Author: Edouard Aldahdah

If you happen to have a complete set of the Khamsat magazines and would like to part for it (but why would you!?), please let me know. I will buy it from you.

*Haleb: As the flagship of the importation, *Haleb was bestowed the honor of being named after Aleppo (in Arabic, Halab), the city where Davenport’s quest began, and around which his desert trip was organized. *Reshan: Oddly enough, the grey Kuhaylah Hayfiyah whose tail female is the most predominant in Davenport breeding today bears a male horse’s name. She was apparently named after a stallion of the Rishan (hence, Reshan) Shar’abi strain, to which she was bred when Davenport first saw her in Aleppo. Reshan’s hujjah mentions her being bred to that horse. One may picture a conversation going on in Arabic around the mare, in Davenport’s presence, where her breeding to that stallion was being discussed. One can imagine Davenport trying to pick up some words from the conversation, and the word “Rishan” sticking in his mind. *Hamrah: this young colt has a female’s name, as hamrah means bay in the feminine, in Arabic; he was probably referred to as ‘the son of the bay mare’ during the trip, ‘ibn al-faras al-hamrah’, and the word hamrah stuck in Davenport’s head. *Muson, *Hadba, *El Bulad, *Simri, *Enzahi and *Abeyah: They were was named after their strain, Kuhaylan al-Musinn, Hadban (Enzahi), Jilfan Sattam…

Did you ever wonder how early Arabian horse breeders such as the Blunts and Homer Davenport chose names for their original desert imports? I sometimes do, and in the process of doing so, I find many original details about these horses and the circumstances of their acquisition coming back to life. The names of the Blunt’s desert imports fall in three readily recognizable categories: Some of the earliest imports were named after plants and animals, reflecting the Blunt’s interest in botany and zoology, and probably bringing back memories of their day-to-day lives during their desert journeys: Wild Thyme, Tamarisk, Basilisk, Francolin (a bird), Jerboa, Canora (another bird), Purple Stock (a flower), and Damask Rose. Other names clearly fell into the mythological Biblical register: Queen of Sheba, Pharaoh,  Hagar, Lady Hester (Dajania’s original name), Babylonia, and Burning Bush, whose early name was Zenobia. The third group consisting mainly of later desert imports were named after their strains and substrains: Rodania, Zefifia (a branch of the Kubayshan strain), Dahma, Jedrania, Jilfa, Hadban, Abeyan and Dajania (whose earlier name was Lady Hester). The names of the other desert imports do not seem to follow a distinctive pattern: Meshura (famous, in Arabic) seems to…

This is not so good photo of what is certainly a very nice colt. This young fellow was bred by Pam Baker of South Carolina. He is the result of breeding the Kuhaylan al-‘Ajuz stallion Salil Ibn Iliad, who traces in tail female to the mare *Nufoud of the Saudi royal stables, to the mare Atah Saqlawiyah, actually a Hamdaniyah by strain, tracing back to *Galfia of the Hamidie Society importation of the USA in 1893. Salil Ibn Iliad, one of the few asil stallions in the USA not to carry Blunt bloodlines, is owned by Lesley Detweiler and is standing at stud at Pam Baker’s. Atah Saqlawiyah was bred by Jackson Hensley of New Mexico and carries a rare line to the precious Saqlawi al-Abd stallion Zarlan (Mistlany x Zarieha by Kahar), a product of Jane Ott’s Blue List program. This colt, which is in my eyes illustrates Combined Source – for lack of a better term – breeding at its best, is looking for a new home.

The Institute for the Desert Arabian Horse recently set up a preservation program for the rare and valuable lines of Al Khamsa Arabian horses in danger of extinction. The program encourages breeders who happen to own horses from such lines and who are not in a position to either sustain these horses or otherwise breed them within the group of Arabian horses recognized as Al Khamsa, to donate or lease the horses to the Institute for the Desert Arabian Horse. The Institute then endeavors to breed these horses and eventually place them or their offspring in a preservation program. So far two mares from the rare and precious Hamdani Simri strain tracing to the desert-bred mare *Samirah of royal House of Saud breeding have been placed in this program. These are ASF Ubeidiya (ASF Ezra x ASF Eudia by ASF David) and her daughter Jadah Kerasun (by ASF Raphael).  Both mares carry rare lines to early Al Khamsa Foundation Horses such as *El Bulad, *Nufoud, *Nedjran, *Farha as well as some of the very last lines to other Foundation Horses such as Mameluke, Kesia I and Kesia II.  Anita Enander, who is the Institute’s President has more about this program, which…

Reader Diane, from Australia, on the quest for standardized perfection and the resulting uniformity of type in Arabian breeding today, had this precious comment, in one of the recent threads on this site: Western people, it appears, have a problem accepting an individual [Arabian horse] that isn’t quite absolute PERFECTION. This is what the Standard is advocating. The individual asil is not necessarily perfection in itself but is perfect for what it should be able to do per its original parameters / breeder/user requirements. Who are we, as westerners, to change this? Westerners need to learn that it’s not about perfection but what is functional.

Earlier this month, this little website reached it’s 50,000th unique visitor and hit the milestone 1,000,000 clicks a few days later, over the 30 months of its short life. In terms of comparative rankings, Daughters of the Wind now ranks in the top 250,000 websites in the USA, and in the top one million websites worldwide, up from somewhere in the top 22 millions when it first started. Its readership grew by 360% over the last three months, and now averages 500 daily unique visitors . Not bad for a start-up, solely focused on such a specific and tiny segment of interest: animals, not any animals, horses, not any horses, arabians, not any arabians, asil arabians, not any asil arabians, rare and little known lines. You can check these stats by visiting websites like alexa.com, which rank other websites in terms of traffic. Just write daughterofthewind.org in the Search box.

