“Fahad Abdallah the Agheyleh Sheykh”

Unpublished excerpts from Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals for the early part of the year 1889, obtained from the Wentworth Bequest at the British Library courtesy of Bill Cooke at the International Museum of the Horse include several references to a “Fahad Abdallah, the Agheyleh Sheykh”; he is identified as a merchant who supplied Prince Ahmad Pasha Kamal, Ahmed Bey Sennari and others with desert-bred Arabian horses, on at least one occasion, in 1889, when Lady Anne saw and liked some of these horses. Fahad is also the one who obtained the stallion Koheilan El Mossen for Sennari, perhaps as part of that same batch of horses in 1889.

A Journal entry from that period mentions Fahad Abdallah as being from the Qassim town of Buraydah, the center of the Agheylat caravan trade network. The Agheylat were a corporation of camel, horse, sheep, ghee, cloth and food staples merchants from Central Arabia, who operated a dense and active network of caravan trading spanning Central Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Iraq and Egypt, with hubs in Baghdad, Damascus, Kuwait, and even Bombay. They were from settled families from the Central Arabian area of Qassim, most of them being from either Buraydah or ‘Unayzah, and many tracing their roots to the settled Tamim tribe, while others were from the Shammar, the Anazah and others. In another entry, Lady Anne reported a story her stud helper Zeyd al-Mutayri told her about members of the Ibn Saud family killing Abd al-‘Aziz, Fahad’s grand-father, who was the ruler (amir) of Buraydah.