Since this blog is not just about horses but also but the people who breed them, I am thinking of starting a new series on some of the twentieth century most influential yet most controversial horsemen of the Middle East. It will likely include the following horsebreeders who were also noted political and social figures in their times — horsebreeding and horseracing being a privilege of this region’s elite: Henri Bey Pharaon (of El Nasser fame, among others); Ahmad Ibish (of *Exochorda fame, among others), H.H. al-Sharif Nasser bin Jamil (of *El Dhabi fame) and Dr. Iskandar Kassis. I will omit a fourth influential figure, H.H. Prince Mansour ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud for now. A fair and comprehensive treatment of these important characters will need some thorough research, on top of what I already know about them, so this is more like a medium term project. Stay tuned.
One more picture of Omar Anbarji’s now deceased desert-bred Kuhaylan al-Musinn stallion Ra’ad, this time by a professional photographer. I think this is the fourth picture of him I post. I would like to familiarize readers with the foundation stock of the Syrian Arabians, because I feel they will become more and more significant in the future. You have already seen pictures of some of the most influential Syrian Arabian stallions, many of which are personal favorites: Ra’ad, a Kuhaylan al-Musinn; al-Aa’war, a Hamdani Ibn Ghurab; Mubarak, another Hamdani Ibn Ghurab; Mokhtar, a Kuhaylan al-Krush; Marzuq, a Ma’naqi Sbayli, etc. Look them up in the search function of this blog on the right hand column, and you will see the relevant entry with their photos. Ra’ad was bred by Jamal al-Turki al-‘Ilyu of the Saw’an clan, which is the leading clan of the settled, part peasant, part sheep-herding tribe of al-Sabkhah, on the banks of the middle Euphrates. Jamal’s family also bred Ra’ad dam Nawal al-Kheil, and her grand-dam as well. The Sabkhah, who occupy the area of same name (click here to see it on Google Map) are themselves part of the larger peasant confederation of the Bu Sha’ban.…
I recently shared with you my plan to propose the mare *Lebnaniah for inclusion in the Roster of Al-Khamsa horses as of 2010. The process is very thorough, usually involving several individuals putting their research skills together. It typically takes several years to complete. As part of this process, I will be sending the Al Khamsa Board original information about *Lebnaniah’s ancestors – information that was not available before. Much of this information is actually included in “Al-Dahdah Index” (don’t laugh), an annotated catalog of noteworthy asil and non-asil horses that were bred in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, the northern Arabian desert, etc) throughout the twentieth century. I have already shared with you the entries on the stallion Shaykh al-Arab and Kayane. The “Al-Dahdah Index” is a living document, which I have been patiently working on for the past twelve years, and I update as often as I can. The information is based on oral and written primary sources from the Middle East — i.e., it is not extracted from books written by Western travelers, horse buyers, and other occasional visitors. I would like to see the “Al-Dahdah Index” published some day, but not before I add a couple thousand more entries. I think I’ll give it another…
Three more pictures this time from the region in eastern Yemen known as Hadramout. From top to bottom, the magic city of Shibam (“the Manhattan of the desert”), the palace of the Kathiri sultan at Say’un (now a hotel), the minaret of the mosque of Tarim (the tallest in Arabia), and a palace in a Hadramout village.
This past weekend I took part of my family to visit with Jenny Krieg, of Poolesville, Maryland. Jenny is the president of Al Khamsa for a few more days. A new board will take over for a year after the 2009 Tulsa Convention, which starts today, and which I am so sorry for not being able to attend. Jenny is otherwise the proud owner of HS Marayah (2 pics below). Marayah traces to the Shaykhah mare *Layya, imported to the USA by W.R. Hearst in 1947. Jenny is one of the few breeders preserving this rare line in Asil form, and this year she bred Marayah to DB Khrush (pic also below) for a 2009 foal. In 2007, mtDNA research showed that Marayah and a Lebanese mare from the same strain and the same original breeder as *Layya shared the same haplotype, implying a common tail female ancestor. *Layya’s original strain, and therefore Marayah’s, is ‘Ubayyan, from the marbat of the Donato family, a merchant family of Italian origin settled in Lebanon’s Biqaa’ valley. *Layya’s great-grand dam was a famous and important mare, and was hence known as “al-Shaykhah” (feminine of al-Shaykh, or al-Sheikh, a honorific title in the Arab world). Her descendents were named al-Shaykhat, after her. They practically formed a new strain, and back in…
Getting *Layya into the list of Al Khamsa Foundation Horses was not easy. There were a lot of rumors about the Hearst importation from the very beginning. Many people here in the USA, believed that H. Pharaon, who sold most of the horses to Hearst, was a crook, and that the horses were not Asil, but mongrels. These persistent rumors meant that the descendents of the 14 horses of the Hearst importation stayed out of the radar screen of the US purist breeding community for years. For instance, they never made it to Jane Ott’s Blue Arabian Horse Catalog (new website!). Skepticism about *Layya was not limited to US breeders. Some people in the Middle East wondered how Pharaon could have parted with such a precious mare. Also, people took it for granted that the Khamis family of Rayaq, Lebanon, who bred *Layya, would never sell a mare from their prized Shaykhan strain to Pharaon in the first place. Of course this is contradicted by the fact that George Khamis, who at one time was staying in the USA for health reasons, wrote the pedigree of *Layya in his own handwriting (I will ask if I can share a jpg of…
I just finished reading the first volume of “Cities of Salt”, the five-volume masterpiece of the prominent Arab novelist Abdelrahman Munif. I really recommend that you read it, if world literature is your cup of tea.. An English translation exists, by Peter Theroux, and so does a German one. There might be a French one too, published by Sindbad/Actes Sud edition, but I couldn’t find it online. Set sometimes in the 1920s or 1930s, the first volume of “Cities of Salt” tells the dramatic story of the transformation of a small village in an unnamed Arabian kindgom, following the discovery of oil by Americans. It describes the abrupt transition from tradition to modernity and its impact on the land and its inhabitants, from an Arab perscpective. Behind this thin veil of fiction, readers will no doubt recognize the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the book was actually banned. Munif, who died in 2004, was well placed to write about this topic. He was born in Jordan, from an Iraqi mother, and Saudi father, the scion of a distinguished family of Agheyls, these merchant families whose caravans criss-crossed the Arabian peninsula, from Gaza and Damascus to Kuwait and from Hail to Bagdad.
The starting point of any serious discussion on El Nasser should be a short statement in Judith Forbis’ “Authentic Arabian Bloodstock”, p. 137, where she cites a letter from Henri Pharaon, the one-time owner of El Nasser. “Pharaon wrote to me on October 6th, 1970 that El Nasser was born on May 1938, that he had purchased the horse from Cheikh Ahmad Taha, that it was bred by the Gheiheich (Ajarash, El Ajarrache) of Upper Syria, the Jezirah region, and that his sire was Douhayman El Ajarrache of the Tibour tribe.” I saw the letter Pharaon wrote to Forbis, in French. I also saw a copy of the horse’s Lebanese racing papers, which match the information in Pharaon’s letter. Save a few small transcription errors (Tibour is Jibour, for example), and one incorrect analogy (Gheiheich and El Ajarrache are two different entities), all the names in the letter are those of well known and identifiable tribes, clans, and individuals. In September 1997, I asked a 90 year old horse merchant, ‘Abdl al-Qadir Hammami what he knew about all these names. Click here for his answer, which one of several inputs that helped clear El Nasser as an Asil Arabian horse. Hammami did not recall Douhayman El Ajarrache, the sire of El Nasser, but identified the strain of the horse as being Dahman (female…