Shela (El Batal x Siva by Silver Rain) was one of my father’s favorite mares. She was bred by Mr and Mrs. Bancroft in the UK in 1981, exported to Jordan in 1983, where Princess Alia Al-Hussein helped my father acquire her from the stud of Said Khair in 1991, along with another mare, Ziba. Shela traced to the Crabbet Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah mare Bint Helwa, through Ghazala, Gulnare and Gayza, and her pedigree consisted mainly of Crabbet, Egyptian and Polish elements, with a pint of Marbach blood. She measured a full 15.3 hands, was very powerfully built, and had a way of staring at you that would make you think twice before you looked back at her. She came from Jordan with her son, Fanar (another looker) by Hilal el Eid (Misk x Haboub) and produced a filly, which died at an early age, before dying herself while in foal, as a result of being mishandled by a lousy vet.
Ziba (Dancing Magic x Shazla by Shazda out of Darthula out of Saladin II) was one of my father’s favorites. A 1980 mare from the ‘marbat’ of Lord and Lady Moyne, and tracing to the desert bred Kuhaylat al-Krush Dafina, a gift from Ibn Saoud to Judith Wentworth, Ziba had no less than ten lines to Skowronek, and this, along with her Krush tail female to Dafina, is exactly the reason why my father bought her from Said Khair’s stud in Jordan and imported her to Lebanon, together with her son Sharif by a show horse of European lines. At the time, my father was a big fan of the Crabbet breeding program (and he still is in some ways), both under Lady Anne and then under her daughter Judith, and we did not know anything about Skowronek’s pedigree. We believed that Skowronek was the best thing that ever happened to Crabbet Stud, and Judith Wentworth certainly did a good job leading her readers to this conclusion. When we learned more about Skowronek, we sold Ziba to some local politician and she eventually found her way to Syria. Her non-asil status aside, Ziba had glorious tail carriage and movement, and was a…
As I am going through the horse photos in my restored hard drive, I thought I’d share with you photos of some of the horses we have owned over time, some asil, others not. As it were, there were 25 years of continuous Aldahdah breeding in Lebanon, but there never was an Aldahdah breeding program. Mares came and went, and the turnover was high, every few years, save for a core of personal favorites. There never was a third generation of Aldahdah foals, except for the Sa’dan Tuqan lines owned in partnership with the Hindi family. I begin with this headshot of Zahra (not her registered name), a Kuhaylat al-Nawwaq from the stud of Kamal Abd al-Khaliq in Aleppo, Syria, by the Ma’naqi Zudghum stallion Dinar son of the Hamdani Simri stallion al-A’war, out of the mare Hanadi who was by Krush Juhayyim. We bought this mare from Kamal when she was 10 days old and then sold her when I moved to the USA. She traced back to the old marbat of the Naqashbandi sufis of Deyr-el-Zor, who have had this line for some 120 years now. The line originally came from the Sba’ah Bedouins. Zahra produced two foals, a colt…