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

I love this old photo of the stallion *Houran, a Kuhaylan Tamri, imported by Homer Davenport to the USA in 1906. The horse is standing so proudly, his neck beutifully arched, and his gaze fixing a far-reaching point on the horizon. Tood bad *Houran only left one daugher in asil USA breeding (the Ma’anghiyah Sbayliyah mare Bint Nimnaarah). *Houran was sired by a Hadban Enzahi stallion of the ’Anazah tribes, some branches of which were home to many Hadban Enzahi marabit, such as Hadban Mushaytib, the most respected.

By the way, have you seen the updated site of the Davenport Conservancy?  It has a series of seminal articles by Charles, which I am never tired of re-reading.

This is an excerpt from Christa Salamandra’s book “A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria”, which I am about to finish reading. It has nothing to do with horses nor with Bedouins, but I thought you’d find her characterization of ‘asala’, authenticity, (from which ‘asil’, “he who is authentic”) interesting:

“In Syria, as elsewhere in the Middle East, modernist notions of authenticity operate alongside and sometimes merge with indegenous understandings. The concept of authenticity, asala, has long been an important component of notions of the self and society in Arabic-speaking regions. Derived from the Arabic root, A-S-L, asala, ”authenticity”, is related to asl, which translates as ”origin”, ”source”, ”root”, and “descent”. Asl refers to a person’s social, genealogical, or geographic origins, or to the place from which his or her roots extend.”

Then follows a discussion of the Western roots of this notion of asala and asil, which the authors traces to Romanticism in Europe, and the longing for everything pristine and unspoilt, and that’s when things becomes extrememly interesting, if applied to Arabian horses. It might (just might, because this is a complex issue, which needs more research) mean that Bedouins did not primarily refer to their horses as “asil”, at least not when interacting with each other.

What is sure, in any case, is that the notion of asil as identified above is a cultural one, and not a zoological one.

I will be in Kuwait for the week, for work, and paradoxically this might mean you will be reading more of me, just because there is little to do there after 9.00 pm, except work very hard (in case my boss is lurking)

This pretty and deserty 17 year old Hamdaniyah mare of Davenport breeding, Artemisia CF (MV Reflection x Artema by Tripoli) “recently completed 70 miles at the El Paso-Las Cruces endurance ride in Texas in fine form and loved every minute of it, and made the list for Top Twenty Limited Distance Endurance Mileage Horses of all time in what is her 12th year in endurance riding” according to her proud owner Linda Sherrill who maintains the Happy Trails Blog. Photo Linda Sherrill.

A few days ago a friend asked me if I knew whether anything about the Egyptian stallion Ibn Ghalabawi and I said I didn’t. Then I consulted his pedigree on allbreedpedigree.com. Granted, this is by no means a reliable source (anybody can enter, remove or edit whatever the want), but in this case I suspect the information in there was extracted from information Sayed Marei (of Al Badeia Arabians) has provided and which was used to make a case for the acceptance of Ibn Ghalabawi’s daughter Azeema by WAHO, in 1978 I think. I did not have access to any other information anyway, except for a two liner in the last pages of Colin Pearson’s (and Kees Mol) excellent “The Arabian Horses Families of Egypt”, but there was no pedigree information in there either.

Later I thought more about it, and it remembered that Ibn Ghalabawi’s recorded great grandsire Soniour (to be pronounced Senor like in the Spanish for “Sir”) was mentioned in Ali al-Barazi’s old book in Arabic as as a famous desert-horse having raced in Egypt in the 1920s or 1930s. He is mentioned alongside other famous old racehorses such as Renard Bleu and Nabras, who was later used by the Royal Agricultural Society as a stallion.

Now it is a shame that I have lost that Barazai book in one of my moves, first from Lebanon to the USA in 2000, then from the USA to France in 2004, then from France back to the USA in 2006. I don’t know of anyone who has another copy of that old book. Mine was a copy which my father had obtained from his late friend Musa de Freije, who had received it from Barazi as a gift. The author Ali al-Barazi, was a Syrian horsebreeder from Hama who had lived in Egypt where he raced Arabian horses. It contains rare and interesting photos of old Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi horses, including a rare photo of Sid Abouhom at the racetrack, which I have not seen anywhere else.

Anyway, what this lead about Soniour points to, if anything is the need to mine the archives of the Heliopolis and Alexandria racetracks. Until then, any discussion about Ibn Ghalabawi, who clearly comes from a racing background, and other horses as well such as *Exochorda’s sire and dam, will prove to be of little added value, given the scant evidence now at our disposal.

