Cherifa and the Shuwayman Sabbah strain back to 1655

Cherifa is a foundation mare of the breeding program of the French colonial stud of Tiaret, Algeria. From Algeria, the line has spread to France, Poland and elsewhere around the world.

Cherifa is particularly well documented. She is entry #1333 in the French Stud Book: bay, born in 1869 in the desert, imported to Algeria around 1875, died in 1878, strain “Chouimi-Sebayé”, acquired from “Farhan ibn Hudaib of the Sbaa Enezah”.

The information on her Bedouin owner is significant. French importation records often mangled the spelling of the names of the strain, breeder or tribe. They sometimes gave their imported horses the strain of the sire instead of that of the dam.

In this case, the owner was none other than the paramount Shaykh of the Sba’ah tribe, Farhan, son of Ma’jun son of Sallal son of Barjas son of Sahu son of Mu’di son of Hudaib. Lady Anne Blunt met him during her first trip to the desert three years after the French purchased Cherifa. She details her encounter with him in her journals entry for April 5, 1878, and writes that he was 22 or 23 years old (so born ca. 1855). Farhan ibn Hudaib was also photographed by Max F. Von Oppenheim, below.

This Sbaa Bedouin Twitter feed in the Arabic language compiles many other interesting primary sources about Farhan Ibn Hudaib, from Arabic and western accounts. I learned from it that Farhan was not the grandson of Faris Ibn Hudaib (who had died in 1869) as Lady Anne wrote, but his great-nephew (unless he was also Faris’ maternal grandson).

Perhaps the most relevant piece of information about the Shuwayman Sabbah marbat of Ibn Hudaib comes from the Abbas Pasha Manuscript (APM). A careful read of Chapter Seven of the Arabic edition of the APM, on the Shuwaymat, allowed me to reconstitute the history of this particular marbat of Shuwayman Sabbah.

The APM does not record a testimony of the Ibn Hudaib leaders. It does however trace back the origin of a Shuwaymah Sabbah which the Dhafeer had “plucked” (Arabic qila’ah, or in Bedouin dialect, gla’a) in war from the Mawayiqah clan of Faris Ibn Hudaib, Farhan’s great-uncle. The Dhafeeri who had taken her inquired about her with Faris Ibn Hudaib. He found out that the Ibn Hudaib family had purchased a Shuwaymah Sabbah from the Ibn Smeyr leaders of the Wuld ‘Ali. The latter had purchased this mare from an Ibn Rabi’ah of the Kawakibah clan of the Ruwalah.

The leading clan of the Kawakibah, the Aba al-Wakl, had been the owners of the marbat of Shuwayman Sabbah within the Ruwalah for a long time, according to their own testimony in the APM. They admitted to having given a mare of theirs to this Ibn Rab’iah — one of their clansmen — as blood money. They also testified to their ancestors having obtained the strain from Dbayss al-Mawh, the Shaykh of the Bani Sakhr Bedouins. This reference to Dbayss al-Muh is important for dating the age of the Shuwayman strain.

Fandi al-Fayiz, the paramount Shaykh of Bani Sakhr at the time the APM was being compiled (ca. 1853), was the son of ‘Abbas, son of Salamah, son of Dhiyab, son of ‘Awwad, son of Fayiz who gave his name to the leading clan, son of Dbayss al-Muh. The standard calculation of 3 generations for a century woud situate the height of the career of Dbayss al-Muh around the year 1655. One can then deduce that the strain of Shuwayman Sabbah was already in existence around the year 1655 AD, because a Shuwaymah Sabbah had gone from Dbayss al-Mouh to the clan of Aba al-Wakl of the Ruwalah, according to the latter’s testimony in the APM.

Fandi al-Fayiz testified about his family’s continued ownership of the Shuwayman Sabbah strain, but did not know when and from where they had obtained it. However, Sahu Ibn Sabbah, a descendant of Sabbah of the Fudul Bedouins testified to his tribe having lost a Shuwaymah mare to the Bani Sakhr in battle, when the Fudul were still in Najd.

The addition that the Fudul were still in Najd when they lost the Shuwaymah in battle also matters for dating the strain: at least five Najdi written chronicles, including those of al-Manqur, al-Fakhiri, Ibn ‘Issa, Ibn Bishr and Ibn Bassam, relate that a severe famine, still remembered as al-Jurman, forced the Fudul, and others like the Dhafeer, to leave their Najd homeland and migrate eastwards in the year 1674-75 (1085 Hijri). This second comparative dating is consistent with the first dating of 1655.

So Cherifa, a Shuwaymat Sabbah from the marbat of Ibn Hudaib of the Mawayiqah of the Sba’ah, traced all the way to the Shuwaymah mare which Sabbah of the Fudul lost to the Bani Sakhr some time before the year 1655, which corresponds to the estimated height of the career of Dbayss al-Mawh of Bani Sakhr, and certainly before 1675, which corresponds to the year the Fudul left Najd. That was big, I thought.

Below, Murad Sbaa, a Shuwayman Sabbah stallion in France who traces to Cherifa five times, including in the tail female, with an additional tail male to the Syrian stallion Mokhtar.

The only Shuwaymah Sabbah mare Abbas Pasha purchased, a daughter of the Saqlawi al-A’raj, was also from the same marbat, according to the APM. She was purchased from Muhammad brother of Nuwaydees of the Ruwalah. He had taken her in war from the people of Ibn Hudaib in the Sba’ah. She has descent in Egyptian pedigrees, through Shueyman of Ali Pasha Sharif, the grandsire of Lady Anne Blunt’s Bint Helwa, Jamil, and Makbula among others.