The State of Arabian Breeding in its Area of Origin, Part I, 2005

This is the first part of a talk I gave in 2005 to the Institute for the Desert Arabian Horse in Phoenix, AZ.

Today I won’t be in the business of telling you romantic stories of courageous war mares and heroic warriors. Rather, you will get more sobering facts which I hope will alert you to the necessity and urgency to start acting to preserve Desert Arabian in their homeland before it is too late.  I’ll begin first with a bit of context and some definitions. In the beginning there was Arabia Deserta and the Bedouins living in it. The word Bedouin comes from the Arabic “bedu,” which means “steppe nomads”, as distinguished from the settled people.  The Bedouins can be defined as the Arabic speaking nomadic camel and sheep herders who live within the the limits of Arabia Deserta.  The Bedouins, and no other group, are the original custodians of the Desert Arabian horse.  Arabia Deserta is the homeland of the Desert Arabian horses. It is by definition, the area of maximum extent of Bedouin nomadic migrations. Wherever these Bedouins used to go looking for pastures for the camels and sheep, the horses went wih them; where the Bedouin didn’t go, you didn’t have original Desert Arabian horses. 

Historically the Bedouin warred against others and sometimes invaded settled people,. Sometimes they were united by some new factor, often religion, which caused them to burst out of the desert and conquer neoghboring areas (as we shall see below).  This happened at least three times in the course of history. The first time was under the prophet Mohamed when the Bedouin left Arabia and conquered the whole area of the world between Spain and China. The second time it happened under the first Saudi state and the birth of Wahhabism. The third time, under Ibn Saud, will be discussed below.  So there were times when the Bedouins left Arabia Deserta and settled other areas of the Arab world and beyond.  We therefore need to distinguish between Arabia Deserta, which is the area of the Arab world that is the homelands of the Bedouins (and therefore, of the Desert Arabian horse as well), and the other areas that are Arab countries but not home to Bedouins and their Desert Arabian horses  

Arabia Deserta was for 400 years indirectly or more directly under the control of the Ottoman Empire.  In the course of the twentieth century, Arabia Deserta was divided into countries largely by artificial borders. These include most of Yemen, most of Oman, all of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, most of Saudi Arabia, half of Iraq, most of Syria, and almost all of Jordan. You can still find desert-bred Arabians, bred by Bedouins, all over Arabia Deserta. The other Arab countries, such as Egypt (excluding the Sinai Peninsula and directly adjoining areas), Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the Sudan, Mauritania, Lebanon, Palestine, as well as the state of Israel (except for the Negev and some parts of Upper Galilee, in which Bedouins are present), are not part of Arabia Deserta, and do no qualify as homelands of the Desert Arabian horse. Sure, some of the best Arabian horses today are bred in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, which are not original homelands of the Arabian horse.  But the ancestors of these horses were imported to these countries from Arabia Deserta, just like they were imported to Britain, France or the USA.   

During the past century, all these countries went through enormous transformations that led to the disappearance of nomadism as a way of life. The nomads of Arabia Deserta (the Bedouins) are now settled, they live in houses equipped with A/C and electricity and telephones, their sons and daughters go to school, where they study medicine and computer engineering.  Trucks and cars have long replaced camels and horses as means of transportation, and national identities – Saudi, Kuwaiti, Syrian, etc. have superseded (but not completely overtaken) former tribal identities (Rweili from Rwala, Shammari from Shammar, Mutairi from Mutair, etc.).  A young man from the Shammar born in Syria will view himself as Syrian and Shammari, while his Kuwaiti-born first cousin will identify himself as Kuwaiti and Shammari. Young Bedouins feel about their heritage the same way that young Americans with German or Irish background feel about their own heritage, even if these ancestors’ lifestyles is only a waning memory.   

