Saqlawi al-Abd is a branch of Saqlawi Jadran

One never stops learning. A read of the Abbas Pasha Manuscript section of the Saqlawi al-‘Abd strain teaches you that the strain is actually a branch of Saqlawi Jadran:

It turns out that a man from the Shammar tribe was once taken prisoner by an Ibn Sha’lan (the leading clan of the Ruwalah tribe). The Shammari gave up his Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah to the Sha’lan man in exchange for his freedom. Later the Sha’lan man was somehow involved in the murder of a fellow tribesman (from the clan of al-Mani’ of the Qa’aqi’ah of the Ruwalah) and had to surrender the Saqlawiyah to this man’s family as blood money. The family’s caretaker was a slave (‘Abd in Arabic) who once rode the mare in battle against the Bani Sakhr tribe, and was unhorsed from her.  From there the strain spread to the tribes, including back to the Ruwalah.

In that specific case, the Bedouin traditional judges decided that the right to claim any mare of that strain  under trover — that’s a Bedouin practice allowing the strain’s first owner within a certain tribe to claim any horse from that strain that enters the tribe — remained with the family of the deceased Ruwalah man (and to his slave by extension), instead of going to Jadran (who was the original owner of the strain within the Ruwalah).

I always knew that Saqlawi al-Abd belonged to the Mani’ of the Ruwalah, by whom it was highly valued, but I did not know that it was a branch of Saqlawi Jadran. This is further confirmed in the introduction to the Abbas Pasha Manuscript, where the author lists Abbas’s favorite strains, and puts Saqlawi al-Abd under Saqlawi Jadran. So much for the legend of the four brothers, Jadran, Ubayran, Rajab and al-Abd, each owning a daughter of the same mare.

This means that the mares *Urfah and *Wadduda, and their female descendants, are Saqlawi Jadran from the marbat of al-‘Abd, and that whoever characterized *Urfah as a Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah was not wrong.

 

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