The Opposite of Choice

What happens when we make choices beyond what is allowed or accepted? Last month I wrote a blog post about endless choice, and how we tend to think that more choice means more freedom and more freedom, more choice. [1] Today I am writing about bounded choice, where freedom stops.

At some level, we transgress frequently. With so many rules and norms, it does not take much. Every time I walk across an intersection at a red light (especially in Germany, heaven forbid!), I choose to rebel. But I have no problem justifying this infraction to myself – I am careful, there are no children to set a bad example, I am in a hurry, it is an impractical rule. In this way, we all navigate choices and constraints on an intuitive risk scale, based on how we were taught, what we have experienced, and the consequences we have been made to bear.

Some choices are considered off-limits. They carry serious, often irreversible, consequences. I call this consequential choice, which Sayyida Salme came to feel in spades. Not that she meant to rebel, I believe she just sought to live life on her own terms. But in Zanzibar’s social straitjacket of her day, there was little room for a confident, observant, intelligent young princess to self-express.

Sayyida Salme did some things one simply did not do. Early on, she taught herself to write even though it was taboo. We can gloss over this choice today, but in her time, it was both a rare achievement and a defiant act. But then she was rewarded for it when she became the scribe for her half-brother’s coup attempt. Even after the palace revolution failed, she surely felt needed and empowered. What did she learn from those consequences?

Was it then such a leap to choose a taboo German husband? At the time, she was alienated from most of her extended family, had no father or mother to make arrangements, was pushing spinsterdom in her early twenties, and may have felt uninspired by the men around her and the wifely prospects before her – whatever it was, I hesitate to speculate, she was audacious enough to perceive a choice that society did not offer. As Sophia Rosenfeld explains in her new book, The Age of Choice, for most people, social standards of good taste blend into their own predilections. [2] A choice like the one Sayyida Salme made would never have occurred to them. Who thinks such thoughts!

And perhaps, too, her sense of consequence was off, for how bounded were the bounds? “In Zanzibar, nothing is as it seems” is the famous quote attributed to explorer David Livingstone, who knew the island well. Sayyida Salme had likely seen her fair share of what men allowed themselves, not least her father with seventy-five sarari (concubines) of many nationalities and races. Contemplating a mixed marriage, she herself was biracial. But she also knew that:

A union with my beloved would have been impossible in my homeland.” (Memoirs, p. 202)

It would not do to have a rogue princess running around. 

What goes for men does not go for women – more then, but even now. [3] All the way back to Eve, a woman could face a choice, but if she chose wrongly, she would bring suffering to herself. It is an archetypal story. Rosenfeld points out that choice links closely to the concept of feminism because choice, or lack thereof, keenly affects women’s lives and identities. [4] Even when new forms of choice were introduced over time, they were accompanied by new forms of exclusion and prohibition, especially pertaining to women. These were “bounded choices,” in which individual well-being remained subordinated to the social order as a whole. [5]

Sayyida Salme was not blind to her situation. Leaving her beloved Bububu for Stonetown, after agreeing to give up her home for the new British consul, she had braced herself:

I vacillated a long time about whether to really throw myself back into the clamor of the city. I had a dark premonition that new and inevitable misunderstandings awaited me there. (Memoirs, p. 194)

Sure enough, once in the city, she met her neighbor by watching him one building over. It was a vulnerable time for the whole family, as the siblings lost the cohesion they had once shared under their late great father, Sayyid Said bin Sultan. It was also a vulnerable time for Sayyida Salme, as she transitioned into adulthood. One might think that “what we do for love” distorts all sense, but in her case, I believe it was also her rational choosing. As her son later wrote, when correcting the latest author capitalizing on tales of the Orient: [6]  

May I point out that she was not “carried off” by my father to Europe. She left Zanzibar on her own will on board H.M.S. “Highflyer” for Aden, was joined there several months later by my father, where they were married in the English Chapel, my mother being converted to Christian faith before. . . . (Letters, p. 130)

And thereafter, Sayyida Salme persisted in her own will, choosing to stay in Germany, loyal to her husband even after he died, reaffirming her original decision over and over again.

What strikes me the most, though, is how, once she made her original choice, she faced a cascading lack of choice. This one choice of husband forced a series of constricting sequalae. No choice to stay on the island, she had to flee. No choice to remain Muslim, she had to convert. No choice to keep her name, she had to rename. The onus was on her to run the gauntlet of non-choice as a consequence of her unacceptable choice.

Sayyida Salme was severely criticized for choosing to become Christian, and no Sultan half-brother ever reconciled with her. Yet, it was not her choice. She would have preferred to stay Muslim, and she paid a huge price for converting. One cannot read the anguish in her Letters to the Homeland and come to any other conclusion. That is why I have come to view her religious choice as a coerced conversion. [7]

Sophia Rosenfeld describes the 19^th century as “a great age of rules,” many of which impeded women. Novels of the time were filled with female protagonists who became full-fledged individuals only at the cost of being repeatedly punished, both formally and informally, for what they chose. [8] Neither fiction nor fairy tale, Sayyida Salme lived the real thing. Her existential, consequential choice took its toll.

There is no fully free choice in this world. [9] Every action we decide to take, how we choose to live, operates within a framework. Barriers abound when it comes to choice. Even as our consumer culture and rights culture have made us into choosing (and choosy) beings, we must often contend with lacking choice. Our choices are constrained by many factors, and lack of availability is the least of it. From internal hesitations to societal pressures to legal constraints, boundaries crop up everywhere. Says Rosenfeld: “Consider formal regulation by lawmakers and extensive informal often unacknowledged regulations by tastemakers, family members, peers, and others, not to mention voluntary constraints.” [10]

And yet, we still have choices to make about choice. As a society and as individuals, what goes and what doesn’t is defined and enforced, even as those lines shift over time. Exploring the implications of Sayyida Salme’s choices, including her consequential and coerced choices, and unpacking the differences between then and now, is a worthy exercise for considering our own range of choices.

Bounded choice, confounded choice – the opposite of freedom. How do our guardrails stand the test of time and still frame our choices today?

Let history surprise you, let her story inspire you – let her authentic voice speak to you.

Andrea Emily Stumpf, November 30, 2025

Photo credit: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand, AFP, from “German city gives green light to traffic-light women,” in The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2014

[1] “How to Choose?? Die Qual der Wahl“ from October 30, 2025.

[2] S. Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice, p. 51 (2025).

[3] See my blog post “An Insta Triple Talaq” from August 27, 2024.

[4] S. Rosenfeld, p. 5.

[5] S. Rosenfeld, p. 12. Also: “Choice was born at the nexus of new forms of agency and new forms of constraint.” (p. 52)

[6] Rudolph Said-Ruete writing to Sir Arthur Hardinge on Oct. 14, 1928, to correct multiple errors in Hardinge’s book A Diplomatist in the East (1928). Original letter located in the Special Collection of the Leiden University Libraries at NINO SR 289.

[7] I say much more about this in my essay “On Faith” in The Centennial Collection. A.E. Stumpf, The Centennial Collection: More of Emily Ruete, born Sayyida Salme, Princess of Oman and Zanzibar (2024).

[8] S. Rosenfeld, p. 18

[9] To be sure, this statement is not meant to answer questions of free will and free choice that philosophers from Spinoza to Kant have debated over the centuries.

[10] S. Rosenfeld, p. 79.