A passage from the Arabic Abbas Pasha Manuscript

I have been reading a passage in the Arabic original version of the Abbas Pasha Manuscript on the testimony of an elderly man of the Ruwalah Bedouins about a certain Kuhaylah mare. Here is my translation into English:

“Some say that she is Kuhaylah, and other people say that she is ‘Ubayyah, and we don’t know which stud [marbat] she is from, and it slipped our mind; after some years of breeding the mare, she produced a bay filly, which turned into a beautiful [zaynah], nadhir, and speedy [sabuq] mare… these are the stories we know about her, other than this we don’t know“. [He] was asked about the sire of the mare; [he] reported: “It has slipped our mind, O ‘Ali; however, at that time, they [i.e., the Ruwalah] mated the Saqlawi Jadran and Kuhaylan Tamri of the horses of Ibn ‘Abhul; these were the dearest of the stallions we used to mate; but we don’t know who her sire is, and we haven’t pinned down which horses her sire is from“; [he] was asked about the mare’s dam: did she happen to beget anything else [other than the bay filly] or not? [He] reported: “By God, O ‘Ali, I don’t remember whether she produced anything else or not; the dam died and is gone… I don’t know.. at the end of the day, [the strain] was cut from us, the Ruwalah; that’s the knoweldge I have, and other than that, I won’t recount..”

This passage is interesting to me for many reasons.

First, it shows that however persistent ‘Ali Bey — Abbas Pasha’s agent — was, the elderly Bedouin did not have information and kept pushing back. ‘Ali Bey was probably trying to authenticate a mare that was already bought for Abbas Pasha, but his insistent questioning yielded no results.

Second, the Arabic word nadhir. I can’t tell what it means just yet, and don’t want to speculate it, but it’s certainly an attribute, like the other two adjectives, “beautiful” [zaynah], and “speedy” [sabuq]. What is also certain is that it applies to a mare, but without having the usual feminine ending in -ah (like zaynah for example). The use of nadhir an an attribute for a female horse in this passage now has me more convinced than ever that the Ali Pasha Sharif stallion Ibn Nadir was most likely the son of a mare by the name of Nadir, not by a stallion named Nadir (as Colin Peason had it in his book). There are several other reasons for this: first, Lady Anne Blunt wrote in her Journals that Ibn Nadir was a son of Wazir; second, Ali Pasha Sharif used to name his stallions and colts after their dams, never after their sires. There was Ibn Horra, Ibn Helwa, Ibn Johara, Ibn Yemamah Jr [a.k.a. Mesaoud]; Ibn Bint Nura [Abu Khasheb], etc. Third, there is no record whatsoever of a Ali Pasha Sharif stallion by the name of Nadir. Based on all this, I think one can safely write down: Ibn Nadir (Wazir x Nadir).

Third, I learned today that Kuhaylan ‘Abhul is a branch of Kuhaylan Tamri. I did not know that before. The ‘Abhul clan is a cadet branch of the Sha’lan leading clan of the Ruwalah. There is another cadet branch, the Mu’abhil, which had its own Kuhaylan strain, but I already knew that Kuhaylan Mu’abhil was a branch of Kuhaylan Tamri.