Part 1 introduced the young stallion Menjad Maram al-Baida, whose sire and dam were imported from Syria to France. Some people would refer to this horse as a “Straight Syrian”. I don’t like this phrase, nor any term with “Straight”. Others who know more than I do don’t seem to like it either. [Incidentally I wonder whether the descendants of the Arabian horses imported to the USA by H. Davenport would qualify. And the Tunisian, Algerian and French horses too. All these folks imported most if not all their horses from Syria]. We had left off with Manjam’s maternal great granddam Marwah, a Saqlawiyah Jadaniyah straight from the marbat of Ibn Amud, arguably the most authentic desert-bred marbat of Saqlawi Jadran in the second half of the twentieth century. More about this marbat in a subsequent entry dedicated to this strain. I first saw Marwah at Basil’s in 1990, when I took the (rather poor) picture above. A very small mare (you can tell from the way her handler is holding her bridle in the picture), with a strong girth, high withers, a very short back, a flat croup, a round hindquarter, she conveyed an overall appearance of roundness and sturdiness that was reminiscent of the descriptions I had read of…