Their fathers still rode horses in the desert, and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers participated in tribal wars against other tribesmen.  Today’s Bedouins are very proud of that heritage, as can be witnessed by the flourishing of websites and chatrooms in Arabic on the Internet dedicated to the discussion of Bedouin heroes, tribal genealogies, and all things Bedouin (although not much is mentioned about Desert Arabian horses, and the littled mentioned is from Arabic translations of the writings of Western Travelers. One example is the Mutayr tribe official website: www.mutair.net).  In addition to the intrusion of modernity into Bedouins lives, other factors have affected Arabia Deserta:  Droughts have had devastating effects on camel and sheep herds, and have forced many tribes to settle or relocate to another area or country. The 1958-1952 drought years were particularly deadly with camel herds depleting by up to 70 percent.  Wars between neighboring countries (Iraq and Kuwait, North and South Yemen) or civil wars within a country (Jordan 1970, Iraq now) and underlying tensions in a strategic and politically  troubled area have also contributed to the decline in Arabian horse-breeding.  

The impact of all these factors on Arabian horse breeding was catastrophic.  The reason for Bedouins maintaining Arabian horses in Arabia Deserta were economic (as a means of transportation), military (as a war machine) and social (as a source of prestige), and all three ceased to exist by the 1960s.  With the disapperance of these reasons, the very existence of the Desert Arabian horse was threatened.  Americans and other Westerners were indeed fortunate to have imported most of their Desert Arabian horses from Arabia Deserta before these transformations took place, or while they were taking place. This has allowed them to maintain and expand    tracing exclusively to horses imported directly from Arabia Deserta.  The sad truth is that, as we shall see, not much remains of that beautiful horse in Arabia Deserta itself. 

Let’s now turn to reviewing the state of Desert Arabian horse breeding in the countries that constitute its original homeland: Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, and the six Gulf countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). 

Desert Arabians in Yemen 

There is a clear tendency in Arab townsfolk tradition [as opposed to Bedouin tradition] to trace back everything they perceived as ‘ancient’ and ‘authentic’ to Yemen, from folksongs to tribal genealogies.  That’s probably why the Desert Arabian horse is thought by many non-Bedouin Arabs to originate in Yemen, while Bedouin tradition ascribes this horse to the area of Nejd in central Arabia.  Most of present-daay Yemen was known as Arabia Felix (Happy Arabia) in ancient times, as opposed to Arabia Desert.  The fertile valleys, the mountains covered with snow, and the large rivers valleys (wadis in Arabic) earned Yemen this beautiful name. The rest of Yemen, including the northermost provinces of al-Jawf and Sa’ada, as well as the Western Tihama provinces and part of eastern Hadramawt, are part of Arabia Deserta per se.  

A recent business trip to Yemen allowed me to find out that the great tribal confederations there still own a good number of deset-bred Arabian horses.  The current, government-supported Sheykh of one the largest such confederation of tribes, the Baqeel, owns about 40 Arabians, and he has apparently gifted one of those to the previous U.S. ambassador to his country.  Another smaller tribe, the Juhannam, located in the Tihamah coastal desert on the Red Sea, is said to still keep relatively significant (several dozens) numbers of Arabian horses. A pretty bay mare I saw in the streets of San’aa, the capital, was said to come from this tribe.  Such short trips are by no means sufficient to yield enough information about horse breeding in any country, and, it is a heresy at this stage for me to say or write anthing definitive about Arabian horses in Yemen.  All I can say for now is that one peculiar feature of the Arabian horses of Yemen is that they don’t seem to have strains in the way the Bedouins of Northern, Eastern and Central Arabia understand them, i.e., family names for horses transmitted through dam lines (matrilineal).  

Desert Arabians in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates  

Princely and ‘sheykhly’ families in these small oil-rich Arab countries still keep small numbers of Desert Arabian lines, probably not more than a couple dozen WAHO-registered horses in each country. There may be a few more unregistered horses in the hands of other individuals. The Qatar ruling family keeps a few original desert horses mostly from the Wadnan, Hamdani strains.  The Sultanate of Oman was an important provider of Desert Arabian Arabians to the the regional powers (Egypt) and the global ones (Britain, often through India).  The number of Desert Arabian horses originating from Oman in the hands of the ruling family there is a figure I currently ignore.  

