The Great Myth

Lady Wentworth

The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants:
Three Voices Concerning the Horses of Arabia
Tradition (Nejd, Inner East)
Romantic Fable (Islam)
The Outside World of the West

Third Edition - 1979
First Published 1945; Second Edition 1962

THE MYTH OF "EL KHAMSA"

As I have said, the generic term "Kehilan Ajuz" means the Thoroughbred horse of antiquity or the old wild horse. It is not the name of a strain, beyond indicating a pure-bred Arabian of any strain.

Certain families became famous for their beauty or their deeds in warfare, and went by the names either of their districts or their owners, or sometimes of their qualities: Kehilan Ajuz of somebody's strain, or Kehilan Ajuz the dark-coloured, and so on. But this did not mean that all individuals were dark. In Dahman the term merely referred to the colour of an ass which fostered a foal.

That modern writers should have talked of the strains as five has probably no more explanation than that there should have been three graces, Three Musketeers, three cheers, seven wonders of the world, or nine lives to a cat!

We seem to have heard of the "Great Five" or the "Big Four" in modern days but all these things are just the catch phrases of captionism and their importance is transient.

The principal strains of Kehilan are not only five but many, and the Bedouins do not regard them as possessing any fundamental difference of type.

Just as the "Five," when enumerated, are never the same five, so the characteristics attributed to them are never the same. No two writers ever agree except oh one universal point, i.e. that the best blood comes from Nejd.

Their views as to which strains have the best heads, longest necks, best legs, etc., vary with each writer and are only interesting as a record of what strains were fashion- able at the time of writing.

The various forms of "Kehilan" mean highbred, Thoroughbred, a stallion, or great antiquity; Kahlan is also an Arab tribe in Yemen, which was the district in which the first wild horses actually recorded by name were captured. 'Kehilan," accordmg to tribal traditions, means pure bred, i.e. Thoroughbred.

Sultan El Naseri, the greatest of all Eastern authorities on horses, who got his information direct from the horse-breeding tribes, said: "The Arab horse was wild," and translates "Kahlan-Ajuz" into "old," and remarks that there is also a "Kahlan- Jedeed" (new) and that Koheil has gone through many transformations.

"Ajuz" also has several meanings, including wild horse, mare, herd, war, antiquity, and the ancient world; the only really quite impossible one in this connection being the silly post-Islamic rendering of "the old woman," since universally adopted but may be dismissed as an "old woman's tale."

This is probably due to a mistranslation of Abu Obeyda, whose original text explained the term " Ajuz" as "ancient," “Kehilan Ajuz” therefore meaning the old Thoroughbred breed.

On this error a laborious legend has been founded by townsfolk in confusion with a real desert tradition, which is that there was once a Bedouin girl ("wahed bint") celebrated as having caught a famous filly as a foal from the wild horses of the desert. Ajuz means a wild horse as well as an ancient breed, and that the filly should have been called "the thoroughbred wild horse" was quite natural, though town scholars would be unfamiliar with the term.

This was, however, not a solitary instance, the whole tradition among the central tribes being of horses wild and caught as foals and tamed, and of Kehilan being the generic term for a true Arabian,o the affixes varying and the cause of the variation being sometimes recorded and sometimes forgotten.

The "Kheyl el Ahwaj" of Abd el Kader is an Algerian corruption of "Kheyl" (horses) or "Koheyl el Ajuz," and a clue to this corruption is given by an Islamic writer from Oneyzeh who called the Ahwaj "Kheyl" or "Kheylet (Kehilet) el Ajuz," “Kheyl” being the plural of horse.

The mistake seems to have arisen from the mere omission and transposition of two dots by the scribe.

"Ahwaj" (crooked) is quite evidently "Ajuz"; the mere omission of the dot on the "j" turns it into an Arabic "h," the terminal "z" equally easily becoming a "j" in MS :-

The elaborate Algerian story of an original horse with a crooked or misshapen back and called El Awaj or Ahwaj (crooked), which is given in explanation of the word "Ahwaj" as applied to the Arab breed, takes its place therefore with the equally absurd explanation of Ajuz as the old woman who caught a foal.

