Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi’s book, Let Them Know She Is Here: Searching for the Queen of Mleiha, grew from a curiosity that began at Mleiha, one of Sharjah’s major archaeological sites, and turns on a coin found there.
Emblazoned on it was the image of a female ruler and the name Abiel, which opened an enquiry into Sharjah’s archaeological past. It was guided in part by her father, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah.
“I went to ask my father, who is a historian,” she said at the launch of the Polish translation of the work, which is already available in English and Arabic. "I asked him, first of all, did you know about this? Nobody knew about this discovery. No one had written about it. And I asked him, ‘Why has no one written about it?’ And he replied, ‘They were waiting for you.’”
The launch event, held at Ksiegarnia Korekty bookshop in central Warsaw on Saturday, closed a week of programming in which Sharjah was the guest of honour at the Warsaw International Book Fair.
It was a rare opportunity for Sheikha Bodour to expand on the inspirations and writing process behind the book, which Sultan Al Qassemi's review in The National says grew from a curiosity that began in 1995, when she spent time at Mleiha before studying archaeology and anthropology.
Part personal meditation and part field research, the work explores the possibility that ancient Mleiha was once ruled by a queen, moving between archaeological inquiry, personal reflection and the deeper history of the land.
“When you read Let Them Know She Is Here, it's like I've put my heart on a plate and I've given it to you,” she said.
“It took me five years to write this book, from research to having the courage to put my thoughts down on paper and battling a lot of self-doubt, and just to get my voice out,” she said. “I think it took a long time for me to put it together.”
The work opens with a walk through Kalba during the pandemic. Reading from the book, Sheikha Bodour describes coming across “a circular formation carefully marked with large stones” in the mountains. As an archaeologist by training, she presents the moment as the first sign of a wider search through land, ancestry and memory.
That search is also connected to her father, whose historical writing and archival work have long documented the emirate and the wider region. Sheikha Bodour described him as a mentor, but said the book encouraged her to follow her own route of discovery.
“In the book, for those of you who've read it, there is a section where I receive a message from my grandfather who says: ‘Your father has been looking for answers in books, but you will find the answers in the earth,’” she said. “‘If you dig the earth, you will find the answers that he's been looking for.’ So I believe it's a continuation of his work.”
In Let Them Know She Is Here, Sheikha Bodour said the coin raised questions about female authority in the region’s pre-Islamic past.
“The coin, I would say this is perhaps the centre of this book,” she said. “The coin that was discovered in Mleiha had a picture of a queen and it had the inscription Abiel in Aramaic, which means ‘my father is God’, and it was a throne name. It was a throne name for royalty at the time of this discovery, which was the pre-Islamic age, 300BC.”
The image, she said, showed a female ruler depicted in the style of Alexander the Great and holding a falcon. She said she later found there were not one Queen Abiel but four queens four queens who ruled in Mleiha and carried the throne name.
Sheikha Bodour views the discovery as a continuation of her father’s work, while also approaching the past through a female lens.
“He has documented the narratives of our people for many years from our point of view, which is very interesting considering that history has always been written from another point of view,” she said.
“My book looks at it also from a different point of view and that is from a female's perspective. I mention in the book that very often history is written from a male perspective, whereas I wanted to show a side of our world, a side of our history from a female's perspective, which just gives a different flavour.”
Let Them Know She Is Here: Searching for the Queen of Mleiha is also a personal journey in which Sheikha Bodour juxtaposes that archaeological search with an inner journey to conquer doubt and fear, drawing on lessons from a 2003 climb of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro that she still draws on in her official and creative pursuits.
“You learn something different about yourself when you're under those difficult conditions because when you're on a mountain, you have to take only what you need and you learn to make a distinction between what you want and what you need,” she recalled.
“Your backpack has only a certain capacity and you can only take water, flashlight and rain clothes, that's it. And so you learn about what you actually need in life and you start to release all of the burdens that you keep carrying with you, thinking that they define who you are.”
