I finally found a couple good photos of Marwah, the Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah of Ibn Amud. The top photo was taken at the entrance of Basil Jadaan’s old farm. Marwah was sired by the grey Hadban Enzahi of Fazaa al-Hadi al-Jarba, the son of the old bay Hadban Enzahi of Fazaa. Both Hadbans stood in Garhok in North Eastern Syria, and were widely used by the neighboring Arabs. She was small, but otherwise impossible to fault. Her croup and hindquarters were among the best I have ever seen in desert-bred Arabian horses. NOTE: Please, if you feel the urge to share on social media, link to the entire blog article, but don’t download and share as if the photo were yours. I don’t want Facebook to own these photos or others.
This desert-bred mare is a representative of the rare and precious strain of Rishan. She traces to a most ancient and authenticated marbat of the Rishan strain, that of Ibn Hathmi of the ‘Abdah section of the Shammar Bedouin tribe. Her breeder Ayid al-Fnaish obtained the line from Ibn Hathmi a few decades ago. Mustafa al-Jabri is her current owner and I took this photo at his stud in 1995. She was registered in Volume 1 of the Syrian Studbook under the generic strain of Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz, reportedly because one of the members of the local registration committee was unaware of the existence of the Rishan strain. This oversight was fixed in the next Studbook iterations. She was born in 1986, and I believe her registration name is Bint al-Badiah. Her sire is al-A’war, the chestnut Hamdani (Simri) Ibn Ghurab stallion which the Shammar Bedouins were heavily using at the time, before he ended up with Radwan Shabareq of Aleppo in the 1990s. Her dam’s sire is the Saqlawi (Jadrani) Ibn ‘Amud of Muhammad al-Faris al-‘Ad al-Rahman of the ‘Assaf, the leading clan of the Tai Bedouins. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Basil Jadaan with WAHO, Volume 7 of…
Two more pictures from Sohaila and Ahwaz from Basil Jadaan.
It is that time of the year, and asil foals are starting to crop up everywhere. I just received these two photos of newborns at Basil Jadaan’s stud in Damascus, Syria (thanks Basil and Joe). They are representative of the latest generation of Syrian asils: pretty, expressive, and true to type. Their grandparents and great-grandparents were desert-bred and were acquired by Basil at a time when less than a handful of breeders cared enough to save these horses from extinction through registration, marketing and intelligent breeding. The story of the registration of the Syrian desert-breds is a fascinating odyssey that deserves to be told, and I trust it will be. I was a little more than twelive years old when I first saw these desert-breds at Basil’s in 1990. Twenty years have passed since, and their offspring keep getting better and better. Note the large, expressive eyes, and the black skins around the eye, and the delicate muzzle. The first one is Sohaila, by Shadeed out of Manolia, and the second is Ahwaz by Shadeed out of Ameerat al-Fadi. I don’t know the strains.