Just a few months ago, I found myself attending an extraordinary evening beneath the stars of Al Faya in Sharjah, celebrating the palaeolandscape’s inclusion on the Unesco World Heritage List. In its silence and open sky, that moment felt to me like a living extension of what is articulated in the narrative-journey Let Them Know She is Here: Searching for the Queen of Mleiha by Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi.
There, between a land that still bears the footprints of early humanity and a sky scarcely altered over thousands of years, I realised that what Sheikha Bodour writes about is not a retrieval of the past, but a re-entry into a long span of time to which we too often forget that we belong.
I also realised that my visit to Buhais Geological Park and Mleiha Archaeological Centre, shaped profoundly by my reading of the book, was not merely a cultural experience, but also an exercise in expanding our consciousness of time. At Al Faya, we encounter humanity before language, before writing, before kingdoms. At Mleiha, we encounter humanity at the moment it begins to inscribe and to establish authority, including kingdoms perhaps ruled by women. Between the two sites runs an invisible thread: the thread of human memory that never breaks, even as its forms change. It is this thread that Sheikha Bodour weaves with a magical narrative craft in her singular journey.
Let Them Know She is Here: Searching for the Queen of Mleiha is neither merely a literary work, nor a purely archaeological study. At its core, it is an epistemic experience, one built on listening more than assertion, on unveiling more than proof.
It places the reader before a central question: how do we reconnect humanity with its land, not as a silent geography, but as a living memory that precedes us all?
From the opening pages, it becomes clear that the author does not approach Mleiha as an isolated archaeological site, but as a living being, with its own breath, silences and accumulated layers of meaning.
The search for the “queen of Mleiha” does not advance as a rigid historical demonstration, but as a spiritual-cognitive journey, where absence itself becomes a sign, and silence an open question. The queen is not only a possible ruler from a distant past, but also a symbol of what has been excluded from historical narration, most notably the feminine essence in the formation of early Arab civilisation.
What distinguishes this text most strikingly is its implicit Sufi presence. Sufism here is neither explicit religious discourse nor ornamental metaphor, but a way of seeing and writing. Listening, slowness, retreat, sitting by a fire, observing the stars, returning repeatedly to a place at dawn, these practices remind us that in ancient wisdom traditions, knowledge is not seized by force, but granted to those who know how to wait.
In this context, the desert becomes something akin to a “greater retreat”, and the land itself transforms into a silent guide, speaking only to those who have shed inner noise. The author does not interrogate the land to extract answers; she sits with it, allowing questions to ripen. This Sufi stance crystallises in a recurring idea in the text: “Truth, when buried in the body of the land, does not die.”
From here, the reading of the book moves beyond Mleiha as a site of only a few thousand years, opening on to a wider horizon: the deep memory of humanity itself, as revealed at Al Faya in Sharjah. Writing about Mleiha today cannot be separated from the growing awareness that this land has witnessed human history stretching back nearly 250,000 years. This is demonstrated by discoveries at Al Faya, with one of the earliest records of continuous human settlement in desert environments.
The inscription of Al Faya on Unesco’s World Heritage List in 2025 was not an administrative or a touristic event, but a global acknowledgement that this desert − long described as harsh and empty − was in fact an early human laboratory of adaptation, survival and innovation. It represents a complete model of what is known as a desert cultural landscape, where humans reshaped their relationship with nature, transforming scarcity into a way of life and environmental adversity into an opportunity for settlement.
The singularity of Let Them Know She is Here lies in its ability to construct a rare bridge between rigorous scientific research and contemplative language. The book draws on archaeological artefacts, coinage, inscriptions and anthropological studies, yet it never separates science from the human experience. Knowledge here is not the accumulation of information, but an ethical responsibility towards the land and towards those who once passed through it.
The discussion of Arab queens − from Mleiha to Saba, from Zenobia to Mawiyya − is not offered as a historical catalogue, but as an attempt to restore balance to a narrative that has long relegated women to the margins. This restoration is carried out quietly, without slogans, as if the author were suggesting that truth, when firmly grounded, has no need to raise its voice.
Within the landscape of contemporary Arabic literature, this work occupies a distinctive place. It belongs to that small body of texts written against forgetting and against haste, texts that reclaim writing as an act of listening. It reminds us that identity is a long process of interaction between humans and their land, and that the past, when reread with awareness, does not imprison the present but liberates it.
Reading this book today, in light of Al Faya’s inscription on the Unesco World Heritage List, grants it an added dimension. It is no longer merely a search for a missing queen, but a contemporary testimony to a renewed awareness of deep human time.
Ultimately, Let Them Know She is Here: Searching for the Queen of Mleiha is not a book about the past, but about restoring the relationship between humans and the earth, and about a wisdom still embedded in the sands, waiting for those who are willing to listen.