Neither of these far-fetched stories is nomadic, and both can be traced to "those madmen who write books," the "Aal el Kutub" (book folk), as the Bedouins used to call them. They are both post-Islamic.

They have, however, been repeated so often that with increasing contact with civilization the town Arabs have taken them up, and they will gradually no doubt filter into the desert and swamp the old traditions, which like all true traditions are simple and unadorned by the imagination of journalistic Orientalism run to seed. Such tales are considered absolutely "modern" by the nomads, to whom in the vast antiquity of their wild-horse tradition King Solomon appears as a mere upstart representative of the New Rich!

We may absolutely dismiss the "old woman" of the East, the "crooked stallion" of Abd el Kader, and Tweedie's ridiculous "tar dressings for mange" as having any serious connection with the term "Kehilan Ajuz."

"Kuheili" Kaheil Highbred, Thoroughbred.

"Ajuz" A wild horse, the ancient world, antiquity.

"Ajzaa" High sandy desert.

Summed up we can take the origin to be as follows:-

Kehilan or Kehilet el Ajuz = The ancient Thoroughbred wild horse or mare.

Kuheil el Ajzaa or el Ajuz = Thoroughbred horses of the desert, or ancient world.

In other words, the old Thoroughbred horse.

Every strain name is a greater or smaller offshoot of Kehilan. With Arabs it is called a "ra-san" (literally, a rope), also "marbut" (tied) = a rope tying a strain to the original Kehilan root.

The tale attributing five principal strains of horses in Arabia to the Prophet's five mares is one of quite modern origin, which Lady Anne Blunt tells us is "mentioned by no old Arabian author and authorized by no tradition even the least reliable.

"All tales based on this legend of El Khamsa must be strictly eliminated from serious history. It is repeated as pure nonsense by the Nejd nomads who have not been in contact with towns, yet Ridgeway even went so far as to denote the whole Arab race as 'the El Khamseh' (the Five)! Absurdity could go no further."

The Prophet had horses and admired the Arabian beyond everything else, but is not believed to have been himself a horse rider. Certainly, said Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, till he was fifty he rode only camels or mules.

The plain, unromantic truth is that there is no such thing as El Khamsa. Even the names of any strains at all are comparatively modern and post-Islamic, though some may be of nomad origin derived from ownership. The earliest way of distinguishing a strain seems to have been by means of some famous horse or tribe: "of the stock of so and so." We heard a mare praised as "of the stock of Dahes," for instance.

In A.D. 600 Ibn Sayah speaks of his charger as "a noble one with white feet of the stock of Yemen of the strain of Wajid and Lahik." This is probably the first mention of strains.

Another mention by the Spanish Jew, Ali Bey, of strains shows that they were then named more after classes or districts than after tribe or owners.

He gives the fanciful attributes and values attached to them by townsfolk :-

Jilfan from Yemen, 2,000 piastres.

Seglawi, valued nearly as highly but there is a prejudice in favour of Jilfan. (Note, the strain of the Godolphin Arabian.)

El Mefki, 1,000 to 1,500 piastres.

El Sabi (Sabrean), almost equal in beauty. El Tredi (Rejected), 600 to 800 piastres.

El Nejdi. These are incomparable, of a quite arbitrary value, always over 2,000 piastres. Best of all. [Nejdi merely means any strain from Nejd.]

When a horse is called Kehilan alone the question now is always asked, "Kehilan of what strain," because all are Kehilan: Seglawi, Managhi, Abeyan, Hamdani, Wadnan, Jilfan; Samhan, Toessan, Shueyinan, Dahman, Saadan, Kebeyshan, Rabdan, Nowak, Harkan, etc.-all these are equally good, and Lady Anne Blunt was emphatic as to the error of describing ]ilfan, Managhi, or Dahman as at all inferior, nor have they any distinguishing hall-marks such as those claimed by Islamic writers and their European copyists.

The idea that the Bedouins only mate certain strains to the same strain or to a closely allied strain is entirely false. A fast and good horse of any pure strain is equally valued. Among modern townsfolk and dealers Seglawi has got a special reputation because it is the chief strain known to Europeans. So everything for sale is called Seglawi.

