Background
Yamani was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1956 to an Iraqi mother from Mosul and a Saudi Arabian father from Mecca. Her father is Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani who gained international fame as Saudi Arabia"s Minister of Petroleum Affairs.
anthropologist researcher author scholars
Yamani was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1956 to an Iraqi mother from Mosul and a Saudi Arabian father from Mecca. Her father is Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani who gained international fame as Saudi Arabia"s Minister of Petroleum Affairs.
She attended secondary school at the renowned Château Mont-Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1967-1975.
Her paternal grandfathers came from Yemen, hence the surname Yamani "from Yemen". Her early education included schooling in Baghdad, Iraq and in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She received her Bachelor of Arts Degree (Summa cum Laude: Highest honors) from Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia and subsequently attended Oxford University where she was the first Saudi Arabian woman to obtain a M.St. and a Doctorate.Phil. from Oxford in Social Anthropology.
She started her career as a university lecturer in Saudi Arabia and became a scholar at leading international think tanks in the United States., Europe, and the Middle East.
She has been a research fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, District of Columbia, and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. She speaks fluent Arabic, English, French and Spanish, and has a working knowledge of Persian, Hebrew and Italian.