Those of you who have looked at the Saudi Arabian Stud Book may have noticed that most of the horses registered in it trace back to a grey horse by the name of Al-Harqan, born in 1947. This horse is the sire of 25 horses in Volume I of the Saudi Stud Book. Pure Man, who by virtue of his knowledge of asil Arabians in Saudi Arabia, is a main contributor to this blog, tells me that Al-Harqan is Kuhaylan Harqan by strain. He also tells me that King Abdel-Aziz Aal Saud (d. 1953) asked a Bedouin from the tribe of Harb by the name of Ibn Fadliyah for a stallion from his famed Harqan horses, and that Ibn Fadliyah gave the king his best stallion: Al-Harqan. Pure Man also tells me that before Al-Harqan, the House of Saud maintained two other stallions of the same strain, but that they don’t appear in modern pedigrees because Saudi authorities did not keep written stud records back then. I think the strain of Kuhaylan Harqan is extinct in the tail female today, but I may be wrong, because there might still be desert horses of this strain in Saudi Arabia which I would not…
One more nice picture coming through “Pure Man” is that of Al-Jahfaa, a desert bred mare from Saudi Arabia. She is a Suwaytiyah by strain, by the Suwayti stallion El Bashir and out of the mare Al Hanfaa.
Two other Youtube videos from the same provenance, show the handsome desert-bred stallion Lazam Najd, a Suwayti al-Hafi by strain. He is a son of the Hamdani stallion Haleem, featured in an earlier video posted here. This is the first time I hear from the strain of Suwayti al-Hafi, although I am familiar with that of Suwayti al-Farm, which was the marbat of Muhsin al-Farm, the Shaykh of the Bani ‘Ali section of the Harb tribe. Suwayti al-Farm is one of the mains strain currently represented in Saudi Arabia. But what is Suwayti al-Hafi, the strain of Lazam?