I - Sayyida Salma (Emily Ruete)

Sayyida Salma (also: Salme) bint Said bin Sultan was born in Zanzibar in 1844 as the daughter of Said bin Sultan, ruler of Oman and Zanzibar, and his Circassian wife Jilfidan. In the summer of 1865 she met the Hamburg merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete. In August 1866, being with child, she escaped from Zanzibar on a ship of the British Navy and left for Aden, then a British Crown Colony. Her first child was born in Aden in December 1866 and died in April or May 1867. Heinrich Ruete joined her in Aden on 30 May 1867. On the same day Salma converted to Christianity, the couple married and left Aden, travelling via Marseille to Hamburg, Germany. They lived together for only three years. During those years three children were born: Antonie (1868-1945), Rudolph Said (born 1869) and Rosalie (born 1870). In 1870 Rudolph Heinrich Ruete died in Hamburg at the age of 31, leaving Princess Salma behind as a widow. In 1872 she obtained German citizenship. Out of piety to her husband she gave her children a Christian, German education. Until 1888 they lived in Dresden, Rudolstadt, Cologne and Berlin. Through her conversion she had lost all her rights in Zanzibar. In spite of this, and facing an insecure financial future, she succeeded in obtaining the support of the German government in her claims to the inheritance of her deceased brothers and sisters. German colonial politics were at their apogee in the 1880s, and this claim of a German citizen could be of use to the government in its negotiations on a new trade agreement with Sultan Barghash. But it turned out to be of no use when Emily Ruete and her children in 1885 were staying on a German Navy ship off the coast of Zanzibar. Her brother declined any direct contact with her and was unrelenting when the Germans informed him about the claim of his sister. She returned with empty hands. Her second voyage to Zanzibar in 1888 shortly after the death of Sultan Barghash, which she undertook her own initiative and against the advice of the German government, was equally unsuccessful. Disappointed by the handling of her affairs by Bismarck and his officials, she turned her back on Germany and decided in 1888 to settle in the Near East, where she lived in Jaffa, Jerusalem and for most of the time in Beirut. In 1914 she returned to Germany and lived with her daughter Rosalie in Jena. She died in 1924 and was buried in the cemetery of Ohlsdorf in Hamburg.

In 1886 Princess Salma published her Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin ('Memoirs of an Arabian Princess'), which allow a rare glimpse into life in a sultan’s palace. It was reissued three times in the same year and was soon followed by an anonymous English translation (London: Ward and Downey, 1888, reprinted in the same year in New Yor City: Appleton and Co.). A second English translation by Lionel Streachey appeared in 1907 (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co.). The first English translation caught the eye of none less than Oscar Wilde, who critically acclaimed the book in Woman’s World (Wilde 1888). A French translation by L. Lindsay was published in Paris (1905). A new edition of the German text had to wait for more than 100 years. It appeared, slightly adapted, in 1989 under the new title Leben im Sultanspalast ('Life in a Sultan’s Palace'), edited by Annegret Nippa (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Verlag, reprinted in 2007 and 2013 by Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg). None of these translations and (re-)editions could have taken into account the many manuscript revisions which are annotated in Emily Ruete’s own personal copy of the 1886 German edition, the existence of which was until very recently virtually unknown to the scholarly world. This copy is kept in the library of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), Leiden. Until now, a text-critical edition of this revised German text has not been published. The second part of her memoirs, Briefe nach der Heimat ('Letters Home'), which tell the story of a young Arab woman torn between two cultures until about 1885, was only published in 1999 by Heinz Schneppen (Berlin: Philo Verlag). This text, addressed to an unknown female person in Zanzibar, is not a series of letters as the title suggests,but a continuous narrative. It is unknown whether she was still in any way involved in the preparation of this typescript version (now extant in the Leiden University Libraries collection, Or. 6281), which dates from around 1924, the year of her death.