A naturalized American writer, Carl Raswan, but who is not of Oriental origin, who recently published a book on Arabia, has also fallen into the quick-sands. Though he begins by giving us three strains instead of the mythical five, he not only assigns three opposite types to them, but actually includes the generic term Kehilan as one of them, with a warning that it must not be crossed with the others. This is like saying that no Thoroughbred should be crossed with the Matchem or Herod strain!

He then proceeds to give us a quite fantastic table of the relative incompatibility of strains in which he is unable to resist the glamour of the "Prophet's Five," which reappear in full force backed up by another Dinari Five! and the bar sinister of the Managhi strain is delineated in warning black!

There is not the faintest truth in the assertion that the Managhi strain "taints" the pure Arab strains, for it is as pure as the rest; or that it is "coarse" or ugly or is speedier or taller, for it is the same as the rest 1

1 It is interesting to note that while asserting the black origin of this strain, bred from an unknown Kadish mare, he later speaks of this same strain being kept "pure'. in one family, Purity cannot be claimed for a mongrel strain,

He admits, and in fact boasts, that his sources of information are not from the desert tribes, as indeed we guessed, and his stories certainly bear the "suburban" stamp of the borderland towns; but the climax is surely reached when he claims for them "an especial value because they could not have originated among the simple nomads of the desert," and had he not told us he had been to Arabia, anyone might have concluded that, like some others, he had gone no farther than Syria or Irak.

The story of Mu'niqi (correct spelling, Managhi) is decidedly one of those which has no place in desert tradition; what he calls the "new and flowery magic carpet placed under the feet of the Arab steed by the fervour of religious leaders and the wealth and splendour of the Prophet, Sultans, Shahs, and Indian Maharajahs" is altogether too new and flowery for serious consideration. It belongs to what Lady Anne Blunt called "the atmosphere of romantic fable, spurious tradition dressed up in the garments of a new religion."

The origin of all this confused information is an invention of the half-caste horse dealers of the borderland towns, whose talk of a coarse plain-headed strain endowed with superior speed helps to sell their half-caste stock whose appearance is common. During the last half century, and especially the post-war period, the already doubtful Arab strains of the north have been crossed with inferior weedy Thoroughbreds. Mares in foal were taken to the interior, whence their produce was brought back in due course by town Arabs sent to buy horses "from the desert," and sold to Syria, India, and Egypt for racing. If pedigrees were asked for, the reply was "Managhi" or "Jilfan," which covered defective type.

Some of the derelict army mares helped to mongrelize the stock of Irak, and Walers too were left behind even after the massacres ordered when the allied troops retired.

Already in 1878 the tale of Managhi and Jilfan had deceived the British Consul at Aleppo.

This is how the horses Yataghan and Naomi came to be imported and registered in the General Stud Book as Managhis Mr Skene found out too late that he had been duped. Yataghan's portrait shows his common type.

Naomi was eventually purchased by Mr Huntingdon, of the United States, whose disappointment was voiced in sheaves of letters to Mr Blunt, in which he called the Oriental horse-dealing confraternity by names whose picturesque fluency rivalled the best Oriental traditions of ancestral curses.

The idea of three types repeated by Mr Raswan seems to have been extracted from the Algerian mass of myths and mixed with the story of the "tainted" strain, for in Arabia Managhi was on the contrary considered one of three most noble ones Mr Raswan also adds what seem to be entirely personal warnings and prophecies as to the dire results of ignoring his advice

It is incorrect that Managhi are bony, coarse headed and masculine, and must never be crossed with Seglawi, Hadban, Hamdani, Abeyan, or "Kuhaylan" (This use of the generic term confusingly sweeps away the whole of the Arabian breed !)

If "Kuhaylan," he says, is mated to "Mu'niqi." the produce will have a large bony frame, will be ugly, coarse-headed, heavy in croup, and thick-necked (This latter is amusing in view of his interpretation of "Mu'niqi as long-necked.) If sire is Seglawi and dam Mu'niqi, things will be even worse Yet the best tribes use these combinations of blood. Notably Abbas gave 3.485 ghazis for the Kehileh mare Nawmah, whose sire was a Managhi horse by a Seglawi out of a Managhieh, and he also bought at high prices four Seglawieh mares in foal to a Managhi of the Anazeh.

