Free PDF The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West, by Christiane Bird
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The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West, by Christiane Bird
Free PDF The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West, by Christiane Bird
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bird brilliantly tells of the 19th-century rise and fall of an Omani ruling family, its role in the enormous Indian Ocean slave trade and, unwittingly, through the Princess Salme, the Christianization and colonization of east Africa by Germany. Oman's Sultan Seyyid Said Al Busaidi was generous with his own people but cruel and ruthless with his enemies, He built alliances with the British as he built a lucrative slave trade in his capital of Zanzibar. After Said's death, his favorite daughter, Salme, an independent woman who flatly refused to obey the mores of her day, eloped with a German businessman who soon died in a fluke accident. Bismarck used Salme and her family to gain a foothold in the slave trade; by the time of Salme's death in 1924, her Omani ruling family's fortunes had declined, German power had risen, and the slave trade in Zanzibar had been abolished. Drawing on Salme's autobiography and letters, journalist Bird (Neither East nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran) presents a first-rate cultural and political history that opens a window onto this little-known corner of modern history. Maps. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Booklist
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the trans-Atlantic slave trade had declined dramatically. At the same time, however, the eastern Africa-Indian Ocean slave trade had increased. At the center of this trade was the island of Zanzibar. The island and the adjacent mainland coast were controlled by the ancient principality of Omani, located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. Bird, a former travel writer for The New York Daily News, supplies a wonderful account of this slave trade and the remarkable Omani family that controlled it. This is a broad-ranging saga filled with fascinating but not necessarily admirable characters. Some, including David Livingstone and Henry Stanley are familiar to Westerners; others, such as the master slaver Tippu Tibb, are interesting characters but at the same time repellent rogues. The most important and enigmatic is the Sultan Said, who gained power in 1804 at the age of 15 and instituted a series of surprisingly liberal reforms and practiced a tolerant form of Islam, receptive to outside influence. Yet he presided over a brutal, bloody slave empire that enriched his familly and kingdom. --Jay Freeman
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Product details
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (June 29, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345469402
ASIN: B008SLHWEU
Product Dimensions:
6.5 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
9 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#3,468,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Christine Bird brings together various fascinating stories centering around Zanzibar and Oman. They say that truth is stranger than fiction. Here that is so. Its an easy historical read and she is well capable about weaving it all together.I did find some errors which annoyed me - the editor should have picked them up. for example: on page 34 she gets the directions of the monsoon back to front. On page 133 she says" ....prior to Zanzibar's revolution of 1963-1964, when African Nationalists overthrew the island's foreigner-dominated government". Wrong - The Revolution was actually in January 1964 and the government was made up of Zanzibaris - mainly of Arabic and Shirazi descent. Her whole book has been explaining how the Arabs of the Gult and Persians had travelled and settled on the East African coast from centuries past. Perhaps as long ago as 700AD and maybe before any mainlanders settled there. The Zanzibari Arabs that led that government of 1963 had a longer history in Zanzibar than the many mainlander African that settled there after the clove boom after 1850 and into the 1900s.And another fact that is worth mentioning: on page 221 Bird talks about the Shells used in the trade with West Africa. A German firm called O'Swald. Those shells were money cowries, Cyprae Moneta, and they were used as currency in the slave trade. An important fact as it further shows the complicity of the Western nations in the slave trade of Africa.The Sultans of Zanzibar were treated very badly in the Scramble for Africa. The story of the German, Carl Peters and his terrible grabbing of land in Tanganyika is not widely known. Bismarck supported Peters and he went on to treat the locals shamefully and that led to the Maji Maji Rebellion when thousands and thousands of Africans were killed by German stormtroopers.The Sultans (Barghash) relied on the British who traded them off with the Germans. Sadly the Zanzibar Government in the 1960's also relied on the support of the British who had framed and designed their independence of 1963. Yet when they asked for military help on the 12 January 1964, a mere month after independence, the British refused aid. Thousands of innocent Zanzibaris died and it plunged Zanzibar into decades of mis-government.Its a sad history.
Great read. This work is not really history, a historical novel, or a novel. It is story-telling based on a limited number of sources, some of which are suspect. However, as long as you read with a skeptical outlook, this is a fun work that reveals much of Oman, Zanzibar, East Africa exploration by Europeans, and much on the perspectives of Princess Salme.
A little ponderous but good information
GReat information on a time and place not well known to me until....I recently picked up Trade Wind by M.M.Kaye at a used book store and come to find the same information in this fifty year old novel that is in this non-fiction account of the same time, Of course the novel has a fictional romance not in Bird's book but the Princess Salme and her exploits are the same.
Very well written and well researched book of a part of the world my schooling ignored. Four more words required.
In THE SULTAN'S SHADOW, author Christiane Bird somewhat ambitiously covers a number of subjects: the country of Oman; the island of Zanzibar; the East African slave trade; the exploration of East Africa by the likes of Livingstone and Stanley; the Al Busaidi sultans of Oman, especially Seyyid Said, who reigned for 50 years; and his daughter Seyyida Salme, whose mother was a Circassian slave and concubine.Bird writes that the seed for the book was planted when she stumbled across "Memoirs of an Arabian Princess", which Seyyida Salme wrote in 1888. Salme was indeed a remarkable person. She did in fact grow up a "princess", one of Seyyid Said's dozens of children. At age 22, after her father's death, she fell in love with a German merchant and eloped with him to Germany, where she had three children before her husband died young in a street-car accident. She spent most of the rest of her 80 years trying to get back in good stead with her family, whom she had scandalized and alienated by her elopement and her conversion from Islam to Christianity. In the 1880s, Otto von Bismarck callously used her as a pawn in Germany's campaign to assemble colonies in East Africa. Author Bird plucks Salme from historical obscurity and does a commendable job in rendering her intellectually and existentially accessible across a broad gulf of time, religion, and culture.But, to me, the book's more interesting figure from history is her father, Seyyid Said. When he assumed tenuous leadership of the Al Busaidi tribe of Oman in the early 1800's, his people were hemmed in and imperiled by many enemies, most notably the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Over the years, in part due to his alliance with Great Britain, Said consolidated his power over his own extended family and tribe, then over the entire territory of present-day Oman, and then beyond it. In 1828 he extended his rule to Zanzibar (he made it his permanent residence in 1840) and from there to the African mainland. He understood the power and commercial drive of the Western nations and sought to co-opt them and play them against one another. In 1833, he agreed to a trade treaty with the United States; it was the first agreement a Persian Gulf ruler ever signed with a Western power. (As a curious consequence the only portrait of Said hangs in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.) Said transformed Zanzibar into the clove-producing capital of the world and a hub of Indian Ocean commerce. But during his rule Zanzibar also became the 19th-Century capital of slave trading.For the first two-thirds of the book, Bird does a good job interweaving her stories of Said and Salme with a presentation of the relevant historical and cultural background of Oman and Zanzibar. I found instructive her discussions of such matters as Ibadhism (the strain of Islam that prevails in Oman), the Wahhabis, the institution of slavery in the Islamic world of Oman and Zanzibar, the East African/Indian Ocean slave trade, the Swahili, and eunuchs. Reading the first parts of the book was akin to a leisurely stroll through the esoterica and exotica of a time and place I knew little about. But Bird tries to tackle too much and over the last third her control over the book and her assorted subjects disintegrates and then in the last thirty pages she wraps up all her story lines in somewhat of a frenzy.Three-and-a-half stars.
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