I'm also a fan of Tolkien, although I'm really not sure if these are the places he based these things on.

I think they're is a site, called Tolkiens dictionary or something like that(it's been at least a year since I've visited there) that would probably be able to tell you if they were based on these southern arabian places.

It was a very cool site, actually, describing nearly everything in the 100,000some years of Tolkiens fantasy history.