In view of Mr Raswans assertion that "Mu'niqi mares are coarse and masculine and Seqlawi stallions feminine in appearance and Hadbans coarse in texture of coat, "it may be of interest to record that Wazir, Mesaoud, Hazzam, and many other Seglawis bred from most famous desert strains were essentially masculine in beauty, and some of the most famous Managhi stallions were so exquisite as to be of feminine appearance.

The Hadban Enzeyhi stallion imported from the Ateybeh tribe by the Blunts had a strikingly wonderful golden bay silky coat like the finest and softest satin plush.

Harsh coarse hair or a stiff curly tail in any strain would indicate some reversion to common blood.

Considering Mr Raswans condemnation of the Managhi strain (coloured a sinister black in his sample pedigree) as "tainted" and his warning to breeders against the effects of its "contamination," It is a remarkable fact that he himself in 1926, acting as agent for Mr W K Kellog in the United States, purchased from Crabbet Stud at a cost of three thousand guineas two mares and a filly foal of that very strain, and what is more, one of the mares was in foal to a "Kuhaylan" stallion and the other to a Hamdani, and they were themselves bred from "Kuhaylan" sires - one of them for two successive generations - and the great-grandam was from a Seglawi stallion! This was just the exact breeding Mr. Raswan professes to condemn.

We must never forget that the Darley Arabian was a Managhi of superlative quality and proved the world's most celebrated sire never surpassed and whose blood saturates the racehorse in hundreds of thousands of repeats.

It may be added that a colt of this tabooed Mu'niqi strain produced by one of these mares and containing a concentration of all these allegedly horrible combinations of blood won two championships for his owner in the United States!

So far from being of base origin the Managhi strain.- says Lady Anne Blunt, is "greatly prized by the desert tribes and ranks with all the best in Arabia now as it was when the Darley was foaled two hundred years ago."

Beteyen Ibn Mirshid (supreme Sheykh of the Anazeh) had a most famous and beautiful Abeyeh Sherrakieh mare whose sire was a Managhi of Ibn Gufeyfi. Imported to Crabbet her produce numbered fifty-six champions to March 1937 and a number of race winners, including the famous Ramla and the World's Champion Shareer and Champion Silver Fire.

"We saw a horse to-day of considerable reputation as a sire for no other reason than that he is a Managhi of Ibn Sbeyel and looked on with awe for his breeding, as he is a mere pony.”

Ibn Sbeyel's Managhis are celebrated all over the desert and accepted as mazbut 1 by all the central tribes," so we may take it that Mr. Raswan has been seriously misinformed, and is merely repeating the gossip of the debased cosmopolitan towns of Syria,

1 Pure bred.

Managhi is not a "fixed race type," nor is Jilfan to be recognized by a straight, long or Roman-nosed profile. The futility of any claim to distinguish strains at sight is well exemplified by Mr. Raswan's own illustration of the ideal Seglawi type, for as a matter of fact the horse illustrated by him is a well-known Kehilan Jellabi stallion called Nasr of Ali Pasha descent, bred by Prince Mohammed Ali in Egypt and raced there as Maniel. He was not a Seglawi at all! It is unfortunate to be obliged to criticize a writer whose ideals command sympathy and whose passionate love for all things Arabian has even extended to changing the name of Schmidt to that of Raswan (out of admiration for one of my horses), but it is impossible to allow his published statements to go uncontradicted, where they reflect upon the value of pure strains.

Further,. Kismet, quoted as a Managhi "unbeaten on the race track of Europe and Asia" and used as an example of the Managhi speed, was not a Managhi but entered in the General Stud Book without pedigree of any kind.

Lady Anne Blunt in 1917 said "I cannot discover any ground for the theory of certain strains having certain particular characteristics. There is no distinction drawn between them as Skene imagined and no Bedouin would dream of keeping them separately."

In her book, "Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates," she mentions certain strains as "outside strains." This she deleted in her annotated copy with the words "there are no outside strains - all are equal in blood,"

It must be pointed out that though oasis dwellers even in Nejd and tribes that have migrated north to the edge of. Ottoman territory accept the ordinary Moslem tradition, it is not so with the Nomad tribes to whom there is ho "Khamsa." What they say is that those are things the Northern folk "Ahl es Shemal" believe. The view of her Muteyti informant was, "Anyone who talks thus is fit to be shut up as a lunatic." We will leave it at that.

