Earlier this month, this little website reached it’s 50,000th unique visitor and hit the milestone 1,000,000 clicks a few days later, over the 30 months of its short life. In terms of comparative rankings, Daughters of the Wind now ranks in the top 250,000 websites in the USA, and in the top one million websites worldwide, up from somewhere in the top 22 millions when it first started. Its readership grew by 360% over the last three months, and now averages 500 daily unique visitors . Not bad for a start-up, solely focused on such a specific and tiny segment of interest: animals, not any animals, horses, not any horses, arabians, not any arabians, asil arabians, not any asil arabians, rare and little known lines. You can check these stats by visiting websites like alexa.com, which rank other websites in terms of traffic. Just write daughterofthewind.org in the Search box.
One more issue of Joe’s inisghftul articles about Egyptian foundation horses in the Arabian Essence magazine, this time about the matriarch El Dahma of Ali Pasha Sharif, her ever growing worldwide influence through some of her most famous descendents. Joe, in the spirit of discussing your article here, I am intrigued about your statement on ”the rule book standard of an ideal Arabian horse”. I am sure you are not talking about how you personally view these horses, but rather about how the lay Western eye tends to see them — and in that case, indeed I would entirely agree with you. It is thrice disheartening to realize that (a) that such a rule book standard even exists in the Western eye; (b) that a single group of horses — the descendents of El Dahma — is generally perceived as embodying it ; (c) to see the extent to which the Western eye has succeeded in defining what an Arabian horse ‘ought to’ look like. In the 1980s, the late Edward Said, of Columbia University, and one of the most influential Arab intellectuals of his generation, developed the concept of “Orientalism’: a theoretical construct with practical applications, referring to the West’s produding its own knowledge about the…