Many may have heard of the Queen of Sheba and wondered about her peculiar origin, but they may not know anything about her mother.  Some of my most favourite books use what we do know from history and mythology to speculate about what we do not know, or what has not yet been revealed.  When I decided to us the unseen as the fantasy element of the Sulayman series I knew that I had to explore the story of Sheba and Prophet Sulayman more.  What we do know is that the story of Sheba and Sulayman is so important that there is a surah about Sheba, Surah Saba in the Quran.

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Umm Sheba and her story is part of the background to the Sulayman and the Green Lamp story.  We learn more about Umm Sheba and her children, which will figure in later books in the Sulayman series as well.  In order to imagine what the mother of Queen Sheba would be like we need only read about her daughter and speculate that the apple does not fall too far from the tree.  With the Umm Sheba character we will have a glimpse into the politics and depth of the jinn culture in our story.  I hope to expand upon this in later novels in our series as our hero, young Sulayman, encounters the jinn world and finds himself in need of donor figures and alliance with the believing jinn to succeed in this quests.

We learn in the story of Prophet Sulayman in The Tree of Light: The Lives of the Prophets for Young Muslim vol.2 that the mother of Sheba disappeared after she thwarted a great battle through ingenious sabotage.  We learn that the King of Sheba was so depressed after his jinn bride left that he went in search of her and was never heard from again.  The tragic origins of the child Queen and her meeting with Prophet Sulayman as an adult are the factual underpinning of Umm Sheba’s story.  If you would like to know more about the Queen of Sheba and Prophet Sulayman please see The Tree of Light: The Lives of the Prophets for Young Muslim vol.2 where we are introduced to the stories of the Prophets through the eyes of our little protagonists, Sulayman and Yusuf, before they begin their studies at Al Chemya.

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