Arabesque Azieze is at the center of the biggest “what if” story I have recently been involved in. Scroll down this website to see a picture of him (I do respect copyrights, sometimes). This Asil stallion was born in Australia in 1978 and was later sold to New Zealand. He was by the Asil stallion Hansan (El Hilal x Hamamaa), a stallion of Egyptian bloodlines. Nothing to write home about.. yet. The real story concerns Azieze’s dam, Orilla, a 1960 chestnut mare. Orilla was by the legendary Oran (Riffal x Astrella), and out of the mare Rabiha, by Rheoboam out of Nuhra. Oran, a Ubayyan Sharraq of the marbat of Ibn ‘Alyan traced to the famed Blunt desert import Queen of Sheba, and was bred by Lady Yule at Hanstead Stud. Oran was the last Asil stallion used at Crabbet Park by Lady Wentworth. Rheoboam was born at Musgrave Clark’s Courthouse Stud from old Blunt bloodlines… wait, there is more: Nuhra was a bay Asil mare (picture below) imported from Bahrain to England in 1938 by the Earl of Athlone, the brother of Queen Mary of England. Nuhra was a Wadhnat Khursan by strain, and her sire was a Kuhaylan…
Samarcande will be five months old next week. She better become a horse freak.
to Monika Savier from (from Italy), Karsten Scherling (from Germany) and Mahmud Abbas (from Syria) who created the WAHO 2007 Conference Syria website. One could spend hours watching the thousand photos and videos. Thank you.
I am tying to get hold of the journal article of same name. “Where have the Bedouin gone” was published by anthtropologist Donald Powell Cole of the American University in Cairo in Anthropological Quarterly – Volume 76, Number 2, Spring 2003, pp. 235-267 Here’s the article’s abstract, as written by the staff of Project Muse: “The Bedouin have been exoticized as nomads and essentialized as representatives of segmentary lineage organization and tribalism. This essay shows more complex and multifaceted existences and argues that “Bedouin” has changed from denoting a way of life in the past to marking an identity today. A multi-sited perspective presents socioeconomic and sociopolitical change among Bedouin from Algeria to Saudi Arabia and includes colonial impacts, commercialization of pastoral production, occupational change, and sedentarization. Bedouin involvement in tourism and the manufacture of Bedouin heritage for sale as a commodity and as a component of (some) Arab national heritages are also discussed. The coexistence of segmentation, markets, states, and Islam is stressed, with class divisions now becoming predominant. A concern with Middle Eastern ethnography in general, largely implicit, runs throughout the text.” Good stuff…