christiane bird

"[Christiane] Bird brilliantly tells of the nineteenth-century rise and fall of an Omani ruling family.... A first-rate cultural and political history."

"Altogether fascinating... Bird has brought keen observation, great personal courage, and an obviously empathetic personality to the story of her adventures among the Kurds.... She enlightens us and also gives us a great gift---a sense of the humanity and pride of a beguiling people."

"In a fascinating narrative, Bird meticulously unveils a fractured, male-dominated society haunted by centuries of despair."

"A brilliantly evocative portrait of people who have suffered terrible crimes but endured with remarkable courage and charm and undying hope... captured with rare sensitivity and sympathetic understanding."

"Christiane Bird covers as much ground as she can, listening to everyone who comes her way and filling in the historical background of every place she visits with admirable clarity.... She has a novelist's gift for quick-sketch character portrayals and a painter's eye for pictorial description."

A Story Virtually Unknown in the West, about two of the Middle East's most remarkable figures---Oman's Sultan Said and his rebellious daughter Princess Salme---comes to life in this compelling narrative. From their capital on the sultry African island of Zanzibar, Sultan Said and his descendants were shadowed and all but shattered by the rise and fall of East Africa's nineteenth-century slave trade.

"As shrewd, liberal, and enlightened a prince as Arabia has ever produced." That's how explorer Richard Burton described Seyyid Said bin Sultan Al Busaid, who came to power in Oman in 1806 when he was fifteen years old. During his half-century reign, Said ruled with uncanny contradiction: as a believer in a tolerant Islam who gained power through bloodshed and perfidy, and as an open-minded, intellectually curious man who established relations with the West while building a vast commercial empire on the backs of tens of thousands of slaves. His daughter Salme, born to a concubine in a Zanzibar harem, scandalized her family and people by eloping to Europe with a German businessman in 1866, converting to Christianity, and writing the first-known published autobiography of an Arab woman.

Christiane Bird paints a stunning portrait of violent family feuds, international intrigues, and charismatic characters---from Sultan Said and Princess Salme to the wildly wealthy slave trader Tippu Tip and the indefatigable British antislavery crusader Dr. David Livingstone. The Sultan's Shadow is a brilliantly researched and irresistibly readable foray into the stark brutality and decadent beauty of a vanished world.

Christiane Bird is the author of A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan; Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran; and The Jazz and Blues Lover's Guide to the U.S. A graduate of Yale University and former travel writer for the New York Daily News, she lives in New York City with her family.