Individuals in all strains vary in perfection and it is in avoiding the imperfect that some breeders have achieved possesion of celebrated strains bred from horses of chosen conformation and have retained a consequently high reputation for fine mares.

Darwin, in the Origin of Species, says that this extreme divergence of livestock bred by different owners from exactly the same original material is due to the fact that not one man in a thousand has the eye and balanced judgment to become an outstanding breeder. Certain tribes and chieftains have this selective power by instinct, and some have not, and what may atone time be a centre of great celebrity may lose its reputation in the hands of a less competent generation. I have already pointed this out (p. 34).

As I have said, no strains (or as we call them in England, families) have any fundamental distinguishing characteristics by which they may be known from other strains. Kehilan meaning Thoroughbred, all strains belong to it. To give an example, all our stock is registered Thoroughbred, and we have the Godolphin, Darley Arabian and Byerley Turk strains, and the successive substrains such as Eclipse, Herod, Matchem, Stockwell, Touchstone, Hermit, St. Simon, Bend Or, etc., while in the female line there are all the Bruce Lowe strains, or families, of famous foundation mares subdivided again with Sunshine, Agnes, Pocohontas, Hawthorn, and other noted strains whose blood breeds winners.

It would therefore be nonsense to say that no Thoroughbred should be crossed with any other of its own strains or that the Agnes strain taints the Matchem strain! Yet this is in substance what Algerian authors and Mr. Raswan say about the Thoroughbred Kehilan, and as explained above it is self-contradictory and unfounded.

No one can possibly claim to distinguish the Bruce Lowe families at sight by looking at the mares, though the immediate progeny of certain sires may sometimes be recognizable; but if half a dozen mares bred from different families from the same sire were shown side by side, no sane person would be bold enough to claim that he could indicate their respective Bruce Lowe numerals.

The stock bred by certain tribes may at certain times be better or worse than that of others and temporarily more highly valued owing to the breeders having better or worse judgment in mating their mares.

A good Seglawi has just the same points as a good Managhi or a good Hadban. A strain is named and valued after ownership, characteristics or performance of some famous horse or mare, whose progeny is valued as we value the strains of special Derby and Oaks winners.

In this way certain strains may suddenly become of greater value than others. just as the dams of Derby winners leap into the limelight. When we speak therefore of the best strains we mean those which may have been specially celebrated at some special time.

It might be possible periodically (but this is doubtful) to pick out horses bred by certain tribes or certain districts, but only because their owners have favoured the progeny of individual sires which stamp their offspring.

When asked what she thought of the strain of one of Mr. Bradley's American Importations, Lady Anne Blunt replied: "Kehilan Heifi is a good strain, but not in the least better than any other. It got a certain reputation from a Heifieh mare which belonged to Turkl Ibn Mehed, Sheykh of the Fedaan, when he was killed in war against the Roala, who captured the mare."

This idea of selective strain breeding is quite a modern one taken from Algeria, and has been exploited by certain travellers who cannot get rid of the flamboyances of horse dealers' rhetoric glorified by Abd el Kader.

They are not satisfied with the simplicity of nomad principles, but are ever on the search for some complicated new theory.

Any exclusive breeding would require a far greater number of horses than Arabia has got at its command. When the Blunts (having been at first imbued with this theory) asked why a certain famous mare had been mated in divergence to what they thought was the exclusive system, the Nejd owner laughed and replied: "All are Kehilan - what more do you want?"

The noble tribes divide their mares into three categories :

(1) The Mazbutat (authentic) mares of absolutely certain pedigree, their ancestors having been from time immemorial in the tribe. From these alone colts are chosen as stallions for the tribe, all others being sold away as yearlings.

(2) Mares captured from other noble tribes and their descendants. These are often authentic, their pedigree being known. But their colt produce is declassed for breeding, or was so fifty years ago, and even one of their own Mazbutat mares, if lost and bred away from the tribe, remained on her return declassed, as they believe in telegony and that a previous mating affects later progeny.