Gertrude Bell took this view of the rooftops of the Arabian city of Hail in march 1914. Her collection of pictures at the University of Newcastle is a treasure trove.

Now look at these Assyrian wall panels, from a palace in Nineveh, in Northern Iraq today. Note the short back, rounded croup and arched neck. And the slightly dished profile and inflated nostrils of the one on the left. We should go back to breeding horses like these.

I still taken by the realism and accuracy of the Assyrian representations of horses of distinct Arabian type on the walls of their palaces. Here is one more. Note that I am not saying “desert-bred Arabian horses” but rather “horses of distinct Arabian type”, because there is no way to tell whether these horses came from Bedouins.

Here’s an interesting and well-referenced analysis on the social transformations of Bedouin society in Jordan spanning 150 years from the middle of the XIXth society until today, from Rami Zurayk’a blog Land and People. Rami teaches at the Faculty of Agriculture of the American University of Beirut (my alma mater).

The photo in the entry below got me looking for more Assyrian wall panels representing horses of distinctly Arabian type, like the one below. Compare with this shot of the Crabbet stallion Abu Zeyd (Mesaoud x Rose Diamond).

I realize I haven’t written for two weeks and I apologize. These are busy days at work and in general, with little time left to other endeavors. I received my Khamsat magazine in the mail last week, and I have been reading it in the metro on my way to work. In it is an article by Peter Harrigan, adapted from his talk at the Al Khamsa 2009 convention in Redmond, Oregon, where Peter introduced his audience with the travels and works of Czech explorer and academic Alois Musil.

The Khamsat writeup from Peter’s talk has this excerpt from Musil’s masterpiece “Manners and Customs of the Ruwalah Bedouins” (which by the way is widely  recognized as the single best work of the ethnography of Bedouin tribes):

“The Bedouins assert that no horses were created by Allah in Arabia. According to their tradition, they brought their first horses from the land of the settlers whom they raided”.

There is increasing archaeological, epigraphic and zoological evidence that points to a domestication of the horse by settled population in an area straddling today’s nations of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, in the plains by the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros chains of mountains. More on this later, but I just thought it was interesting to see how Bedouin lore echoed recent scientific discoveries.

PS: The above photo pictures an Assyrian carved wall panel from the city of Nineveh now on display at the British Museum in London, long after the horse was domesticated, and is just displayed here for illustrative purposes. There is indeed epigraphic evidence of Assyrian king receiving horses as forms of tributes from Arabian kindgom, although it is difficult to say whether these are nomadic Bedouin kingdoms or settled kingdoms.

Since this blog is not just about horses but also but the people who breed them, I am thinking of starting a new series on some of the twentieth century most influential yet most controversial horsemen of the Middle East. It will likely include the following horsebreeders who were also noted political and social figures in their times — horsebreeding and horseracing being a privilege of this region’s  elite: Henri Bey Pharaon (of El Nasser fame, among others); Ahmad Ibish (of *Exochorda fame, among others),  H.H. al-Sharif Nasser bin Jamil (of *El Dhabi fame) and Dr. Iskandar Kassis. I will omit a fourth influential figure, H.H. Prince Mansour ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud for now. A fair and comprehensive treatment of these important characters will need some thorough research, on top of what I already know about them, so this is more like a medium term project. Stay tuned.

I just emerged from more than three days of power outage due a record setting snow storm that buried the Washington area under 30 inches of snow. I lost my telephone and internet connection last Friday night and did not get it back until this morning. I apologize to those of who wrote and were expecting a response during these few days, and particularly to the ladies at the Association du Cheval Arabe Bedouin (ACAB) in France. I have promised them a short article for their upcoming catalogue, which is going to press soon. So I am getting back to work on it now.

Even since I found Caroyln’s McIntyre’s blog “Girl Solo in Arabia”, I have been reading it avidly to the point of neglecting everything else. Just take a deep breath, click and start reading. You’ll emerge from it three hours later, with red eyes, but the journey it takes you on is worth every minute of your time.

I just noticed I wrote my 500th blog entry a few days ago, and with it came the realization that the amount of material available on ‘Daughter of the Wind’ may soon become unmanageable to some of the readers less familiar with the various – and not always user-friendly – ways of navigating it.

