This 19th-century autobiography offers a rare inside look at the society surrounding a sultan's palace. A real-life princess in exile recalls her vanished world of harems, slave trading, and court intrigues.

Emily Ruete was born in Zanzibar (in modern day Tanzania) as Sayyida Salme, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman. She was the youngest of the 36 children of Sayyid Said bin Sultan Al-Busaid, Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman. Her extraordinary life story is the subject of Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar.

Memoirs of An Arabian Princess: An Autobiography is the memoirs of Emily Ruete (born Sayyida Salme) , princess of Zanzibar and Oman. It is believed to be the first autobiography of an Arab woman.

Originally published in 1888, this is the first known autobiography of an Arabian woman, and the only known autobiography of an Arabian princess. Set in mid-nineteenth century Zanzibar, where Arab and African cultures met, it provides a view no official account could possibly reveal, into the intrigues of court life, the struggles for political power, and the world of the harem. For the love of Heinrich Ruete, a young German consulate official, Princess Salme bint Said chose to forsake, at the risk of death, her privileged place in a Muslim society. In 1886 they fled to the West, where tragically, three years later he died. She remained in Germany with their three children, and there, in a characteristically lively style, wrote of her experience.

Emily Ruete was born in 1840 as Princess Sayyida of Zanzibar. Set against a backdrop of political intrigue in the great age of European colonialism, this memoir offers a portrait of 19th-century Arab and African life, not only in the palace, but in the city and plantations as well.