One more issue of Joe’s inisghftul articles about Egyptian foundation horses in the Arabian Essence magazine, this time about the matriarch El Dahma of Ali Pasha Sharif, her ever growing worldwide influence through some of her most famous descendents. Joe, in the spirit of discussing your article here, I am intrigued about your statement on ”the rule book standard of an ideal Arabian horse”. I am sure you are not talking about how you personally view these horses, but rather about how the lay Western eye tends to see them — and in that case, indeed I would entirely agree with you. It is thrice disheartening to realize that (a) that such a rule book standard even exists in the Western eye; (b) that a single group of horses — the descendents of El Dahma — is generally perceived as embodying it ; (c) to see the extent to which the Western eye has succeeded in defining what an Arabian horse ‘ought to’ look like. In the 1980s, the late Edward Said, of Columbia University, and one of the most influential Arab intellectuals of his generation, developed the concept of “Orientalism’: a theoretical construct with practical applications, referring to the West’s produding its own knowledge about the…

You really need to visit this website: http://www.akhalteke.info/. I am serious. Start with the introduction, and go through the history and purity chapters, then the rest. The ‘politics’ chapter is also interesting. It has nothing to do with Arabians, but is instead about this famous other eastern horse, the Akhal Teke. Except that, unlike most websites on the Akhal Teke, it methodically and relentlessly deconstructs all the myths and folklore surrounding the origins of the Akhal Teke (e.g. that it is the oldest ‘pure’ breed in the world, that it is the horse of the Scythian tribes of 3000 B.C., that is was kept unmixed with foreign blood in remote desert areas, etc, etc). It tells you the REAL story of the breed, about how the breed was managed (or rather, mismanaged) by the Soviets, who cross-bred it with English Thoroughbreds, and kept valuables lines outside the formal Akhal Teke Studbook. It puts informed criticism and hard facts before romanticized mythology and brand marketing. It is simply impressive. It’s the most impressive bofy of information I have ever come across online, all horse breeds considered.

Read the story here.

This is just a quick note to acknowledge all the private email messages that I have been getting from many readers over the past couple weeks, without having had the chance to respond them. I am getting anywhere between 10 to 12 emails from readers every day, most of which are solid and substantive, and hence require a good deal of thinking. I apologize for not having replied to many of these recently, as it is crunch time at work, and my horse ‘focus time’ will be limited until June 30th.

The word ‘kadish’ (feminine kadishah, plural kudsh) is one you will hear often if you become involved in Arabian horses in their native land, the Middle East. I for one, encountered it very early on in my life. I would be on a visit to a horse farm with my father, and we’d be looking at the mare herd that was roaming freely in large enclosed courtyards or open pastures, and learning about their elaborate origins and pedigrees (‘this one is a Saqlawiyah from this tribe, this one a Hamdaniyah from that clan’, and so on), when a wretched-looking horse typically kept in a separate enclosure would draw my attention, perhaps exactly because he was being left apart: ‘And what about this one?’ I would naively ask our host. “Oh, this one is just a kadish, we use him to pull the cart”, would be the usual answer, often uttered in a dismissive tone, as if discussing the ‘kadish’ further was a distraction from the more interesting conversation about the other horses.  The less people talked about these ‘kadish’, the more the curiosity of the ten year old I was back then was aroused. On the way back from these visits, I…

One topic that keeps popping up on this blog is the culturally-rooted Arab notion of authenticity and purity in Arabian horses: the notion of an ‘asil’ Arabian. I have been trying to look at this notion from a number of different lenses, and have written about it on several occasions (click here for one such instance). I find myself continuing to grapple with this notion and my thinking about it keeps evolving. One way to understand this notion of  an asil Arabian is to look at some of conceptually related notions, in particular the notions of ‘hajin’ and ‘kadish’. This entry focuses on ‘hajin’, and leaves the altogether different notion of ‘kadish’ for a later time. Understanding what ‘hajin’ means may help to better understand the notion of asil. So what’s a ‘hajin’ horse, according to Bedouins and other Middle Eastern Arabs involved in Arabian horse breeding?  Simply put, a hajin (pronounce it hah-JEEN) is a horse of foreign, non-Arab blood, such as the English Thoroughbred, Kurdish, Turkmen or Barb horses. There is also an Arabic verb for this notion of hajin: Hajjana. ‘Hajjana al-khayl’, when speaking of a person, is the deliberate act of mixing or interbreeding one’s asil…

The Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah mare Basilisk is perhaps one of the best known mares imported by Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt from the desert. The line produced important horses early on such as the stallions Berk (Seyal x Bukra, out of Bozra, out of Basilisk) and Ibn Mahruss (Mahruss x Bushra, out of Bozra, out of Basilik). Thanks for the efforts and foresight of Carl Raswan and Richard Priztlaff, the Saqlawi Jadran tail female line to Basilisk survives in US asil breeding through the mare Rabanna (Rasik x Banna by Nasr) and her progeny. This line thrived during the second half of the twentieth century, and acquired a certain degree of notoriety, but has been dwindling steadily during the past ten years, as many breeders stopping breeding their mares. What most people are not aware of, is that there is another asil line to Basilisk in American breeding. It’s fleeting but it’s still there, miraculously. That’s the line of Basilisk through the mare Slipper (Yima x Sabot by *Euphrates), and her daughter Peraga (by *Mirage), both foundation mares in early American breeding (both asil and non asil). If you like to learn more about this line, you may want to read Michael Bowling’s article…