So here are few tips, keeping in mind that there are three columns to this blog, with the articles appearing on the left column:

1) if you are looking for information on the horses of a particular country (Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, France, Germany, etc) or just for a broad topic (Bedouins, Tribes, Strains, Racing, etc. ) then click under “Themes”, in the central column. You will find under each broad theme category all the blog entries that directly related to it.

2) if you are looking for more specific information (a particular strain e.g., Hamdani, Hayfi ; a particular breeding group e.g. Davenport or Crabbet; or particular famous breeder or family of breeders e.g. Saud, Mauvy, Blunt, then click under “Labels”, in the right column. You will need to scroll down to the middle of the column.

3) If you know what you are looking for and it’s very specific, just use the “search function” in the right column, not far from the “Labels”.

 This very old mare is a Kuhaylah Trayfiyyah from the Middle Euphrates valley in Syria, near the small town of al-Mayadin.

This area general is home to the tribe of al-Aqaydat (Ageydat), a wealthy and powerful semi-nomadic tribe of cultivators and small herders whose Shaykhs obtained a number of really good desert-bred mares in the first part of the twentieth century, sometimes through ghazu (raids) and sometimes through purchase and gifts. They bred these mares well, and protected them by using only asil stallions, and hence came to own reputalbe marabet. Today some of the prettiest and typiest Syrian horses came from these Ageyday marabet.

One of the most well known Aqaydat marabet is that of Kuhaylat al-Trayfiyyah, which is an old strain the history of which I don’t know well. All I know is that it might – just might – derive its name from Matarifah clan of the ‘Anazah tribe. The strain is mentioned in the Abbas Pasha Manuscript, in connection with events that took place in Eastern Arabia, either in Bahrain, Qatar or the al-Ihsaa region of Saudi Arabia.

The Kuhaylah Trayfiyyah is the photo was not registered in the WAHO Syrian Studbook and I don’t know the reason. Perhaps some of her papers or authentication documents were missing or incomplete, perhaps she did not meet the Registration Committee’s criteria, and perhaps her owners did not want to register her, which was not uncommon at the time.

I recall being struck by her high withers, her deep girth, her sloped shoulder, her short-back, her level croup, her beautiful pricked ears, and her overall graceful and gentle appearance, despite her old age, and poor condition. Photo taken at Radwan Shabariq’s farm near Aleppo, in 1996, where this mare was being brought to be bred by his Hamdani ibn Ghurab stallion al-Aawar.

Joe Ferriss has a nice article on Egyptian Arabian stallions of the Hadban strain in the online newsletter Arabian Essence.

Speaking of Hadban stallions of Egyptian bloodlines, I was lucky to have known the grey stallion Kaheel (by Ashour who was by Anter out of Ayda x Yosr by Ibn Fakhri out of Bint Yosreia), who was bred by the Egyptian Agricultural Organization in Cairo, and died in my home country of Lebanon, leaving no progeny, some time in the late 1990s. I made plans to purchase Kaheel after I saw him for the first time. When I went to see him again at some equestrian center north of Beirut, he had just died from a colic.   Kaheel was a unique individual in many ways: a Anter grandson in the tail male, both sire and dam from the Hadban strain (he actually qualifies as Sheykh Obeyd and Heirloom) and otherwise the direct grandson of three lesser known but very special Nazeer offspring, all three of which belong to good racing lines:

1: Ayda, by Nazeer x Lateefa, and hence a full sister of Serenity Ibn Nazeer / Lateef  

2: Bint Yosreia, by Nazeer x Yosreia, and a full sister of Tersk’s Aswan / Rafaat, among others;

3: Ibn Fakhri / Korayem, by Nazeer x Helwa, and a full brother of the unique Abla at the EAO 

He was also near perfect in conformation, with tremendous presence, and beautiful, graceful movement, and a kind disposition. I can’t help thinking what things would have looked like had I been able to acquire him. The last I heard, his full brother Sadek, a chestnut, was alive in Saudi Arabia.  

PS: when you look at his pedigree on allbreedpedigree.com, you can’t help but notice the near dominance of Crabbet horses at the sixth generation and beyond: Rustem, Kazmeen, and Hamran, in addition to Sheykh Obeyd mares bred by Lady Anne Blunt: Radia, Durra, Zareefa, Dalal, Fayda, etc. I mean, I always knew that Egyptian horses were full of Blunt blood, but I never saw it displayed on a pedigree in such a striking way as on Kaheel’s.