Legends and facts of the shapeshifting Queen of Sheba

Apr 6, 2026

Guest

Safia Aidid

Guest

Shahla Haeri

Guest

Kamala Sulayli

Safia Aidid, historian of modern Africa, Shahla Haeri, anthropologist of gender and Islam, and Kamala Sulayli, journalism professor and documentary narrator, explore the Queen of Sheba's many afterlives. They trace portraits from biblical and Quranic retellings to Ethiopian and Yemeni claims. Conversations cover medieval reinventions, nationalist contests over her origins, and how her image fuels contemporary movements for women's authority.

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ANECDOTE

Yemeni Memory Uses Belkis As Feminist And Beauty Icon

Yusra Ashaq, a Yemeni journalist, remembers the Queen of Sheba as a source of national pride and a feminist icon for Yemenis.
Kamala Sulayli describes a Sana'a beauty-clinic commercial that uses Belkis's image to sell modern cosmetics.

INSIGHT

Scriptures Frame Sheba As Political Peer Not Sexual Prize

The Hebrew Bible and the Quran present the Queen of Sheba as a monarch who tests Solomon and validates his wisdom rather than a sexual conquest.
Both texts leave key details silent (name, appearance, governance), creating space for later interpreters to project ideas about gender and power.

INSIGHT

Interpreters Turn Silence Into Demonizing Details

Medieval exegetes transformed the silences in scripture into narratives that regulate female power by demonizing or demarcating the Queen's body.
Stories like the Targum Sheni add motifs (hairy or donkey legs, demonic lineage) to make her liminal authority legible and containable.

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The Queen of Sheba is a holy figure to some; a demon in disguise to others. Her indelible presence has haunted religious scholars and fuelled nationalist visions in East Africa and Southern Arabia. IDEAS explores the many afterlives of the Queen of Sheba — and how ideas about gender and power have shifted in each retelling of her life.

Guest in this episode:

Shahla Haeri is a professor of anthropology and a former director of the Women's Studies Program at Boston University, and one of the pioneers of Iranian anthropology. Her books include Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi'i Iran, No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women and The Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority, Gender.

Jillian Stinchcomb is a director's visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey working as a postdoctoral fellow in the "Interactive Histories, Co-Produced Communities: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" project. In 2020, she defended her dissertation, "Remembering the Queen of Sheba in the First Millennium," a reception history of the Queen of Sheba across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian texts from the biblical to the early medieval period. She works with material in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Ge'ez.

Safia Aidid is an interdisciplinary historian of modern Africa and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Her research addresses anticolonial nationalism, territorial imaginations, borders, and state formation in the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on modern Somalia and Ethiopia.

Eyob Derillo is a reference specialist in the Reading Room of Africa and Asian Studies at the British Library, and previously served as curator for the library's Ethiopic and Ethiopian Collections. He is a Ph.D. student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, focusing on the history of Ethiopian magic.

Yousra Ishaq is a director and producer in Yemen, facilitating local productions and coordinating multinational teams including international media outlets such as the BBC and PBS. In 2017, she co-founded the Yemen-based ﬁlm foundation and production company, Comra Films.