“Mrs. Ruete, the Berlin-based sister of the Sultan of Zanzibar, will soon publish a two-volume work entitled ‘Memoirs of an Arabian Princess,’ which is said to contain both personal experiences and particularly impressive descriptions of Mohammedan [sic] culture in East Africa” states a notice in a German illustrated magazine of April 1886, an example of the publicity preceding the publication of Emily Ruete's autobiography Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian Princess) that same year. The memoirs, written in German, primarily describe the childhood and young adulthood of their author, who was born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, near Zanzibar Town in 1844, and who lived in Zanzibar until the age of 22, when she left the island after her relationship with her German neighbor was discovered. It is widely acknowledged as the oldest published autobiography of an Arab woman in existence. The memoirs, extending from a personal life to “a meditation about the self” in history and culture, also describe episodes from Ruete's later life, such as her journey to Zanzibar in 1885, where she and the inheritance she hoped to claim were used as a bargaining instrument, playing a central role in German colonial ambitions in East Africa. As the notice in the illustrated magazine heralds, they additionally discuss important aspects of Muslim and East African culture for her German readership, such as “The Status of Women in the Orient,” “The Fasting Period,” and “Slavery.” “I don't want to write a scholarly book,” writes Ruete, “I just want to try to make it possible for the European reader to have a correct understanding of the more important views and customs of the Orient.”

Before the publication of Ruete's memoirs, the Ruete's relationship and subsequent perceived flight from Zanzibar had proven enticing fodder for asides in the narratives of explorers and for articles in the illustrated magazines of the day. These imaginative retellings of this episode in Ruete's life read like a “fairytale from the Thousand and One Nights made real” and have arguably provoked the distinctive sober language and style of the memoirs themselves, termed “ethnographic” by Annegret Nippa, editor of the contemporary modernized and somewhat abridged German version of the memoirs.