Recently, Mohammad Mohammad Uthman al-Tahawi, who maintains the very rich Tahawi tribe website, uploaded an important document, which is like a Abbas Pasha Manuscript in miniature. It is the herd book of his great grandfather, and leader of the Tahawi clan, Shaykh ‘Abdallah Saoud al-Tahawi. Mohammad found it among the horse related documents of his grandfather Uthman, and was told that the book was started by Shaykh ‘Abdallah, and kept up by the latter’s son Shaykh Faysal. When the sons of Shaykh ‘Abdallah divided their father’s horses between them upon his death, they passed book to each other to keep it updated. Mohammad copied it by hand in 1980, and has now uploaded it online. Rather than tell you about it, I will translate some of its parts, with Mohammad’s permission: In the name of God, the Most Merciful and Compassionate, blessings upon God [follows a string of religious invocations…] This is a record of the history of the origin of the horses of the Kuhaylat origin, the Tamriyah branch, established by the glorified Shaykh of the Arabs Sa’ud [son of] Yunis al-Shafi’i of the Arabs of [the tribe of ] al-Hanadi may God rest his soul and welcome him…
I found this family tree of the Shammar Bedouin clans from the section of the tribe known as Zawba’ (Zoba). It can be found online on an Arabic genealogy website. Most Shammar genealogies were put together by Western travelers, often basing themselves on more or less reliable Bedouin informants. This one was compiled by a Syrian ‘traveler’ in the years between 1963 and 1971 across three countries Iraq, Syria and Kuwait ( to where many Shammar Bedouins from Syria emigrated in the 1960s). It is special in that it references its sources, the tribal elders who were used as sources when compiling the information. The document says it will be published [was it already?] in an upcoming book about the Shammar Bedouins in three volumes. I have been trying to compile such a list for many years, and was facing three challenges — other than the logistical challenge of locating and reaching the sources, which were getting increasingly scarce as time was passing by: 1) first, the difficulty of reconciling tribal genealogies, as they was always a point were the elders’ versions differed, like in all oral histories; one would claim his clan is related to another clan; the elder from…