I had published this beautiful photo of the 1994 Syrian Kuhaylan Khallawi stallion Al Sabik (*Ta’an x Hallah) some ten years ago. Recently Arnault Decroix shared with me another photo of the same handsome horse taken a few moments before or after the first one. This was truly a special horse.
I woke up in Beirut this morning to good news from Yasser from his countryside house in the Nile Delta. My Khallawiyah mare Bint Rammah just foaled a well-built filly by Batal al Zaman. Yasser and I are partners on the filly. Yasser’s photo. We will name her Jawaher Al Arab. Her older sister was already Jawharah (jewel), and she is jewels in the plural, so Jawaher. Yasser and I carefully selected Batal al Zaman for his pedigree (a very simple pedigree, old EAO-lines only, and low Nazeer) and his outstanding racing record in Egypt. He is by Ibn Dahsha (Wasel x Dahsha by Adeeb, tf Bint Radia) out of Saddeeqah (Adawy x Eetimad by Mourad, Farida tf).
The previous post in Arabic was to introduce the daughter of my Khallawiyah mare Bint Rammah, born a couple days ago. The new filly, named Jawharah Al Arab is owned jointly between Yasser Ghanim and I, and is at his small farm in the Sharqiyah province, east of the Nile Delta. Bint Rammah was already in foal to Maward AlPetra, a Dahman stallion from lines to the Nagel’s Katharinenhof Arabians (NK) and Ansata Arabians studs, when I acquired her a few months ago. Video below.
الحمدلله فرسي الخلاوية بنت رماح ولدت مهرة يوم البارحة. المهرة كبيرة الحجم وبصحة جيدة الحمدلله سميناها جوهرة العرب وهي شراكة بيني وبين ياسر غانم وموجودة عنده بمحافظة الشرقية بمصر ز الاب حصان دهمان شهوان من اصول مصرية تغلب على مشجر نسبه خطوط انساتا وناجل اسمه ماورد البتراء كانت الفرس عشار منه لما اشتريتها من صاحبها وهو من الاسرة الطحاوية الام بنت رماح من اصول بدوية بحتة معروفة مثبوتة محفظة من سلالات عرب الطحاوية القديمة غير المسجلة دوليا. ابوها رماح ابن ابن حصان السباق الاسطورة جولدن ارو الذي اكتسح ميادين السباقات في لبنان ومصر في الخمسينات والستينات من القرن الماضي واصبح فيما بعد فحل سفاد في مصر والعراق والمملكة العربية السعودية واذكر اني سالت والدي ذات يوم وانا في مطلع العمر عما اذا كانت هناك خيل سباق عراقية لا ترد بنسبها الى الفحل الهجين المعروف بالطبيب او السوري او “دهمان عامر” الذي ملأت احفاده اسطبلات مربيين وهواة خيل السباق في لبنان وسوريا وأجابني والدي انه ثمة حصان عراقي اشقر مشهور ركض في سباق بيروت كان اسمه جولدن ارو وكان معروف عنه انه لا يعود نسبه الى الطبيب وترسخ اسم جولدن اروهذا في ذهني خلال السنين التي تلت سرد والدي لهذه القصة حتى أتاحت لي ظروف سكني في مصر ان اتعرف على…
Layth, by Mahrous out of Hallah, was spectacular. He was the prototype of the masculine stallion. I had never seen a neck like that on a Syrian horse. Photo from my 1995 visit to Mustafa al-Jabri’s stud. His strain goes back to the Khallawiyyaat marbat of the Ja’alifah of the Northern Shammar in Iraq, through the Tai. Anything from that marbat is now gone, I believe. I am not sure if the Khallawi strain is a branch of the Kuhaylan strain (the Abbas Pasha Manuscript says it is) or a strain of its own. Below, one of his daughters, out of a Kuhaylat al-Wati mare, either Dawhah or one of her daughters. She was very impressive too. Photo from my last visit to Jabri’s, in 2000.