The UAE ruling Sheykhs have a few Desert Arabians from the Tuwaisan and Jellabi strains, whose ancestors were reveived as gifts from the neighboring kingdom of Bahrain.  There have always been, and there continues to be frequent exchanges of such gifts between the ruling families of these four states, plus Bahrain.   

Strating from the the 1950s and 60s, many Bedouins Sheykhs (their majority from the Anazah confederation) left Syria as a result of the socialist agricultural reform policies adopted by the governments of these countries, which sought to confiscate the vast agricultural estates of these Sheykhs-turned-landowners  

Many of these Sheykhs – especially those who for one reason or another, were not in good terms with Saudi Arabia, the other major recipient of disaffected Syrian and Iraqi tribes – moved to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates where their prestige and noble lineage garanteed them a warm welcome and large subsidies from local rulers, who also granted them citizeship.  Many Bedouin clans followed their Sheykhs into this new “Arabian Far West” where job opportunities edriving from the oil windfall abounded. Some of these clans took their camel herds and horses with them. So these Guf states ended up with some Desert Arabian Horses from Northern Arabia Deserta (the part known as the Syrian Desert).  A corollary was the horse export market from Syria to the Gulf Countries flourished, and, as oil revenues skyrocketed throughout the 1970s, reports abounded of Qatari, Kuwaiti and Emirati Sheykhs-businessmen flying back to Syria to buy Desert Arabian horses – but also Arabian hawks, camels and goats – from the Syrian Desert.  

Desert Arabians in Bahrain 

Many if not most of you are more or less familiar with the Desert Arabian horses of Bahrain.  They have been made popular by the writings and regular reports by frequent visitors to this little archipelago from around the world.  More recently, the World Arabian Horse Organization held its conference there, and this has allowed some of you to visit this country and learn more about its horses.    

The Royal Stud of Bahrain now keeps a nice and informative website about its herd of Desert Arabians at http://www.bahrainhorses.com.bh/econtents.asp. One can refer to the website for up to date information about the number of extant Bahrani strains, their history, and photos and videos of representatives of each strain.  There are more Bahraini Desert Arabian horses in the hands of other members of the Bahrain Royal family, especially the current King’s uncles, which do not appear on this website.   

I’ll defer a more detailed discussion of the status of Arabian horses in Bahrain, including its fragility and the challenges it may face in the future, to another venue. Suffice it to say here that the Desert Arabian herd of Bahrain, with its twenty-plus different strains and relative genetic diversity, is today, along with the Tunisian and Syrian herds, the main hope for outcrossing Egyptian-heavy and inbred Desert Arabian lines in Western Countries, and that Bahraini horsemen are aware of the importance of this pricelss heritage.  

Desert Arabians in Saudi Arabia 

According to Bedouin tradition, the areas of the Arabian Peninsula which constitute the present Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are the cradle of the Desert Arabian horse.  They are also home to most of the horse–breeding tribes.  Starting from the first decade of the last century and up to the 1930s, King Abdul Aziz Al Saud (known to Arabs as Ibn Saud) whose family had ruled the greater part of the Arabian Peninsula for most of the nineteenth century, was able to crystalize the energy of the Bedouin tribes, which had until then been focused on inter-tribal warfare and factionalism, and succeeded in turning this energy from a factor of division to a factor of unification.  Ibn Saud united most Arabian tribes [Mutayr, Atayba, al-Dhafir, al-Ajman, Harb, al-Suhul, Qahtan, Subei’, Bani Khaled, al-Dawasir, Bani Hajr, al-Murrah, al-Sherarat, al-Hawazin, Bani Atiyah, Juhaynah, Balii, plus some sections of the Anazah and Shammar] under the flag of the Wahhabi creed, a rigorist doctrin of Islam. 

