Daughter of the Wind: Edouard Al-Dahdah’s blog on desert arabian horses, past and present

I just wanted to take this occasion to wish everyone a Happy, happy new year. It’s been a great year for Daughter of the Wind, which by the way will blow its first candle in a just a few days.. Here’s to another great year of enjoying these wonderful horses and the great people who breed them across the world.

A recent entry featured the beautiful Mauvy stallion Moulouki. Here is a picture I took in 1995 of his son Doum (x Shawania) who like his sire before him, stood at stud at Pierre-Henri Beillard’s Le Sureau (South western France), which is now being dispersed. [Update Jan. 5th, 2009: Doum was also bred by Mauvy]

When I started this blog, I thought I’d be able to write about a strain each week, which means you should have read about 50 strains by now. Well, I was able to only feature six strains on this blog, with varying degrees of detail: Kuhaylan al-Hayf (i.e., K. Hayfi), Kuhaylan al-Dunays (i.e., K. Dunaysan), Kuhaylan al-Mimrah, Kuhaylan Ibn Jlaidan (a branch of Kuhaylan al-’Ajuz), Kuhaylan Krush al-Baida, and Ma’naghi Ibn Ufaytan (a branch of Ma’naghi Hadraji). Here’s a new year resolution: I will try to feature ten strains in 2009, and will call it “Strain of the Month”, accounting for the summer break, when I will try to leave my laptop at home.  

Here’s what I have lined up so far in no particular order. The list is based in part on requests received from readers and friends, and in part on personal selection: 

- Kuhaylan al-Wati

- Kuhaylan al-Khdili

- Jilfan Dhawi

- Kuhaylan al-’Armush

- Kuhaylan al-Sharif 

- ‘Ubayyan Suhayli

- Ma’naghi Abu Sayfayn

I still have three slots to fill; if you have any favorite strains you’d like me to feature, just let me know by replying to this threads, and I will do my best to accomodate your requests. The objective of this series was never to exhaust the discussion on any particular strain (it can’t be exhausted anyway, and certainly not by someone who lives in Washington, DC for the better part of the year), but rather to share with you the little I happen to know about this strain, for the record. If I don’t know enough to write an interesting entry about a strain you’ve asked for, I will tell you. If you challenge me enough, I might make a few calls to some old timers and some of the Bedouin breeders of this strain and ask them about it.

I can’t resist sharing with you the nice holiday card I just received from Joe and Sharon Ferriss. Thank you Joe and Sharon.. 

and the one Laszlo and Eva Kiraly also sent me.. Thanks Laszlo and Eva..

and a Happy Holiday to all..

The magnificent grey stallion pictured below was bred was Robert Mauvy in 1969 near Tours, in France. Mauvy also bred his sire Amri (Saadi x Zarifa) and Amri’s dam Zarifa (Matuvu x Iaqouta). He sold Amri to Idaho in the USA as a three year old, but not before he used him on a couple of his best mares (I actually sometimes wonder if Amri left anything out there). Moulouki’s dam Izarra, a beautiful grey mare, was a gift to Mauvy from Admiral A. Cordonnier, who certainly maintained the best private Arabian stud in North Africa, near Bizerte in Tunisia. 

Izarra (by David x Arabelle by Beyrouth) was bred by Cordonnier and so was her dam Arabelle. Their tail female was to Samaria, a grey Kuhaylat al-’Ajuz  mare born in 1882 imported to Pompadour by Mr. de Ganay in 1887. Ganay bought Samaria for 8,000 Francs (an enormous amount!) from Khalid Bey al-As’ad of Taybeh, a village now located in Southern Lebanon. The al-A’sad were until the 1970s the overlords of South Lebanon and the most powerful family among this area’s Shi’a population. The older al-A’sad lords were known to maintain a small stud of Arabians that they’d usually acquire from Bedouin ‘Anazah clans who had they summer pastures in the nearby Golan Heights. Samaria did not stay at Pompadour for a long time, for she was sold to the stud of Sidi Thabet in French-controlled Tunisia, where she founded one of the most successful North African damlines.  

Moulouki does carry one line to the stallion Denouste through his great-grandsire Ourour. To be frank, I have always been wary of Denouste for three main reasons: 1) type: he certainly looks like a poor representative of an Arabian horse; 2) progeny: his many (too many) sons, grandsons and greatgrandsons are even further away from classic Arabian type than he was; and 3) a flaw in the pedigree of his great-grandsire Burkeguy, which will be the subject of a discussion that’s now long overdue.  

