*Kismet

The other day I was looking at foundation horses (i.e., original Arabian horses imported to the USA and the UK from the Arabian desert) in the pedigree of my new mare Jadiba, trying to gauge how “comfortable” I felt about the information currently available to us in terms of their ‘asalah’ or authenticity. “Comfort”  is an particularly subjective notion, by my own admission, partly because I am setting the bar, and I tend to set it very high, and partly because of the relativity of the very notion of ‘asalah’. Of course, my level of ‘comfort’ is a function of the amount and quality of information available on these horses, and here a relative classification is possible by growing level of ‘comfort’. I for instance feel very ‘comfortable’ about most of the information on most of the Davenport horses in Jadiba’s pedigree, because many of them have surviving hujaj, or original authentication documents, especially *Wadduda, *Urfah, *Hamrah, *Muson, and *Jedah. I also feel similarly comfortable about many of the Blunt horses in her pedigree, especially those who were bought directly from Bedouins like Rodania, Hadban, Pharaoh, Azrek, and Queen of Sheba. The ones like Kars, Basilisk, and Dajania who were bought…