After their adoption of Wahhabism, the tribes became, as if often the case with new converts to any creed, even more extreme in their observance of the new doctrin than the Saudi ruling establishment itself.  Before Wahhabism, most Bedouins only loosely observed Islamic precepts.  They were, in Western terms, “non-denominational Muslims.” They didn’t fast regularly (well, their harsh nomadic lifstyle actually meant that they spent all their lives fasting), they were influenced by all sorts of rites and superstittions, and they didn’t diligently go on the annual pilgrimage, the Hajj.  The tribes, now organized by Ibn Saud into a regular army, the Ikhwan (Arabic for “Brothers”, brothers in religion, that is), went on to conquer the territory of what is now Saudi Arabia and would have gone much farther, if the British and their own king hadn’t stopped them.  The British hastily imposed arbitrary between the lands conquered by Ibn Saud and the neighboring British protectorates of Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait.  A stretch of desert was even added to Jordan to connect it to Iraq, and prevent direct contact between Saudi Arabia and the French protectorate of Syria.  

The Ikhwan refused to acknowledge the treaties Ibn Saud signed with the British ‘Infidels’, and went on carrying out raids of their own into Iraq and Jordan, then under British control.  Ibn Saud went through the greatest difficulties trying to rein them in.  The British responded with airstrikes, and when the Ikhwan urged Ibn Saud to respond to the offense, he did not support them; a large rebellion blew out, following many signs of Ikhwan discontent and restiveness.  Ibn Saud ultimated crushed the rebellion, arrested its main leaders [Faysal al-Dawish the leader of Mutayr, Sultan ibn Bijad the leader of the Ataiba and Ibn Hathleen the leader of the Ajman, who were either jailed or exiled], disbanded the whole Ikhwan, and took away their primary military weapon and means of transportation: the Desert Arabian horse.  To prevent further unrest, Ibn Saud had the horses and camels of the Bedouin tribes collected and concentrated in his stud farms.  He also proceeded to accelerate the settlement of the Bedouin tribes, either by force or through giving them economic incentives and subsidies for those who agreed to settle.  

[I do not have the right to use the Cavedo pictures in a publication. I am only the custodian of these pictures from Laura Cavedo through Billy Sheets.  Please do not use them here. Edouard.] 

Starting from the 1960s, the oil boom and the resulting development of modern means of transportation and communication brought about immenses changes to the changes Kingdom, the consequences of which on its economy and society are still being felt today.  Saudi Arabia was increasingly becoming a magnet for Bedouins and non-Bedouins from all over the Arab world, and beyond, a sort of Far West at the time of the Gold Rush, for whoever was seeking rapid wealth and seemingly unlimited opportunities.  The Saudis were themselves becoming more and more exposed to the rest of the Arab countries.  

A number of partbred Arabs from Iraq and Lebanon made their way to Saudi Arabia for racing purposes.  These horses with high percentage of English Thoroughbred blood had already overtaken the racetracks of Beirut, Bagdad and Egypt, and almost completely driven out the Desert Arabian who had hirtherto formed the bulk of the racehorses there up until the mid-fifties.  Some of these partbred horses found their way into Saudi royal studs.  The concentration of very large numbers of Saudi Arabian desert horses in a small number of stud farms incresed their vulnerabilty and the odds of contamination by foreign blood.  

Not all the royal herds were equally affected.  It is said that at least two Saudi princes keep a fair number of Desert Arabian from old desert bloodlines, predominantly from the Hamdani and the Swayti al-Farm strains. Outside the royal herds, it is relatively cumbersome to sort out which tribes and clans have kept their horses pure and which haven’t.  Fortunately, the vast majority of the horses that came to the USA from Saudi Arabia came before these changes took place, or just as the country was undergoing its rapid modernzation, and so some of this blood is preserved in the USA until today.  

EDITOR: PICTURE OF HAMDANI STALLION (sire of *Muhaira)  

Iraq 

Iraq is unique among Arab countries in that it is the only one with a potential to become a regional power.  It has the human, historical, agricultural, and water potential of Egypt, combined with the oil, wealth, and strategic potential of Saudi Arabia.  

