A conversation with Muhammad al-‘Aqub, owner of the Rabdan strain with the Tai Bedouins

Last week I received an unexpected call from a Syrian gentleman living in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His name is Muhammad al-‘Aqub. His family belongs to the Bedouin tribe of Harb, a tribe long affiliated with the Tai tribe.

He wanted to tell me about their horses and their origins. We spoke for about an hour, but I was driving for most of the time and I did not take any notes.

He told me that his family, the ‘Aqub, had owned the strain of Rabdan for more than 200 years without interruption, since around 1810 or 1815. Here is my recollection of what he told me about how they got the strain:

There was a battle between Ibn Haddal, the leader of the ‘Amarat ‘Anazah Bedouins, and a Kurdish tribe around 1810 or 1815. It took place north of the town of Ras al-‘Ayn which is in the extreme tip of North Eastern Syria today. The Kurds held their own, taking several mares and even one prisoner from the ‘Anazah. The Kurds did not care to know the strains and origins of the horses they took, just in their being war mounts. At the time, his seventh paternal ancestor (I can’t recall the name he gave me), was visiting the Kurds, with whom he had a good relationship, perhaps even an alliance of some sort. He was offered any mare from the ‘Anazah loot, but the prisoner advised him to take a particular mare, a Rabdat Khushaybi, from Ibn Haddal’s own horses. He did.

He also told me that, decades later, one of his ancestors gave a mare to Abd al-Hamid (Hamid) al-Talal al-‘Assaf, the Sheykh of Tai. They prospered with the Sheykhs of the Tai. I recall that the current Shaykh of the Tai, Muhammad al-‘Abd al-Razzaq (Abu Basil) had more than dozen mares from that strain in the early 1990s. My father owned one of them for a while, a superb bright bay Rabdah by the name of Raghdah.

He told me that he had heard (not sure from who) that the Rabd were originally Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz of the horses of the Sharif of Mecca, but that he did not know how they had made their way to Ibn Haddal.

Most interestingly, he also told me that the Rabd (plural of Rabda) of Bahrain were also from Ibn Haddal of ‘Anazah, and he even sent me an audio recording from a member of the Ibn Khalifah family of Bahrain confirming that provenance and giving the date when they got the strain. I do not recall that date.

His uncle from the same ‘Aqub clan is the breeder of the superb Rabdan stallion Rawj al-Bahr in the photo below. They do not race their horses, but occasionally give them to other families who race them, such as the family of Jaryo al-Subayh, who has owned a branch of their Rabdan marbat for a while now.

I asked him why the Bedouins did not mate his Rabdan strain but I don’t recall his answer. He told me that his family liked to breed their Rabd to stallions of the Krushan and Hamdani strains. He also told me what original tribe the Harb were from (not the same as the Harb in Saudi Arabia, just the same name). He also told me that a faction of his Harb tribe had became part of the ‘Abdah Sba’ah of Ibn Hedeib.

A few days after this conversation, I happened to be clearing up one of the shelves in my office. I found notes I had taken from a phone conversation Hazaim Alwair and had had with Jaryu al-Subayh in 2005. It essentially repeats the same information from Muhammad al-‘Aqub, with some approximations. The Rabd did not come with Harb from Najd. Harb were not originally from ‘Anazah.