Customer Reviews

The Sultan's Shadow: One Family's Rule at the Crossroads of East and West

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lyrically written but also thoroughly researched, "The Sultan's Shadow" deserves more attention than it's getting at the moment. But I predict that will change.

Bird, the author of two fascinating travelogues, one about Iran seen from the female perspective and the other about the Kurds, has crafted a terrific narrative history of the ruling family of Oman during the 19th century. It encompasses not the story of that family, which is compelling enough (the sultan of the title, Seyyid Said, turned Oman into an imperial power); but also the background of a region, the Indian Ocean, that if today's strategic experts are to be believed, is emerging as one of the most important in the world.

Glowingly reviewed in [...], the book has captivated me because I have visited Oman and seen how different it is from its better known neighbors: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Persian Gulf kingdoms. Its low profile is itself a mystery with an intriguing past. But "The Sultan's Shadow" will captivate anyone who opens it, whether or not they they have been to Oman.

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.

In the introduction, Christiane Bird says that the book was inspired from her reading Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar. Studying the princess led Bird to the study of Oman (which ruled the island) and of slavery (which was a way of life there and an important export). After the first few chapters which mostly take place in Oman, the focus is on Zanzibar with Princess's story woven throughout.

Princess Salme was the daughter of a slave and the Sultan. The slave system of this place and time was much more benign than that of the American plantation system. All the sultan's children were born free and were raised and educated as royals. Their mothers were freed upon the death of the sultan. Salme eloped to Germany and eventually got involved in internaational diplomacy regarding Zanzibar.

While it does not interfere with the quality of the work, I thought the sections on expeditions of Livingston and Stanley were overly long for their relationship to the story. The Tippu Tip story is also too long, but is germane in that Tippu Tip is part of the Zanzibar story.

The "Notes" section shows the large number of sources pulled together to create this book. The "Notes" is more than a list of citations, it has a narrative that often describes the source and its level of objectivity. There is a very good page of maps labeling all the points of referred to in the text. There are no plates.

I've read, and tried to read, a number of histories of Middle East countries and they have not been "user friendly". The problem isn't just the textbook nature of the prose; it is my lack of background. The large number of unfamiliar places, people, tribes or battles makes the story hard to place and has too often requires Wikipedia consultation every 5 pages. Bird seems to know what I need to know and how much of the unfamiliar I can handle. The prose and the pacing of content are excellent.

Both this new book and the 2005 book, A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan show Bird to be a versatile and gifted writer.

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.