Photo of the day
I took this photo of the Asil stallion Khalid (Mahrous x Khalidah) in Aleppo, Syria in the mid-1990s, at the farm of Mustapha al-Jabri. Khalid is a half-brother to the stallion Basil, the subject of an previous post by Joe Ferriss. Both Khalid’s sire and dam are desert breds. Notice the excellent legs and the strong sinews on this horse.
Khalid’s dam, Khalidah, is a Saglawiyah Jadraniyah from the horses of Hulu al-Hulu, the leader (Shaykh) of the ‘Adwan Bedouin tribe, and traces to the glorious marbat (tribal stud) of Ibn ‘Amud of the Shammar tribe. His sire is a ‘Ubayyan Suhayli (a branch of ‘Ubayyan Sharrak), also from the Shammar.
According to Mahrus ibn Haddal, who was Shaykh of the al-‘Amarat tribe in the 1920s, Ibn ‘Amud obtained his original mare in a ghazu (tribal raid) against the al-Frijah section of the Ruwalah tribe. Ibn Haddal’s testimony is given in Khairi al-‘Azzawi’s great book on the tribes of Iraq (in Arabic). Other accounts I have gathered from recent conversations with Bedouins have the Saglawiyah Jadraniyah of the marbat of Ibn ‘Amud (or Saglawiyat ‘Ibn ‘Amud for short) trace to the ‘Anazah tribe in general, of which the Ruwalah is a part of.
To me Khalid is the quintessential Asil stallion: powerful but graceful, strong but gentle, masculine but refined.
In 1995 I visited the Al Hulu’s,they breed pure-in the-strain Saklawi Jedrani I saw Saklawiat 16/16 in their stud;If my memory is good, in the Syrian SB for the ones who have it,their name is “Al Holo”;
the stud is near the turkish border few miles from the Aleppo-Mosul railway;
Joe, do you have pictures of visit?
since the visit I move into 2 houses,I do have pictures but I have to look.this tribe is a branch of the powerful Adwan tribe located in Jordan,during the french mandate the syrian branch were always raided by the neighbouring Shammar trying to steal their horses,that’s why a part of them along with their horses migrated to turkey few miles away distant where they still are;their horses due to heavy imbreeding were divided in 2 categories few very nice and a lot of small “shetland” pony sized not at all in my style of Arab horse
I am reading Faisal I of Iraq, and came to a passage about a horse that was a gift to Faisal from “Shaikh al-Musin Abu-Tabikh, who had returned from his temporary exile in Syria in the autumn of 1923. The shaikh had made a courtesy call on Faisal and brought along his eleven-year-old son. Recalling this episode decades later, the shaikh’s son, Mashkour, recorded: I accompanied my father on a visit to King Faisal I…My father had brought with him as a gift a famous breed of horse known as Saglawiyat. The horse had a strange grey colour but was pure bred….My father told him that he had brought him a gift of a pure bred and rare horse…We left for the garden to see the horse and when the King saw it he admired the horse greatly and was very pleased as the King was an authority on pure bred horses and turning to my father asked about the horse’s pedigree. The King then said as I recall, ‘I have never seen a more beautiful horse, either in colour or shape.’ He then started to examine the horse with an eye of an expert, inspecting its body, its feet and its hooves, and opened the horse’s mouth to ascertain its age from its teeth. He then said: ‘I will always ride only on this horse and I consider this gift the best gift I have ever been given.'”
I did a search on Saglawiyat and ended up here. Here I can’t decide if this is the name of a horse or a breed, or strain of Arabian, though. Can you shed any light on this?
Saglawiyat is a strain or line of Arabian horses. It is not a breed or a sub-breed.