(3) Mares of unknown pedigree. These in the best tribes are used for riding only. They go by the name of "Shemalieh," Northerners, or "Kadisheh," mares of no breed, the Mazbutat mares being sometimes called "Nejdieh," of Nejd, in distinction, though there is no such thing as a Nejd breed.

All authentic mares claim to be descended from certain original strains of Kehilan blood. The most notable are the Seglawi, Managhi, Abeyan, Hamdani, Dahman, Hadban, Jilfan, Toessan, Saadan, and Wadnan. The pedigrees are chiefly remembered through the dams, the blood of the sire being taken for granted as always beyond question, because no man would send his mare to an underbred horse.

These pedigrees are not written in the desert but kept by oral tradition. Within the tribe the blood of each mare is of common notoriety and so is not a subject for deception, but strangers need to be on their guard.

Northern breeders, contaminated by contact with the townsmen and their horses, are justly considered to become careless about their mares. There are men in Arabia as in all countries whose judgment is bad, or again, tribes which are too weak to retain their best mares, these being raided from them by the more powerful Sheykhs. The blood remains, but not the best individual merit.

This is the principle on which all Kehilan nomenclature is arrived at. First the name of the horse's strain, followed by the names of the men who held it; or sometimes instead of the name of the owner we find added to it the characteristic of certain mares such as "dark" or "grey," but this does not mean that the whole strain is marked by this peculiarity. No strain has any special type or colour.

Abeyan is supposed to have originated when a cloak, "Abayeh," which fell from the rider was held aloft by his mare's tail. Dahman is from "Dohm," dark-coloured (not from the colour of the mare but from the black ass which fostered the foal!) Managhi from the partition curtain of a tent is given by some nomads, but this and other renderings seem far-fetched, and a more obvious derivation is from "Anak," the bounding gallop which always goes unrecognized by translators. In Syria we hear of its meaning "long-necked," but length is not indicated in the word. The name following Kehilan is almost always that of a man or a place, such as Kehilan Nowak or Kehilan Rodan; literally Nowak's Thoroughbred, or Rodan's Thoroughbred. Again, they would speak of a mare as Nejdieh, as we might say a Compton mare. This might be of any strain, but the place where it was bred would ensure pure blood and high quality.

When names get too numerous some are dropped, and the Seglawi Jedrans of Ibn Sudan have dropped the Jedran and remain Seglawi of Ibn Sudan.

The name of the main strain never changes, but the substrains are often altered as time goes on, as can be seen from the above.

It cannot be too emphatically stated that to speak of the "Seglawi type" or the "Managhi type" and so forth is pure nonsense and based on post-Islamic errors. The first-class Arabian type is the same of whatever strain his dam may be.

The impossibility of attributing certain characteristics to certain name strains is easily demonstrated. The name of the strain' is transmitted by the dam only; thus you could have a mare of the Seglawi strain, only a small proportion of whose blood would be Seglawi. The whole of the male ancestors might be of other strains.

Any man who boasts that he can distinguish a horse's strain at sight cannot have considered the fact that it is mathematically impossible.

In the above case the proportion of the Seglawieh mare’s blood is eleven to three against. Carrying this back two dozen generations, the odds against are sixteen million, two hundred and seventy-seven thousand, two hundred and sixteen to twenty-four!

It is only in rare cases that mares can be mated for many generations to horses of their own strain, as in the case of the Krushiehs of Muteyr.

STRAINS

Examples of Strains

"Kehilan" is the generic term, feminine "Kehileh," or before a vowel "Kehilet," e.g. Kehilan Musenneh, Kehilet Afras, Kehileh Rodanieh. (You cannot say "Kehileh Afras" or "Kehilet Rodanieh.")

Example of the main strain divided by the addition of the owner's name and sub- divided by that of his family:

These were four brothers of the family of Ibn ed Derri called Jedran, Obeyr, Rejeb, and El Abd (who was the son of a slave). Each owned mares of the Seglawi strain of Ibn ed Derri. Jedran's strain became the most famous and was called Seglawi Jedran of Ibn ed Derri. Later they were carried on by Sheykhs called Ibn Sudan and Ibn Sbeyni, and for example became Seglawi Jedran of Ibn Sbeyni. Others became S. Semneh and S. Marighi. The other brothers bred less famous stock.

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