The Rishan strain in the Abbas Pasha Manuscript

Another very rare Arabian horse strain is that of Rishan (feminine Rishah). The most common marbat is Rishan Shar’abi. I have developed a special interest in this strain over the years, because of the high quality of the individual representatives I have seen. A search for ”Rishan” in my digital Abbas Pasha Manuscript copy turned up a single mention. This reference is on page 346. A man who appears to be from the southern Shammar (the Shammar at Jabal/Mount Shammar in Central Arabia) speaks of his Saqlawiyah mare: “and we covered her at our place by al Rishan Sharabi of the horses of Beni Wahab, the horse of al Fawadi of Shammar al Jazirah.” Shammar al Jazirah is a reference to the Northern Shammar, the Jazirah (island) is Northern Mesopotamia between Euphrates and Tigris). The Beni Wahab are a ‘Anazah tribal confederation that includes the Wuld ‘Ali tribe among others. The Arabic i/y (ya’) letter is often mistaken for a b (ba’) in handwritten texts, because the only difference between these is a dot under the letter. The b has one dot, while the i/y has two. So I searched for “Ribshan” and “Rabshan” as well. The latter was more…

Photo of the day: desert-bred Rishah Shar’abiyah, Syria

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…