Below is a photo of the grey mare Sabine, foaled in 1900, who is presumably the daughter of two of M. Portalès’ imports. The picture comes from the article, ‘Les chevaux du midi’, printed in the 27 October 1907 Le Sport universel illustré. Mossoul’s entry in volume 11 of the Stud-Book français (1894) says he was out of a Saqlawiyah, and came from the ‘Anazah. Kadidja’s entry, in the same volume, says she was from the Mawali. Her sire was a Kuhaylan al-Kharass and her dam a Saadat; in Edouard’s post on Georges Tabet’s 1937 Ansaab al-Khayl al-Arabiyah the Sa’dan Tuqan, Sa’dan al-Hassun and Sa’dan al-Najr are all three said to be “with the Mawali”. There are photos of Mossoul and Kadidja in two prior posts on imported stallions and mares at Pompadour.
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…