These days, I have been enjoying reading excerpts of Hisham Ibn al-Kalbi‘s “Ansab al-khayl fi al-Jahiliyah wa-al-Islam wa-akhbaruha” in my spare time. This roughly translates as “The genealogies and accounts of horses in the era before Islam and after the rise of Islam”, and is commonly known as “Kitab al-Khayl” (the “Book of Horses”). This precious work was written more than 1,200 years ago (yes, twelve hundred years ago) by one of the most prolific and knowledgeable medieval Islamic historians and genealogists. Every one of the 140 books Ibn Al-Kalbi (757 AD -819 AD) wrote is now lost, except two books that miraculously survived: the “Book of Horses” and the more famous “Book of Idols“. A manuscript version of the “Book of Horses” was published in Arabic, first in 1946, then in 1964. If you happen to read Arabic and live in the USA, here is a list of a few libraries where you can find a copy. I xeroxed mine from the Georgetown University Library. Another manuscript version was also translated to French and published by E.J. Brill Publishers in Leyden, Germany, in 1928. The “Book of Horses” revisits the stories of the most famous horses in pre-Islamic times (before 610 AD)…
As a follow up to an earlier post on the Asil Kuhaylan al-Mimrah strain that breeds on in South Africa, this is a rare picture of the lovely Barakah (Ibn Manial x Gamalat), the mare through which the strain survives in Asil form. Photo courtesy of Albert Kaffka of the Al-Yatun Asil Stud in South Africa. By the way, if you are interested in the horses that were exported from Egypt to South Africa in the 1940s – of which Barakah was one – and their Asil descendents there, read this article, courtesy of Eugene Geyser, the President of the Asil Club of South Africa. Barakah was bred to the Asil stallion Tuwaisaan, an import from Bahrain, to produce Sahibi Bint Barakah, of which you can find a picture here (scroll down).