Arabian Sands

Bernard Haykel This is an older book and an unusual choice. I contracted malaria when I was in Yemen doing fieldwork. Between bouts of feverish hallucination, I read this book. It’s the authority on the Arabian Desert. He ventures into The Empty Quarter, one of the great deserts of the world. Arabia was an incredibly harsh place for human beings to live. Thesiger shows how Arabs, especially nomadic Arabs, were in tune with this ecology. They developed a culture that enabled them to survive. He shows the humanity of the Bedouin, otherwise thought to be savages. (Source)

Jo Tatchell This was written in the 1950s after Thesiger returned from five years of Arabian travel. He was one of the few non-indigenous people to cross “the Empty Quarter”, the desert that occupies a huge part of what is now Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It’s almost a million square kilometres of billowing amber dunes – and more terrifying than an ocean. Usually, people travelled around the peninsula by sea, hugging the coast to get from town to town. A group travelling from Qatar to Mecca would make their way around the southern part of the peninsula. But there were ways of crossing it... (Source)