The Reestablishment of the Arabian Breed!

The Arabic culture and identity had always been best manifested in two glorious forms; the poetic Arabic language, and the noble Arabian horse! The image of a Faress (horseman) and Sha’er (poet) was the ultimate form of nobility in the Arabic perception! I consider the two the facets and flip side of the coin of the pride of the Arab people! Nothing is more related to the identity and characteristics of the Arabic personality than these two. Even the message of Islam, which was primarily carried by the Arabs along with their vast prosperous empire from Spain to China do not relate as such to the Arabic identity. The Islamic civilization had many benefactors and contributors from different ethnic backgrounds and it declared itself from the very beginning as a universal message. This is exactly what caused the Arab control over the empire to fade out and finally collapse in a few centuries in favor of the Kurds, Turks and Persians.

Both, the language and the horse, remained gold-pure in the daily practice of the Arab people protected by strong cultural, religious and ecological parameters. They were so when the Arabs were virtually isolated in their peninsula, and they remained so when the Arabs were the dominating power in the new empire, but not for long after the new overwhelming effect of the superseding powers.

The Arabic diachronic linguistics suggest that the pure Arabic language was lost as the language of everyday speaking first in the metropolitan areas outside Arabia between the 4^th and 6^th Hijri centuries (10^th and 12^th centuries AD), and later inside Arabia between the 6^th and 8^th Hijri centuries (12^th and 14^th centuries AD). This is exactly the period I estimate as the beginning of the Arabian Horse strains and what I call “the reestablishment of the Arabian breed”.

However, the Arabic language even if lost in the daily life had the advantage of a well-protected place in the Islamic religion and civilization (regardless of the Arabic identity) as the language of the Holy Quran and Sira (life and teachings of the prophet) and the undisputed mean for learning and practicing the Islamic teachings and rituals. The Arabian Horse with all the respect it enjoyed needed a different strategy to survive and was not as pivotal to the non-Arab Muslims to maintain!

My hypothesis for the beginning of strains is based on three main propositions:

1. Strains started as a preservation effort when the purity of the Arabian breed was endangered circa the 13^th and 14^th centuries. Neither were they an ancient genetic taxonomy of the breed, nor intended as genealogical horse families the way we received them. They were not known or mentioned in any of the pre- 13^th century Arabic sources. They were just a collective attempt by the Bedouin community to seek and describe the very little that had remained of the trusted Atiq (Asil) Arabian horses and exclude any doubtful or potentially contaminated ones. To SEEK and DESCRIBE is what created the notions of MARBAT and STRAIN respectively.

2. Marbat (Stud) is the starting point of any strain in contrary to the modern belief that considers strains as an abstract concept. A strain represents a succession of Marbats or even a kind of family tree of Marbats were the first (root) Marbat is the first source of the strain (like Kuhailat Ajuz). The strain name (Kuhaila) was merely a characteristic description to denote the horses inside the first Marbat (Ajuz). Those first [few] Marbats always belonged to trusted Bedouin figures of high status inside Arabia (e.g. Sheikh of Qahtan or Sharif of Mecca.) New names of strains and Marbats (the two were often interchangeably used) were created as the family tree expended and new distinguished branches (of trusted owners) appeared.

3. Each of the initial strains described a pool of mares owned by the owner of the Marbat that were not necessarily genetically related. Modern mtDNA shows that mares carrying the same strain name do not always genetically match and thus were not of the same original mare. That does not necessarily suggest any mistake by the reporter of the strain information. Mares of the same strain did indeed (as I suggest) descend form a set of genetically unrelated mares (a pool of mares) that existed at a certain point of time in the same original Marbat. I can imagine that whoever was called “Ajuz” had a group of mares that enjoyed this beautiful natural black makeup of the Asil horses around their eyes and were accordingly described as Kuhaila (singular) or Kahayel (plural) of Ajuz. “Shahwan Al Obidi”, head of the strong and famous Qahtan tribe, could very well own a number of horses with the admired black coat so they were all called Dahma (singular) of Dohm (plural) of Shahwan.

The research conducted by Edouard on this blog confirms some of these propositions. All the researched strains did indeed start between the 13^th up to the 17^th centuries AD. The more recent ones are only branches of the older ones. Edouard’s research, so far, suggests three main sources that were sought and accepted for “the reestablishment of the Arabian breed”. These sources include:

1. The Sharifs of Mecca (Western Arabia) whom the term Ajuz seems to be attached to somehow.
2. The tribe of Qahtan (Southern Arabia) and their Obaidi Sheikhs.
3. Banu Lam (Central Arabia) of the ancient Tai tribe and their main sections of Dhafeer and Fudul.

Edouard in his fascinating series on dating the origins of strains has identified a potential set of original strains. So far, two are definitely identified as independent original strains: “Kuahilat Ajuz” and “Dahmat Shahwan”. Another possibly independent strain is the Saqlawi strain. Kuhailat Ajuz seems to be the mother of most of the known strains. Shuwayma, Wadna, Hamdaniya and Hadba – which are all quite old – seem to descend from Kuhailat Ajuz as per the available accounts. More recent strains like Krush, Mimrh, Harqan are all from Kuhailat Ajuz. This coincides with the oral Bedouin traditions: “Al-Khayl kulha Kahayel” (the Asil horses are all Kuhaila). All here is not to be taken literally but it means most of them. It is very important to dating the strain to identify who “Ajuz” is. Whether he is one of the early Sharifs of Mecca, or an old lady (Ajuz in classic Arabic means an old lady, while in the more recent Arabic dialects can refer to an old man) related somehow to the Sharif of Mecca that is yet to be discovered.

The five ancient strains (Al Khamsa) is clearly a mythology. The only written account of it is a very modern book by Mohammed Pasha son of Prince Abdulkader Al-Jazairi who died 1913!

Whether the original strains will appear to be five or more or less does not matter. What really matters is that the concept of strains was a complete new innovative system that gradually developed in the post 12^th century Arabia to save the Arabian breed that was on the brink of extinction. The flourish and spread of these strains that were maintained under strong cultural value system represented a resurrection of the breed. What I tend to believe is that the breed was literally reestablished from probably as few as tens of mares that were considered authentic enough in the possession of a handful of notable Bedouin leaders between the 13^th and 15^th centuries.