Rehan Ud Din Baber has this amazing Facebook page where he displays dozens of pictures of desert Arabian horses in their original environment. Most of the photos are from the US Library of Congress Digital Archives. My absolute favorite is this photo of the mare of Emir Abdullah of Transjordan. The photo, taken by John D. Whiting, has the following caption: “Emir Talal’s wedding. Emir Abdullah’s mare. The bridegroom wedding mount. c. 1934 – 35“. If this mare was the mount of the Emir (later King) of Jordan, and the mount of his son on this special day, then she must have been the best mare of the Jordanian royal family at that time. The precise date of the wedding of Emir Talal to his cousin Zein el-Sharaf is the 27th of November 1934. She was the eldest daughter of Sharif Jamil ‘Ali bin Nasser, and was to be the mother of King Hussain of Jordan, born in November 1935.
Gudrun Waiditschka has this nice article on her website about the stallion Tajar 1811 of Count Jozsef Hunyadi, a foundation stallion of European breeding imported from Egypt by Baron Von Fechtig to the Austro-Hungarian empire. Tajar was from the stud of the Mamluk Murad Bey. He does not have lines in Al Khamsa today.
I was unpacking today and I found my negatives’ scanner in a box I had not opened in years. I also came across some old negatives from the days of our travels to Syria, my father and I, to see desert Arabian horses, so I scanned them. These times did not feel particularly blessed back then, just normal days off from high school or university. If only I knew how fleeting these moments were.. During one of these trips in the mid to late 1990s, veteran Alepine horse merchant Abdel Qadir Hammami took Radwan Shabareq, my father and I on a drive a couple hours outside Aleppo — now a lawless area infested with ISIS thugs — to see three mares that had just arrived from the desert. This was our chance to see something new and different from the stud farms of our breeder friends. Hammami had brought the three mares for an Alepine man, the owner of an ice cream store who did not know much about horses, but Hammami — then in his nineties — knew what he was getting him. It did not take long for the old man to admit that he had the mares smuggled from the other side of the…
Also from my scans is this photo of old Leelas, the Kuhaylah Khdiliyah (an ‘Ajuz branch, highly esteemed in the Syrian desert) of ‘Abbud ‘Ali al-‘Amud of the ‘Aqaydat Bedouins, which he got from ‘Udayb al-Waqqa’ of the ‘Anazah. He was so attached to her, he would not sell her at any price, even though he was poor and he was getting handsome offers for her. He would not breed her either, because he thought no stallion was worthy of her. In old age, he agreed to lease her to Qatari diplomat Yusuf al-Rumayhi for a year, where she produced a filly by his Egyptian stallion Okaz (Wahag x Nazeema), and when she was in extreme old age, ‘Abbud finally conceded that the Hamdani Ibn Ghurab stallion al-A’war was worthy of her, so he agreed to breed her to him, and she produced a stallion, Saad al-Thani. She is in her late twenties in this photo. Note the extremely deep jowl, the small cup-shaped muzzle, the lower lip longer than the upper one, the bone structure in the face, and the large eye, naturally lined and extended in black, like kohl makeup. That’s how the Kuhaylans derive their name.
I took this photo in the early 1990s, on one of the trips my father and I used to take to the Biqa’ valley of Lebanon to see our horses. A flock of sheep grazing in the morning sunrise.
I have been saying it over and over, but the Kuhaylah Hayfiyah mare FinDeSiecle CF, with Jeannie Lieb, has one of the most beautiful heads I have seen on an Arabian horse. It’s perfection, in my opinion. The eyelashes, the muzzle, the deep jaws, the proportion. A case study.