WAHO blues
A nice article by Gudrun Waiditschka about the 2007 WAHO Conference in Syria, with lots of pictures of desert Arabian horses. I was invited to make a keynote presentation about strains at the conference, but had to drop out at the last minute. This is the first time I regret not attending a WAHO conference. My friend Hazaim al-Wair, who prepared the presentation with me, confronted the crowds on his own, and did a superb job by all accounts. Hazaim you need to turn your laptop on, and start blogging..
Yes, I read the transcript of Hazaim al-Wair’s talk in the WAHO booklet reporting on the conference. To me, his recitation of strains and their origins reads somewhat like Gulsun and Judi’s translation of the Abbas Pasha Manuscript.
You’re basically right on substance, but it’s the other way around: many, though not all of the recitations of strains and their origins are excerpts from the original Arabic text of the Abbas Pacha Mansuscript, as published by Saudi historian (and long-time Ibn Saoud adviser) Hamad al-Jasir. We did not have to go through the English translation, since a summary version of the original Arabic is available in bookstores.
Still, we used other written and oral sources, including Mahrus Ibn Haddal’s account of Anazah strains in Al-Azzawi’s book: “the tribes of Iraq” (also in Arabic).