I recently asked Jean-Claude Rajot about Mauvy’s opinion of Denouste. I have the utmost trust for Mauvy’s knowledge and judgment, for he was uncompromising in his quest for purity of blood, and paid a heavy price for his stand. I thought to myself: “If Mauvy bought and used the young stallion Saadi (by Ourour x Oureah by Ghalbane, picture below) on all his mares, then it must be because Saadi (and hence Ourour and Denouste) met his standards of purity.” Other breeders would not get away with far less than that, as this is not the type of argument upon which any  student of bloodlines one ought to rely in assessing the authenticity of an Arabian horse’s origin [even though it is widely used in the context of Egyptian bloodlines and the horses of Ali Pasha Sherif, for instance]. But there was still that lingering uneasiness about Denouste. 

Jean-Claude’s answer was somewhat reassuring: Mauvy did not think there was anything wrong with the horse himself (”he thought the horse was okay” said Jean-Claude), even though he didn’t think consider him to be a true representative of Arabian type (Mauvy, sarcastically: “definitely not a horse before which you’d kneel down in admiration”);  that said, Mauvy apparently reported that Denouste’s racing success heralded the beginning of the “fraud era”, with every other horse being presented as a Denouste son. However, Mauvy wrote enthusiastically about Ourour (picture below), describing him as the prototype of an Arabian stallion, despite his relatively excessive height (155 cm or 15.1 hands).

Issue resolved, then? Maybe. I will ask Jean-Claude to write about all this, and then we still need to discuss Denouste’s pedigree.

PS: Moulouki was owned by Pierre-Henri Beillard, who gave me this picture of him, as well as the two others. Beillard, who appears in the photo, also used a son of Moulouki’s Doum (x Shawania by Amri), also bred by Mauvy. Moulouki’s 3 generation pedigree is here: 

                                   Saadi [Ourour (Tunisia) x Oureah (Tiaret)] 

                        Amri [Mauvy]

                                   Zarifa [Matuvu (Pompadour) x Iaqouta (Tiaret)] 

Moulouki [Mauvy]

                                  David [Hazil (Cordonnier) x Salome (Cordonnier)]

                      Izarra [Cordonnier] 

                                 Arabelle (Beyrouth (Tiaret) x Ambria (Cordonnier)]

If you anyone knows someone who could volunteer to write intelligently about asil horses in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain today, please email me privately at ealdahdah@hotmail.com. I am looking for someone who knows the horses and the country context hands on, and preferably but not necessarily from there. Fluency in English is not required since I am ready to translate. This would leave me handling Syria and North Africa.

I know there were Al Khamsa eligible tail-female descendants of Dajania after Nadirat, although they might not yet be in the Al Khamsa database. One is Nadirat’s 1946 daughter Aalastra, by Gulastra. And of course there was Nadirat’s famous 1935 daughter Aarah, by Ghadaf.

Nefisa is one of the most interesting of all the Crabbet broodmares, with her 21 live foals. Nine of these were fillies. Although Narghileh and Nasra were the two retained for breeding at Crabbet, and probably two of her best, the other fillies are worth a look too.

Nefisa’s first filly was Nahla 1889 (by Ashgar). The Blunts actually planned to retain her for breeding, but she died in the fall of her three-year-old year from overeating acorns in Crabbet Park.

Nefisa’s next filly was Nejiba 1892 (by Azrek). From her picture, this was a really dandy grey Azrek daughter. She did produce four foals at Crabbet, all colts. One died, one was sold to India, one to Scotland, and one was given to a nephew of Lady Anne’s who lived in Greece. Nejiba herself was given away at age 11 to the son of a longtime friend of Wilfrid Blunt’s.

Nefisa’s next filly was Narghileh 1895, marked “very fine” in the Crabbet records. Narghileh did have two younger full sisters, Nawara 1902 and Ninawa 1904, both sold to South Africa in 1906. Nawara at least is the subject of commentary in Lady Anne Blunt’s journals, where she is noted as having faulty action and one that “should be got rid of.” So presumably Narghileh was the best of the three Nefisa fillies by Mesaoud.