Historically, the pashas, the land-owning aristocracy and the wealthy merchants of Iraq have played roles similar to their Egyptian counterparts (the pashas) in the Desert Arabian breeding. In addition to its settled population, Iraq is today home to the largest Bedouin tribes, now entirely settled: large sections of the Anazah, most of the Shammar, the Jubur, the Tai, and all the Dulaym, the Muntafiq, the Bani Lam, the Ubayd, the Juhaysh, and many others live there.  Some even claim that up to 40 percent of Iraq’s population is composed of Bedouin tribes, often settled in areas with names now familiar to most of us.  The Shammar and the Tai make up a large part of the northern Iraqi town of al-Mawsil (Mossoul). The Zoba tribe of the Shammar confederation form a third of the population of now infamous al-Fallujah, and all of the town of Abu Ghraib. The Dulaym are settled in Al-Qaim and Ramadi. Many of these tribes have been breeding Arabian horses for centuries, and have continued doing so until very recently.   

It seems that it is Iraq’s sad fate to be invaded by the dominating global power of the time.  It was invaded by the Mongols, the Ottomans, the British and now the Americans (with the British yet again).  The British army invaded Iraq for the first time during World War I in 1914, and ultimately withdrew, leaving tens of thousands of English Thoroughbreds and Australian Walers behind.  These horses eventually mixed with the local horse population, a good part of which was of Desert Arabian stock.  This resulted in a standard breed of horses that is known today all around the Middle East as the ‘Iraqi’. These horses were exported all over the Middle East – to Lebanon (sometimes making their way from Lebanon to Syria), Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, and had considerable racing success wherever they went. They were also widely used for breeding in all these countries.  

Inside Iraq, the Iraqi government bought many of these partreb Arabs for its state-owned studfarms, and made sure these horses were distributed in stallion depots all across Iraq. Their impact on areas inhabitated by Bedouin horse-breeding tribes was simply devastating.  A stallion depot in the village of Al-Bughah in the Iraqi Jaizrah (Upper Mesopotamia) located in the midst of the dira (nomadizing area) of the Juhaysh inflicted huge damage upon the Desert Arabian horse population of that tribe and neighboring ones.  Many Bedouins would bring mares to these government stallion depots and breed them a horse that was usually a partbred because it was convenient or simply out of ignorance. Today, more than ninety percent of the horses in the Iraqi studbook accepted by WAHO is composed of such partbred horses. At the time the Iraqi studbook was in the works, many Desert Arabian horses were NOT registered, either because the registering authorities discarded them or because the Bedouin refused to regsiter them, for fear of confiscation by the Iraqi authorities.  The Iraqi Bedouins kept breeding these horses up until the beginning of the nineties, after which the survival of the families took precedence over the survival of their horses.  

Another complicating factor, quite separate from the problem of Iraqi partbreds with English Thoroughbred blood is the close interaction of Arab tribes in the North of Iraq with Kurdish and Turcoman (settled) tribes that keep other indigenous strains (Kurdish, Turcoman, Tazi, etc.). In northern Iraq, Kurdish and Arab areas overlap, there are many adjoining villages – one Arab, one Kurdish – and the horses often share the same pasture.  Yet another aggravating factor was that, following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraqi military officers (most of them of Jubur, Tay, Dulaym, and Shammar tribal backgrounds) brought back many horses as war prizes from the WAHO-approved registry in Kuwait.  The vast majority of these Kuwaiti horses were not Desert Arabian.  These horses, often with Crabbet, Polish, and other non-Desert Arabian blood, were then mixed with the local Iraqi stock throughout the nineties. 

It seems impossible that amidst this grim background, some Desert Arabian horses would have survived in Iraq uncontaminated.  Nevertheless, in the face of all these hardships, limited numbers of Bedouin clans have kept many unregistered Desert Arabian pure, especially in the North (among the Jubur, the Tai and the Shammar) and the Center of the country (the Ageidat).  There is no doubt some gems are still to be discovered there.  I would estimate there are perhaps 500-1000 Desert Arabian horses remaining in Iraq, most of them not registered in the Iraqi studbook accepted by WAHO.  To find them, it is necessary to go to the clans and families who have been breeding Desert Arabian horses for a long time, and transmitting the horses from father to son. These are the people most likely to have remained adamant about the purity of the horses of their forefathers.  

