without gaining the inheritance or reconciliation she hoped for. ¹ Between 1889 and 1914 she lived in Jaffa and then Beirut, returned to Europe, and died at Jena on 29 February 1924, aged 79, of severe pneumonia. ¹

The academic sources record her conversion to Christianity: van Donzel's editorial biography states that at Aden she was baptized with the Christian name Emily and married there, and Prestholdt states that she eloped with a German merchant and converted to Christianity; her faith is therefore recorded as documented christian for the period from her baptism in 1867 to her death. ^{2 3} She was raised, however, a Muslim princess of the Al Bu Said house, and only her article's infobox names her first religion personally as Ibadi Islam; as that is a single personal attestation, no ibadi value is recorded for her birth segment, the whole position is stated in her faith note, and her father's documented affiliation is not counted as attestation about her.

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.