Ibn Ghalabawi

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.