This was my father’s answer when I asked him why he was about to purchase a beautiful, authentic desert-bred mare that was not registered in any studbook. There was something idealistic and foolish — these two tend to overlap — about his stance which left a mark on the teenager I was. No formal authority at the time was ever going to recognize the purebred status of this beauty. Her resale value and that of her offspring were almost nil. Despite having given it a lot of thought over the years, I am still conflicted about registration. On one hand, one does not really need a formal registry to confirm the purebred status of a horse. Registries get their information from somewhere. That somewhere, in the case of this mare, was the spotless reputation and the word of the mare’s owner. Also, I reasoned, registries got it the other way around. The very definition of a “purebred” for most breeds is a horse entered in a registry. That includes WAHO’s famously circular definition of a purebred Arabian horse. Besides, registries around the world are full of horses proven not to be purebred. Heck, that is the rule more than it…
Sheykh Tahawi Saeed Mejalli al-Tahawi who is in his nineties was interviewed recently by Yehia Abdel-Satar Eliwa al-Tahawi. The old man, who is the memory of the Tahawi clan of Egypt, told him that the original Kuhayla Khallawiyah mare had come to Shaman Ghumah al-Tahawi from the Mawali Bedouins. I had hypothesized this connection of the Futna line to the Mawali tribe some seven years ago on this blog, here. It is now confirmed. This makes the Egyptian Kuhaylan Khallawi strain of Bint Futna one of the most prestigious strains of Northern Arabia, that of Khallawiat al-Nesswan [“of the women”, not sure why they are called this way]. A branch of the Mawali leading family, the Aal al-‘Aabed, who had settled in Damascus, and provided Syria with its first president, Muhammad ‘Ali al-‘Aabed, owned a Khallawi line that survived in Asil form until the late 1990s, in both Lebanon and Syria. I owned the last such mare in old age. These were quite the race horses. When Ottoman Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid was on his way from Istanbul to Mecca on pilgrimage, he was hosted by the leader of the Mawali Bedouins near Hama, in central Syria, and presented with a Khallawia mare. In Syria,…
As I was telling you in an earlier entry, last Friday I spent a most delightful day as a guest of Yehia Abd al-Attar al-Tahawi in Geziret Saoud in the Sharqiyah province of Egypt, along with Mohamed Osman al-Tahawi and Yasser Ghanim al-Tahawi and a number of others. I took tons of pictures with my i-phone, but I am having trouble downloading them on the laptop, so that will have to wait a bit. However, I did take some pictures with Mohamed’s camera when my phone’s battery was dead, including the following ones of a wonderful speckled Kuhaylah Khallawiyah mare. She is not registered, and she is one of the few remnants of their old tribal horses, 11 mares and one stallion in total. Her name is Bint Rammah, and she was born in 2003. Her dam is by the tribal Tahawi stallion Marhaba and her grand-dam by the “Straight Egyptian” Tahawi stallion Marshall (Amlam x Bint Fulla), who is her only link to registered Egyptian horses. According to the oral histories I heard during my visit, the Kuhaylan Khallawi strain of the Tahawi clan traces to an original mare brought from the Syria desert by one of the Tahawi shaykhs. From there she spread among various members of the Tahawi clan, including to Sh. Abd…
Kuhaylan Khallawi (often misspelt Halawi) is a strain of Arabian horses little-known in the West. It is mentioned in Lady Anne Blunt’s list of strains derived from the Kuhaylan family, and in Carl Raswan’s list. The only other place it is mentioned is in Roger Upton’s writings, where his desert-bred import Yataghan (sire of the Ma’naqiyah mare *Naomi, which still has an asil tail female in the USA) was recorded as having been sired by a well-regarded Kuhaylan Khallawi stallion belonging to the Shammar. That’s it. In Egypt, the 1943 mare Futna, bred by the Tahawi Arabs, and bought by Ahmad Hamza as a broodmare for his Hamdan Stables, was from that same strain. Her dam is recorded as a Kuhaylah “Halawiyah”, just another way to write Khalawiyah, depending on how you choose to pronounce the Arabic letter [?]. Futna still has a thin tail female alive in the USA and Egypt, so the Kuhaylan Khallawi strain still goes on. According to their family website, wihch has a very rich section on horses, the Tahawi clan leaders brought all their horses from the area of Hims and Hama in Central Western Syria in the period extending between the 1880s and 1930s. …
These have been quite busy days for me, and I have not been able to write as often as I wanted to. That said, I wanted to quick highlight the fact that two new proposals to add new horses to the Al Khamsa Roster have been sent to the Al Khamsa Board of Directors. The first was sent by Joe Ferriss, and concerns the three Tahawi (an Egyptian peasant tribe of Arab stock) mares that are the foudation of Egypt’s Hamdan Stables: Fulla (a Shuwaymah Sabbah), Futna (a Kuhaylah Khallawiyah), and Bint Barakat (a Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah). The second proposal (click here if you interested in reading it) was submitted by yours truly and concerns the mare *Lebnaniah, a Ma’naqiyah Sbayliyah imported by W.R. Hearst to the USA in 1947. The AK Board is currently discussing both proposals.
I am back on the map, and slowly emerging from processing a couple hundred emails that have piled up in my inbox during my absence. I am looking forward to the new Khamsat issue, with a focus on the WAHO 2007 conference in Syria. Hazaim al-Wair and I have an article in there on Arabian horse strains represented in the Syrian Arabian Horse Studbook, in which you will see some of the pictures you’ve already seen and liked on this blog, and some which you haven’t seen yet, like the one below. This is Hallah, a Kuhaylah Khallawiyah bred by the tribe of Tay in North eastern Syria in 1983, and owned by Mustapha al-Jabri, who sold her to one of the Gulf countries (I think Kuwait) in the mid-nineties (not sure of the exact date, either). Enjoy the picture which I took in 1993, and more on the strain and the mare later..