What does Sayyida Salme, born an Omani princess on the island of Zanzibar in 1844, still have to tell us today? As the first Arab woman to publish a book, her writings give us a fascinating account of her life and times, while also giving us plenty to ponder about our lives today. This discussion guide provides background materials, along with numerous activity pages and other resources, based on her great-great-granddaughter's new translations.

Andrea Emily Stumpf's new translations appear in a comprehensive three-book series that also features many historical photos and short contextual essays. Since the new translations are more accurate than the historical translations and also easier to read for a twenty-first century audience, they make for excellent primary source materials of a rare voice that combined Eastern and Western cultures from a woman's perspective.

Sayyida Salme did the unthinkable when she secretly taught herself to write as a girl and then later married a German merchant, thus exiling herself to Germany. There, as Emily Ruete, she raised her family and wrote her ethnographic Memoirs, the first book of the series, to let her children know where she had come from. The second book features a later manuscript that the children discovered after her death in 1924, in which she described her very difficult early years in Germany, This raw and searing immigrant narrative reveals how she suffered not only from her religious conversion, great culture shock, and racist attitudes, but also her husband's abrupt and tragic death and ensuing lack of financial agency that brought this princess to the edge of poverty.

Sayyida Salme's / Emily Ruete's writings offer a unique perspective, as she became an explorer from the East to the West when most explorers were men heading from the West to the East (including Africa). This discussion guide is especially geared to high school, college, and graduate students as a window into a surprising and still resonant history for today.