[This article is work in progress jointly between Kate McLachlan and I] Kate and I are have serious doubts about the Darley Arabian being from the Fad’aan tribe, as modern lore has it. There were no Fad’aan Anazah Bedouins in the area of the Syrian desert between Aleppo and Palmyra around 1700 CE, where the Darley Arabian is said to have been acquired from. It was not until the 1800s — at least a century later — that the Fad’aan left the vicinity of the oasis of Khaibar in the Hijaz (Central Arabia) and moved north to the Syrian desert, a thousand miles to the north. Kate tells me that the only primary source about the Darley Arabian is a letter by Thomas Darley to his brother, printed on pp. 21f. of Richard Frederick Meysey-Thompson’s 1911 The Horse: Its Origin and Development Combined with Stable Practice. The letter, reproduced below in full, makes no reference to the Fad’aan Bedouins or to the ‘Anazah for that matter, and only speaks of a horse of the “Mannicka” race (reference bolded in the letter). ALEPPO, Ye 21st December, 1703. DEAR BROTHER, Your obliging favour of the 7 Aprill came to my hands the…
صورة قديمة لحصن عزان حصن الشيخ عبدالكريم بن احمد المهشمي.. مركز رحوب مديرية برط العنان محافظة الجوف اليمنمنقول عن صفحة فهد اسماعيل الانباري
Saudi historian of the ‘Anazah tribe ‘Abdallah ibn Duhaymish Ibn ‘Abbar al-Fad’aani, whose work I generally value, found a mention of the date of the mass migration of several ‘Anazah tribes from Central Arabia to the Syrian desert (North Arabia, which covers part of Syria and Iraq and Jordan today), in a contemporary Lebanese chronicle, Tarikh al-Amir Haydar al-Shihabi, which was published in Beirut in 1933. I could not find the relevant passage in my edition of this chronicle, so I am taking Ibn ‘Abbar to his word. Says Ibn ‘Abbar, with my rough translation: The book “Lebanon in the era of the Shihab princes, by Prince Haidar Ahmad al-Shihabi, perhaps the only source for events in Bilad al-Sham in the thirteenth century [Hijri]”, mentioned under the events of the year 1230 H (1814 CE) that “great swarms of the tribes of Anazah came out of Najd, escaping drought and difficult conditions; these tribes are the Fad’aan, the Sba’ah and the ‘Amarat; they competed with the ‘Anazah tribes from Dhana Muslim [Ibn ‘Abbar added here: Dhana Muslim being the Wuld ‘Ali, the Manabihah and the Jlass] that preceded them, which led them to collide with each other.”