EDITOR: THREE HORSE PICTURES: skinny mare, Kuhaylan Krusha, and chestnut k. Mimrah from shammar.  

Syria 

Syria is today home to most of the Anazeh tribes, and to some of the Shammar and other major horse breeding tribes.  About 2000 Desert Arabian horses from 40 different strains are registered in the WAHO-approved studbook, most of them Bedouin bred.  A second batch of 300 or so Bedouin horses that had been left out of the previous registration process was recently approved by WAHO.  The Syrian horse registering commission did quite a decent job of registering the horses of the Bedouins, and resisted various pressures to register non-Desert Arabian horses of doubtful background.  The pictures appended to this article show the huge variety found in Desert Arabian horses now to be found in Syria.  All the horses pictured are either desert bred, or their sires and dams or all four grandparents are desert bred. In some instances they were still bred by the same Shammar and Anazah Bedouin tribes that gave these horses their strain names some 150 or 200 hundred years ago (al-Khdilat for the Kuhaylan Khdili, Ibn Nowag for the Kuhalyan Nowag, Ibn Sahlan for the Ubayyan Seheili, al-Maraziq for the Saglawi Marzakani, Ibn Jalidan for the Kuhaylan Ibn Jlaidan, etc).  

In other instances, the horse’s ancestors were acquired by sheep-breeding tribes (called Shawaya), the names of which are less associated (at least by Westerners) with horse-breeding: the Agaydat, the Naim, the Bu Shaaban, etc.  In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the sheep-breeding tribes have grown waelthier than their more powrful “more Bedouin” camel-breeding neighbors, mainly because they were closer to the best pastures and water, compared to the camel breeding tribes who were the traditional horse breeding tribes.  When the Syrian government (and the French mandate before it) adopted the policy of settling the tribes, those tribes who were already herding sheep (which need for water and pastures than camels) or engaging in agricultural for part of the year, obviously had an incumbents’ advantage over the camel-herding tribes, and were successful in holding to the the areas their had been already cultivating.  Many of the Anazeh camel-breeding tribes chose the exit option and left to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Some took their horses and camels (see above) with them, but others keep them in the hands of their sheep-breeding neighbors.  Thus in many cases, the sheep breeding tribes ended up with some of the most valuable Desert Arabian horses.  

All these horses are an invaluable resource for Desert Arabian breeders worldwide, who need to encourage Syrian Desert Arabian breeders to breed their horses to horses of similar or equally pure origins, and not to horses of Polish, Crabbet, Russian, or worse, French bloodlines, something which the Syrian breeders are today increasingly tempted to do.  The Syrian stud book is today where the US stud book was almost a hundred years ago.  The overwhelming majority (about 85-90 percent) of the horses are Desert Arabian. It will take concerted efforts to keep this situation from deteriorating. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: place related PICTURES adjacent. This is a LOT of pictures. 

Jordan  

Only horses owned by the Jordanian Royal family were registered in the Jordanian WAHO approved studbook, and none of those horses alive today are Desert Arabians. 

 The original Desert Arabian horses of the Royal Jordanian Stud have been bred with Crabbet and Spanish and other non-Desert Arabian bloodlines for about fourty years now. Nevertheless, many unregistered horses are owned by Bedouins of the Huwaytat, and Bani Sakhr tribes.  Very few of these can quanlify as pure Desert Arabians.  The famous Ruwalah tribe of the Anaazh tribal confederation has all but lost its Desert Arabian horses. Some years ago the Ruwalah brought ten of their horses to Lebanon for racing, which had 25 percent or more English Thoroughbred blood…  

End Part I. Part II will appear in the next issue. It will cover Lebanon, JAlgeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and consider the potential for international action. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: END PART I