I am definitely not a fan of Tom Friedman of the NYT — far from it — but I thought that the last paragraph of his most recent NYT opinion piece applied well to the urgency of preserving rare Arabian horse lines (and whatever else needs to be preserved, for that matter): As I’ve noted before, when we were growing up “later” meant that you could paint the same landscape, see the same animals, climb the same trees, fish the same rivers, visit the same Antarctica, enjoy the same weather or rescue the same endangered species that you did when you were a kid — but just later, whenever you got around to it. Not anymore. Later is now when you won’t be able to do any of them ever again. So whatever you’re planning to save, please save it now. Because later is when they’ll be gone. Later will be too late.
To continue with the series of this year’s foals, here are a couple from Regine and Warren Staas in Germany, from desert Saudi-Bahraini lines, tracking to *Savannah in tail female. This black filly is alredy on allbreedpedigree.com (here) by AAS Japik (AAS Sail out of AAS Al Kamila) out of AAS Ghazala, and both dam and daughter look splendid! The chestnut colt below is also a Dahman, by AAS Japik out of AAS Muharraq (AAS Theeb x AAS Ghazala), and is also a promising one. These are all close lines to the desert, and as Lady Anne Blunt wrote in her Journals about a mare of same strain and same origin (Bint El Bahreyn) “the Dahmeh Shawanieh from Ibn Khalifeh, she is a fine mare and authentic” (Dec. 22 1907) and “authentic blood from eastern Arabia is rare” (Dec. 30 1907). It still is.
I am catching up on weeks of backlog in correspondence. Here is Mayassah Al Arab (Clarion CF x Cinnabar Myst by ASF David). Photo credit to Kim Davis who is boarding her for me.
Yasser Ghanim is issuing News Letter 1 about their horses twice a year.
This one was bred by and belongs to Jenny Krieg and is a reward for the efforts of the Al Khamsa Preservation Task Force. Her sire is Tamaam DE, a Doyle/Straight Crabbet stallion belonging to Rosemary Doyle and the dam is the wonderful, old-style, classy, grand and stylish Sarita Bint Raj, who in addition to her good looks, is our last asil link to *Euphrates, *Al-Mashoor, one of the last ones to *Mirage, as well as being tail female Basilisk through Slipper. By the way, Jenny Krieg has a nick for carefully and expertly choosing stallions to match her mares, and these matings always result in exceptional individuals. Photo credit to Terry Doyle.
This one is from the Deblaise stud in France, a daughter of the Syrian Kuhaylan al-Nawwaq import Husam Al-Shamal out of their mare B’Oureah (Ourki x Bismilah by Irmak).
The Tahawi preservation breeders have the last (with her dam) asil Kuhaylat al-Kharass filly, by a Straight Egyptian stallion from US lines and out of the desert mare. I have not seen her yet, but from the photos Yasser took, she seems quite something. There was only one horse from that strain, an aged stallion, in the Syrian Studbook and he died a while ago. There was an old mare from the same strain in the Lebanese studbook, but she died too. The strain is originally from the Sba’ah ‘Anazah, where it was much prized and sought after especially for racing. It is well represented in the sire and dam lines of many of the Hearst imports. It was also the strain of Proximo/Jadaan, the personal mount of the head of the Fad’aan Jadaan Ibn Mhayd, seen by the Blunts in their second desert journey in 1881 (Lady Anne spelled the strain as Kuhaylan Akhras) and bought by them in India where he had been sold for racing. Proximo failed to produce anything at Crabbet (not very fertile), and was eventually sold to Poland yet at some point it was considered likely that the Crabbet foundation mare Nefisa was his…
Select pictures of new asil foals from around the world. This one is special, because she traces to the only desert-bred stallion in America, the old Mlolshaan Hager Solomon; he is a son of DB Khrush, so close up Davenport and Saudi imports there, and out of a daughter of Mlolshaan. Her breeder and owner is Cathy Fye, and judging from both the pedigree and the conformation, she will be an endurance athlete.
Lately I have been re-reading Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals and Correspondence to let steam off increasing workload. I try to read a few entries while in the car, in airport terminals, and — I confess — in the bathroom. I have been paying special interest to the entries about Ali Pasha Sherif horses — it’s probably the “I-now-live-in-Egypt factor”, trying to make sense of the various horses mentioned. Then I remember that RJ Cadranell had most of it figured out in this fascinating article, here. RJ, hats off to you.
This stallion of Ali Pasha Sherif’s (APS) has always been a bit of a puzzle for me. One more than one occasion in her Journals and Correspondence, Lady Anne Blunt, whose favorite stallion of all APS’s stallions he was, clearly states that he was a Saqlawi Jadran by Wazir. If that’s the case, then his name does not make sense, Nadir being a male’s name in general, and “Ibn Nadir” meaning the son of Nadir. After carefully reading all the entries about him in Lady Anne’s Journals, and noticing the pattern of the names of APS’s horses (stallions and mares) with “Ibn” or “Bint” after their dam’s names and never after their sire’s (Ibn Nura, Ibn Sherara, Ibn Horra, Ibn Zarifa, Ibn Bint Jellabiet Feysul, etc, for the stallions, and for the mares Bint Helwa, Bint Horra, Bint Nura, Bint Azz, Bint Bint Jellabyet Feysul, etc), I became convinced that “Nadir” must have been Ibn Nadir’s dam’s name, as odd as it may sound. Every visit record of the Blunts at APS was accompanied with a list of the horses, and a naming pattern emerges, similar to the way Bedouins and Syrians name their horses: there is an important root…
This last photo from 1990 or 1989 of the late Mustafa al-Jabri (on the left), Radwan Shabareq (on the right) and my father, Gen. Salim Al-Dahdah marks the end of the 40 days of celebrating Mustafa’s legacy as a major breeder of Arabian horses. May he rest in peace surrounded by his beloved horses, Mahrous, Ihsan, Basel, Halah, Nawal, Hallah, Ameenah and all the others which he loved and cherished so dearly.