Nefisa’s next filly was by Feysul and born in 1906, but she lived only a month. Nefisa’s last three fillies were all by Daoud. Of these, the most famous is the first, Nasra 1908, who became one of the all-time great Crabbet broodmares. The next was Nadima 1909, sold to Argentina at age four, where she founded a line of Arabian breeding. Finally there was *Nueyra, Nefisa’s 21st and last foal, born when Nefisa was 27. Wilfrid Blunt sold *Nueyra to W.R. Brown in 1918. History has not been kind to *Nueyra. Her photographs are disappointing, and she was the animal in W.R. Brown’s large Crabbet imporatation that he liked least. However, nobody seems to take into account that this was the 21st foal out of a 27-year-old mare. By that time, Nefisa probably had a severely compromised uterus and not very good milk. In fact, Nefisa’s next-to-last foal, a colt by Daoud, is described in Crabbet records as “Beautiful colt. Died after 6 weeks; mare short of milk.” *Nueyra was probably lucky to have survived at all. Furthermore, *Nueyra was just two years old when World War I started. All of the Crabbet horses are known to have suffered from fodder shortages during the Great War.

It seems almost impossible to believe that this line has been lost to asil breeding in the tail female. Where have all the Kuhaylan Da’jani gone? Dajania’s was the second-most important line in Crabbet breeding, which is one of the preeminent components of today’s mainstream Arabian horse breeding. True, there has never been as many mares from the Dajania tail female as there has been from the Rodania line at any given point in time, but that makes this line’s contribution to the breed all the more spectacular. 

Dajania’s daughter Nefisa (x Hadban) produced 21 foals at Crabbet. Of the mares, Narguileh (x Mesaoud) and Nasra (x Daoud) were the most prepotent. A look at Al Khamsa’s online Roster allows one to trace the evolution of Nefisa’s Al Khamsa eligible progeny over the first half of the twentieth century. The record is impressive, but but most of the contribution to asil breeding is through males: Nadir, Narkise, *Nasik, Rustnar, Najib, *Nafia, Nusi, Adonis, etc. The last Dajania Al-Khamsa eligible tail female descendent is Nadirat (Rizvan x Nusara), born in 1927, when most of us were not born yet..  

That said, Al Khamsa doesn’t accept Nureddin II (by Rijm x Narguileh, another Da’jani and Nasik’s full brother) nor his offspring (and I am not sure I want to get into THAT discussion here). But lets say it did, for the sake of argument.. and this gets us to Jordan’s Fa-saia (by Faserouf x Ata Aia by Katar, born in 1962), which is where it starts to hurt.

Ata Aia (Katar x Mirzaia by Mirzam) was bred by the US Remounts from 100% Crabbet bloodlines. She seems to have been a really typey mare (picture below), and so was her daughter Jordans Fa-saia according to Joe Ferriss who saw her. Fa-saia brought Babson bloodlines into the picture, and so did her son, Serrison (x Serris), born in 1975, and probably the last asil Kuhaylan Da’jani of the Dajania line..  Joe told me of a last ditch effort to do something with Jordan’s Fa-saia, but things didn’t work out. How sad.. 

Part 1 introduced the young stallion Menjad Maram al-Baida, whose sire and dam were imported from Syria to France. Some people would refer to this horse as a “Straight Syrian”. I don’t like this phrase, nor any term with “Straight”. Others who know more than I do don’t seem to like it either. [Incidentally I wonder whether the descendants of the Arabian horses imported to the USA by H. Davenport would qualify. And the Tunisian, Algerian and French horses too. All these folks imported most if not all their horses from Syria]. 

We had left off with Manjam’s maternal great granddam Marwah, a Saqlawiyah Jadaniyah straight from the marbat of Ibn Amud, arguably the most authentic desert-bred marbat of Saqlawi Jadran in the second half of the twentieth century. More about this marbat in a subsequent entry dedicated to this strain.

I first saw Marwah  at Basil’s in 1990, when I took the (rather poor) picture above. A very small mare (you can tell from the way her handler is holding her bridle in the picture), with a strong girth, high withers, a very short back, a flat croup, a round hindquarter, she conveyed an overall appearance of roundness and sturdiness that was reminiscent of the descriptions I had read of ancient Najd horses. Her head, to which the above photo does not do justice, was characterized by a broad forehead, a small muzzle, exceptionally deep jowls, a dished profile (more so than most desert bred mares of her generation), and above all, huge, shiny, watery eyes with a soft, sweet, generous, almost motherly way of looking at you. Unfortunately, Marwah never produced a mare equal to her. Her chestnut daughter Nisreen by Mobarak was not nearly as good, and her granddaughter Hijab was nowhere even close. Her great-grandson Menjad looks like he’s reversed that downward trend, and I am awaiting news of his foal crop. Whatever the case, you can’t get purer than he is. But blood is not everything, or is it?