New Information about Kafr Ibrash farm and Bint Kareema from Egypt
The other day I spent a most beautiful day between Abu Kebeer and Geziret Saoud in the Sharqiyah province of Egypt with the Tahawis. Yehia Abdelsattar al-Tahawi, Mohammed Abdallah Saoud al-Tahawi and Yasser Ghanem Barakat, their friends and I spent hours talking about horses and looking at them. One can hardly find people with a richer and better preserved equine tradition. As always with them, I learned new and interesting things that could benefit Egyptian horses.
It is about the Kafr Ibrash farm, which is where the Inshass foundation mare Bint Kareema was purchased from by the Inshass Stud.
Here’s what we know about Bint Kareema:
— She was a roan grey mare, born in 1935 and acquired from the “Kafr Ibrash Farm” by the Inshass Stud of King Fouad and his son King Farouk;
— She was by Lady Anne Blunt’s Rasheed (Jamil Blunt x Zareefa), out of Kareema, a mare by a “Dahman” out of an “Obeya”;
— She was sold to a Abd el Samad el Gayar on July 5, 1953, according to Pearson and Mol, first edition.
— According to Judith Forbis’ Authentic Arabians, Volume 1, page 274, her strain was ‘Ubayyah’; this is perhaps an inference from her grand dam’s name “Obeya”;
Here’s what I could infer about Bint Kareema, from the information above:
— her sire Rasheed being an Inshass stallion (he sired the Inshass mares Ragaa out of Saada in 1937 and El Zahraa out of Zahra in 1934), the Kafr Ibrash Farm where Bint Kareema was purchased from must have had a close connection with the Inshass Royal Stud.
This connection to the Inshass Royal Stud was furthered when I found out some three years ago that the current village of Kafr Ibrash was only six miles away from the town of Inshass, the Egyptian Delta town where the King’s Stud was located, in the Sharqiyah province. Back in 2010, this geographical proximity had already led me to hypothesize that the owners of Kafr Ibrah Farm “were closely associated with the Egyptian Royal family in some way or another”.
Today this hypothesis is confirmed.
While at the Yehia al-Tahawi’s farm in Sharqiyah, I met a young journalist, Saeed, who writes a column in the Saudi equine magazine “al-Jawad al-Arabi”. Saeed mentioned that he was from a village in the Sharqiyah province that is very close to Inshass and its Inshass Stud, which is now used as a government warehouse. I asked him whether he knew Kafr Ibrash. He said it was a village next to his. I asked him whether there was an old stud there from the 1930s. At this point Saeed picked up his phone, and called the former Member of Parliament from Kafr Ibrash, Mr. Mohii Rafaat Rabie, who promptly told him that in Kafr Ibrash was the farm of the Egyptian Queen Mother Nazli and that of her brother, Sherif Pasha Sabri, and that Nazli’s farm house was still to be found (about the stables, he promised to check and get back to me).
So the “Kafr Ibrash Farm” was really the stud farm of Queen Nazli, the Queen Mother..
This not only means that Bint Kareema was from one of the Royal Studs, which brings her closer to being authenticated, it also means that Joe Ferriss’ hypothesis that Bint Kareema and the Queen Mother’s 1947 stallion *Ibn Farhan (registered as being by a “Dahman” out of an “El Obeya”) are related is probably correct.
Here is a photo of a stallion from this line, the handsome Hakeel Ibn Kaisoon.
Congratulations on the detective work, which, as always, leads to the need for more detective work!
Du beau travail !
Thank You so much for sharing this! K.R. Lisa
Dear Edouard
I needed this information which is most interesting.
Here we list Bint Kareema as “Bint Karima” (Bint Kareema) (1935) (Inshass)
My notes from 1973 say” Dr Marsafi told me that Karima(Kareema)’a dam could be “El
Obeya Um Geris). It was never confirmed to me. This could mean that she is an Abayyah.
I have seen offspring/offspring of the mare and truly liked them. They had long reaching strides, lots of substance and lovely type. Also quite correct
Take care
Hansi
More inferences on Bint Kareema.
She is recorded as having been born on May 19, 1935. The sheer precision of the date as recorded by Inshass stud, concerning a mare born outside the Inshass stud is actually in favor of this date being the date of her joining the Inshass stud, which would then argue in favor of her being from the Stud of Prince Kemal El Dine Hussain where Rasheed was standing until the Prince’s death in late 1932.
Alternatively, this may be her real date of birth, and this would then mean that her sire Rasheed (who in this scenario would have bred her dam in June 1934) bred her dam Kareema while he was at Inshass (where he has already sired the mare El Zahraa in 1934). In this case it would mean that Kareema was brought to him from a satellite stud of Inshass most likely that of Kafr Ibrash itself.
More information on Queen Nazli
http://www.egy.com/historica/
This all shows how much more there is yet to learn about some of these ancestors These are ancestors which were accepted in the past by their owners, caretakers, etc. as the real thing but in the ravages of time the details perhaps memorized or known to them did not come forward into a studbook record in full detail, so we must look elsewhere.
Along with others, I have been trying to learn more about the Queen Mother’s horses, and I am grateful Edouard for your recent discoveries and that you are sharing them with us.
It is interesting to note, if you follow the Queen Nazli link you will soon discover that the daughters (or granddaughters) of the Queen’s imported mare Saema, were named mostly after her own children, i.e. Faika, Fazia, Fawzia Fatheya etc.
The strain of Obaya Um Geris is a common factor between some intriguing Inshass horses of the 1930s and 40s. There is a big question mark on the source of this strain which is known as a northern strain coming from the Syrian Desert rather than the more Southern deserts of Najd and its surroundings. Some of the names of breeders or pre-owners of these horses are not totally unknown and they share some commonalities. The Egyptian studs (other than Inshass) were not totally void of the Obaya Um Geris from known sources! There is more that goes in the same direction but we are still waiting for some big revelation that connects all the threads together.