Muniqui-related strains in the Abbas Pasha Manuscript
The Abbas Pasha Manuscript (APM), compiled around 1852, is the single most comprehensive — and perhaps the only — source of Bedouin accounts and stories about their Arabian, faithfully and painstakingly recorded by the envoys of Abbas Pasha. The unique value of the APM lies in the Bedouins being both the narrators and the protagonists of these stories.
Every other written source at our disposal comes from Western travelers and explorers who, with few exceptions, did not speak the language, communicating mostly through interpreters and other intermediaries who “explained” things to them, which they would then go on and explain to us the readers of their books. We readers became accustomed to seeing the Bedouins and their horses through the more or less distorting lens of travelers like Upton, Blunt, Davenport, etc. The Bedouins in these Western accounts lost their agency and became subjects. Arabian horses became a Western field of knowledge.
Carl Raswan, despite living among the Ruwalah for some years, is a good example of this distorting lens: what his numerous writings show is his own perspective, as illustrated by his classification of Arabian horse strains. For example, Raswan classified Sa’adan, Rishan, and Samhan under the “Muniqi related” strains. This led me to look for mentions of these strains in the APM, in a quest for an unfiltered Bedouin perspective that dates back to the 1850s.
It turns out that Sa’dan is featured in the APM as a branch of the Kuhaylan strain. A prominent Central/Eastern Arabian tribe, the Mutayr stood a stallion from the Sa’dan Tuqan strain. Leaders of the Mutayr and of another Central Arabian Bedouin tribe, the Subay’, mated their mares to that stallion. So much for Sa’dan Tuqan being a “Muniqi related strain”, or for a hermetic distinction between the horses of the North and those of the South.
The Rishan strain, while not mentioned as a branch of Kuhaylan, is attested by the APM among the Northern Shammar and the ‘Anazah (which I knew), but also as a home strain of the ‘Ajman Bedouins of Eastern Arabia (which I didn’t know). At the time of the APM, the ‘Ajman had recently come from the Southwestern corner of Arabia, near Yemen.
As to the Samhan strain, the only mention of it in the APM is as a branch of the Kuhaylan (page 599). The account is complex, and deserves an entry of its own.
The Abbas Pasha Manuscript is truly a gift which keeps on giving.
Re the distinction between horses from the north and from the south, after getting stuck into Osmer’s books last week, I have a feeling that, whatever its precise origins, it was also shaped by European misunderstandings, given the appearance of the magical Mountain Arabs in Osmer’s later book.
This is a huge surprise.. What I know and read from oral or written claims is that the jelfa , Sattam Al-Bulad or dhawi, Al-Hadba, or what they call Al-Hadaba, and Al-Kabisha, are descendants of Al-Maanqiya.