Memoirs of an Arabian Princess

Sayyida Salme lived a remarkable life in remarkable times and told the tale more than a century ago in her  Memoirs of an Arabian Princess , the first book commercially published by an Arab woman. She was born in 1844 as a princess on the island of Zanzibar, daughter of the great Omani Sayyid Said bin Sultan and his Circassian slave Djilfidan. By the time she published her  Memoirs  in German in 1886, she had moved from Arab royalty amidst harem politics to the challenges of raisi