Still unpublished in German are Nachtrag zu den Memoiren ('Sequel to the Memoirs') and Syrische Sitten und Gebräuche ('Syrian Manners and Customs'). The first text was written shortly after 1888 and tells about her second voyage to Zanzibar and her opinions on the colonial policy of Bismarck. The second, very short, text is the only one which deals with an aspect of her life in the period between 1888 and her death in 1924. Otherwise very little is known about her life in that period.

In 1993 the Dutch scholar Dr Emeri van Donzel published a new English translation of all the autobiographical texts of Emily Ruete on the basis of the manuscript materials, preceded by a 140-page introduction on her life and that of her son Rudolph Said Ruete(An Arabian princess between two worlds. Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to my memoirs, Syrian customs and usages, by Sayyida Salme/Emily Ruete. Edited with an introduction [and translation from the German] (Leiden etc.: Brill, 1993). A review by Werner Ende contains useful additional informatiion (Ende 1993).

From Emily Ruete only one other publication is known, on the climate of Zanzibar (Ruete 1886a). In this article she recommends the training of female doctors to provide better health care to women.

II - Rudolph Said Ruete

Rudolph Said Ruete was born in 1869 as the only son of Emily and Rudolph Heinrich Ruete. After attending the Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin he entered with the recommendation of the Imperial court the cadet school in Bensdorf near Cologne and later in Gross-Lichterfelde. In 1888 he received his commission as a second lieutenant in the 19th Thuringian field artillery regiment in Erfurt. In 1894 he was appointed for a one-year period to the German consulate in Syria. He used this stay to visit his mother in Beirut and to travel in Syria and Palestine. In 1898, as first lieutenant, he resigned from the army. From 1899 till 1900 he was employed in Egypt as 'inspecteur général des chemins de fer économiques de l’Est'. In 1901 he married Maria Theresa Mathias, born in Cologne in 1872. She was a niece of Sir Alfred Mond, first Baron Melchett, (1868-1930), son of the German-born Jewish chemist and industrialist Ludwig Mond (1839-1909). In 1906 the City of Hamburg gave him, his wife and his son permission to bear the family name Said Ruete. Until 1910 he worked for the Egyptian National Bank, explored for oil and coal in Jabal Zeit on the Gulf of Suez, and was director of the Deutsche Orientbank (1906-1910), which facilitated infrastructural railway projects and the construction of the Assuan dam. After 1910 he withdrew from active business life. Between 1910 and 1914 the family lived in London. During World War I Rudolph, still a German national, lived with his family in Switzerland. In 1934 he became a British citizen. Rudolph Said Ruete died in London in 1946, his wife in 1947. They had two children: Werner Heinrich Mathissen (1902-1962) and Olga Salme Mathilde Benvenuta (1910-19??).

Rudolph Said Ruete had a keen personal interest in the history of the family of his mother. He spent much of his time and energy collecting and studying books and documents concerning the history and the rulers of Oman and Zanzibar, which formed the basis for some publications and lectures. During four visits of Sultans of Zanzibar to London (1928, 1929,1937 and 1938) he renewed the family relations with with his cousins. In 1930 the reigning sultan Khalifa bin Harub bin Thuwayni bin Said awarded him the Royal Order of the Brilliant Star. In 1932 the same sultan recognised Rudolph Said, to his great personal satisfaction, as a grandson of Sultan Sa’id ibn Sultan. The fact that his mother had converted to Christianity, however, continued to be a taint on his relations with his royal cousins in Zanzibar and Oman.

Besides, he tried to play the role of a mediator on the international political scene, especially in the German-English relations before and during World War I and the Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine. As such, he was in regular touch with many influential people in politics, government and banking. In 1919 he published his correspondence and reports of interviews with high-ranking German officials during World War I. His many letters and documents relating to his personal involvement in Palestinian politics remain largely unexplored and unpublished. Among them figure names such as Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann and Jamal Husseini.

In addition to articles in newspapers and periodicals, he published several monographs (Said Ruete 1898, 1900, 1919, 1929) and autobiographical notes (Said Rute 1932). Three novels were written about the history of the Ruete family, by Mary M. Kaye (1963), Nicole Vosseler (2010) and Lukas Hartmann (2013).