Muniqui-related strains in the Abbas Pasha Manuscript

The Abbas Pasha Manuscript (APM), compiled around 1852, is the single most comprehensive — and perhaps the only — source of Bedouin accounts and stories about their Arabian, faithfully and painstakingly recorded by the envoys of Abbas Pasha. The unique value of the APM lies in the Bedouins being both the narrators and the protagonists of these stories. Every other written source at our disposal comes from Western travelers and explorers who, with few exceptions, did not speak the language, communicating mostly through interpreters and other intermediaries who “explained” things to them, which they would then go on and explain to us the readers of their books. We readers became accustomed to seeing the Bedouins and their horses through the more or less distorting lens of travelers like Upton, Blunt, Davenport, etc. The Bedouins in these Western accounts lost their agency and became subjects. Arabian horses became a Western field of knowledge. Carl Raswan, despite living among the Ruwalah for some years, is a good example of this distorting lens: what his numerous writings show is his own perspective, as illustrated by his classification of Arabian horse strains. For example, Raswan classified Sa’adan, Rishan, and Samhan under the “Muniqi related”…

The Rishan strain in the Abbas Pasha Manuscript

Another very rare Arabian horse strain is that of Rishan (feminine Rishah). The most common marbat is Rishan Shar’abi. I have developed a special interest in this strain over the years, because of the high quality of the individual representatives I have seen. A search for ”Rishan” in my digital Abbas Pasha Manuscript copy turned up a single mention. This reference is on page 346. A man who appears to be from the southern Shammar (the Shammar at Jabal/Mount Shammar in Central Arabia) speaks of his Saqlawiyah mare: “and we covered her at our place by al Rishan Sharabi of the horses of Beni Wahab, the horse of al Fawadi of Shammar al Jazirah.” Shammar al Jazirah is a reference to the Northern Shammar, the Jazirah (island) is Northern Mesopotamia between Euphrates and Tigris). The Beni Wahab are a ‘Anazah tribal confederation that includes the Wuld ‘Ali tribe among others. The Arabic i/y (ya’) letter is often mistaken for a b (ba’) in handwritten texts, because the only difference between these is a dot under the letter. The b has one dot, while the i/y has two. So I searched for “Ribshan” and “Rabshan” as well. The latter was more…