So today my wife made me take a break from work to see the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo. I enjoyed the visit. In the evening I checked the website of the museum and found this reference, about the collections in its library: “The late Prince Youssef Kamal collection is in the Museum library with the French Expedition famous Déscription de l’Egypte.” That’s the son of Ahmad Kamal Pasha (APK), who inherited his father’s stud of Arabian horses, and sold it to Prince Mohammed Ali, Lady Anne Blunt (who bought three mares) and others in 1907. I will go back to the library to check out this collection, and look for horse-related materials.
I was always intrigued by the scarcity of references in Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals and Correspondence to her encounters with the Dahman Shahwan horses of the lines of Nadra El Kebira and Obeya, compared to her numerous references to horses from the lines of Yemama (Saqlawi Jadran ibn Sudan), Roga El Beda (Saqlawi Jadran, no marbat mentioned) and Freiha (Kuhaylan Mimrah) at the stables of Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfiq and Prince Ahmad Kamal. This is by far Egypt’s most famous and globally prevalent strain today, yet it is the one we know least about from contemporary sources. The most explicit of these scarce references occurs during a visit to the stables of Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfiq at Manial on December 22nd 1908, where she records seeing “a beautiful grey Dahmeh Shah. the prince got lately from the Khedive who had her dam from A. Pasha Sherif (she had a foal 3 weeks old with her)“. This is either Nadra El Kebira or Gazza. Another reference is from one year earlier, on December 17, 1907, also during a visit to the Prince: “There was a handsome white horse from the Khedive, a Dahman — sire Seglawi, which headed the list of horses.” Could this be Farhan/Saklawi II, who…
The entry in Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals about her last visit to Ahmed Pasha Kemal’s stud (shortly after the Pasha’s death) on March 10th, 1907 is extremely informative. It was the last of several visits of Lady Anne’s to that stud, she remembered a lot of the horses from her previous visits, she spent a long time looking at the horses (1.5 hours), and she was accompanied by “Ali Effendi the old Kurdish manager”, Mahmoud who then went under her service and of course Mutlaq. Her description of the mares and stallions in that Journal entry comes four days after the acutal visit (which was on March 6th), and is precise and detailed as usual. Look at the comments of that blog entry for comment’s and speculation on my side about the horses in this entry of Lady Anne’s Journal, some obvious and some not so obvious. Here is the full text of that entry (italics are Lady Anne’s but bolds are mine): March 10 Now about the Ahmed Pasha Stud. Was received there by Ali Effendi the old Kurdish Manager, and Mahmud, and spent about an hour and a half looking round. The first mares in the row, a chestnut Nowakieh,…
While perusing old handwritten notes I found this bit of information, from a conversation with Radwan Shabareq: “Dr Iskander Qassis had four Krush mares which he got from Abu Husayn Khattab (the premier horse merchant and expert in Syria in the 1950s) who in turn got them from his father who had in turn obtained them from Mijhim ibn Mhayd. They were from the Krush of Al-Sane’, which was the best Krush marbat of the Fad’aan (woul ne3m).”
This is the transcription of a conversation with Jean-Claude Rajot, in 2013, whom I had asked what master breeders Robert Mauvy and Anatole Cordonnier thought of Denouste: Here is what Jean Claude had to say: “Robert avait fait des recherches et Cordonnier aussi. Ils en ont parle une seule fois devant moi. Le point faible dans le pedigree: Aissa, par Bou Maza et Kebira. Le cure avait perdu les papiers. Cordonnier avait le meme entraineur de courses que Denouste.” Les juments favorites de Mauvy: Guelmouna par El Nil, Fadd’a, Iaqouta, Izarra. Il avait fait saillir Fadd’a par Asfour mais elle n’avait pas pris.
I am b ack and will resume the series of photos on Mustafa al-Jabri’s horses, by backdating a few entries until we reach today’s.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I am off to Kuwait for two days on Saturday, and I was just back from a week in Yemen before going back there in three weeks.. I am longing for a pause.
A reader had asked about a photo of Azyya (Kenur x *Aziza by Gamil Manial), the dam of Faziza by Fa-Turf in Germany (the line in the US is extinct). Here is a photo, from the Khamsat archives, courtesy of Jeanne Craver.
Qubbah Gardens was the upscale Cairo neighborhood surrounding the Khedivial Palace of Qubbah/Qubbeh. This list (in French) of the neighborhood’s residents in 1936 and their profession (if “Crown Prince”, “member of the royal family” or “Rentier” are professions) reads like a Who’s Who of Egypt’s rich and famous of that time. Note the diversity of backgrounds that was characteristic of the upper echelons of Egyptian society at that time: Jews, Christians, Muslims, Levantines, Westerners, etc. The list includes “Ibrahim Khairi Pashja, Lewa” (Lieutenant General) of Badaouia fame (the dam of Kheir who was likely named after his dam’s owner) and “Mohammed Nafea Pasha, Rentier” of Nafaa El Saghira fame, who seem to have been neighbors, as well as co-contributors to RAS foundation breeding stock.