By Edouard Al Dahdah

Edouard Al Dahdah offered an exten­sive report and analysis regarding the indige­nous Desert Arabian horses remaining in their areas of origin and adja­cent Arabic states at the Institute’s February 2005 Sympo­sium on Preser­va­tion. This article, in two parts, is adapted from Mr. Al Dahdah’s presen­ta­tion. Both parts were previ­ously published in Al Khaima,  the Institute’s maga­zine (part 1 in vol. II no. 2; part 2 in vol. 3 no. 1) as “The State of Arabian Breeding in its Area of Origin.” This article is copy­right by Mr. Al Dahdah and the Insti­tute for the Desert Arabian Horse, with all rights reserved.

Today I will not be telling you romantic stories of heroic Bedouin warriors mounted on coura­geous war mares attacking an enemy camp at dusk. Rather, we’ll be looking at more sobering facts which I hope will alert you to the neces­sity and urgency of acting to preserve the Desert Arabian horse in its home­land before it is too late. I will begin first with a bit of context and some defi­n­i­tions. The word Bedouin comes from the Arabic bedu, which means “steppe nomads,” as opposed to hadar, the Arabic word for “settled people.” The Bedouin are Arabic-​​speaking nomadic camel and sheep herders who live within the limits of Arabia Deserta. The Bedouin, and no other group, are the orig­inal custo­dians of the Desert Arabian horse. Arabia Deserta is the home­land of Desert Arabian horses. It is by defi­n­i­tion the area of maximum exten­sion of Bedouin nomadic migra­tions. Wher­ever these Bedouin used to go looking for pastures and water for their camels and sheep, the horses went with them; where the Bedouin didn’t go, you did not have orig­inal Desert Arabian horses.

Histor­i­cally, raiding was the main­stay of the Bedouin economy. Bedouin either raided each other or invaded settled people. Some­times the Bedouin over­came their mutual antag­o­nisms and a new factor, often of a reli­gious nature, caused them to unite and burst out of the desert to conquer neigh­boring settled areas. This has happened repeat­edly in the course of history. The most signif­i­cant such occur­rence was in the seventh century, under the Prophet Muhammad when Bedouin armies — united by a new reli­gion, Islam — poured out of Arabia Deserta and conquered the whole area of the world between Spain and China. At the begin­ning of the nine­teenth century, the Bedouin united under the banner of a reformed creed of Islam, Wahhabism, and created the first Wahhabi state. Yet another outburst took place in the twen­tieth century, under Ibn Saud, the founder of the second Wahhabi state.

So there were times when the Bedouin left Arabia Deserta and invaded other areas of the Arab world and beyond. We there­fore need to distin­guish between Arabia Deserta, which is the area of the Arab world that consti­tutes the home­land of the Bedouin (and there­fore of the Desert Arabian horse as well), and the other Arab areas, mostly popu­lated by settled people, that are not orig­inal to the Bedouin and their Desert Arabian horses. The impor­tance of this distinc­tion will become obvious later in the course of this discussion.

Arabia Deserta was for 400 years, more or less, directly under the control of the Ottoman Empire. After World War I, the British and French colo­nial powers took over the dying Ottoman Empire, and carved Arabia Deserta into a number of new coun­tries sepa­rated by arti­fi­cial borders, not more than virtual straight lines running across the desert. However, from a geograph­ical, histor­ical, cultural, ethnic, and economic point of view, Arabia Deserta is one single entity. It includes all of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and most of Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Oman. You can still find desert-​​bred Arabian horses, bred by the Bedouin, all over Arabia Deserta. Other Arab coun­tries — Egypt (excluding the Sinai Penin­sula and directly adjoining areas), Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the Sudan, Mauri­tania, Lebanon, Pales­tine, as well as the state of Israel (excluding the Negev and some parts of Upper Galilee, in which Bedouin popu­la­tions are present) — are not part of Arabia Deserta and do not qualify as home­lands of the Desert Arabian horse. Certainly, some of the best Arabian horses today are bred in coun­tries like Egypt and Tunisia, which are not orig­inal home­lands of the Desert Arabian horse. But the ances­tors of these horses were imported to these coun­tries from Arabia Deserta, just as they were imported to Britain, France, or the United States.

During the past century, all these coun­tries of Arabia Deserta went through enor­mous trans­for­ma­tions that led to the disap­pear­ance of the nomadic lifestyle. The nomads of Arabia Deserta (the Bedouin) are now settled. They live in houses equipped with elec­tricity, air condi­tioning, and tele­phones; their sons and daugh­ters go to school, where they study medi­cine and computer engi­neering. Trucks and cars have long replaced camels and horses as means of trans­porta­tion, and national iden­ti­ties — Saudi, Kuwaiti, Syrian, etc. — have super­seded (but not completely over­taken) former tribal iden­ti­ties (Ruwaili from Ruwalah, Sham­mari from Shammar, Mutairi from Mutair, etc.). A young man from the Shammar born in Syria will view himself as Syrian and Sham­mari, while his Kuwaiti-​​born first cousin will iden­tify himself as Kuwaiti and Sham­mari. Their fathers still rode horses in the desert, and their grand­fa­thers and great-​​grandfathers partic­i­pated in tribal wars against other Bedouin.

Today’s Bedouin are very proud of that heritage, as can be witnessed by the flour­ishing of Web sites and chat rooms in Arabic on the Internet dedi­cated to the discus­sion of Bedouin heroes, tribal genealo­gies, and all things Bedouin (although not much is mentioned about Desert Arabian horses, and the little mentioned is from Arabic trans­la­tions of the writ­ings of Western trav­elers; one example is the Mutayr tribe’s offi­cial Web site: http://www.mutair.net).

The impact of moder­nity on Desert Arabian horse-​​breeding has been cata­strophic. The grounds for main­taining Arabian horses in Arabia Deserta were economic (as a means of trans­porta­tion), mili­tary (as a war machine), and social (as a source of pres­tige), and all three ceased to exist by the 1960s. With the disap­pear­ance of these reasons, the very exis­tence of the Desert Arabian horse was threatened.

In addi­tion to the intru­sion of moder­nity into Bedouins’ lives, other factors have affected Arabia Deserta: Droughts have had devas­tating effects on camel and sheep herds, and have forced many tribes to settle or relo­cate to another area or country. The 1948–1952 drought years were partic­u­larly deadly, with camel herds in Syria reduced by up to 70 percent. Wars between neigh­boring coun­tries (Iraq and Kuwait, North and South Yemen) or civil wars within a country (Jordan 1970, Iraq now) and under­lying tensions in a strategic and polit­i­cally trou­bled area have also contributed to the decline in Arabian horse breeding.

Amer­i­cans and other West­erners were indeed fortu­nate to have imported most of their Desert Arabian horses from Arabia Deserta before and during these trans­for­ma­tions, allowing them to main­tain and expand the number of horses tracing exclu­sively to horses imported directly from Arabia Deserta. The sad truth is that, as we shall see, not much remains of that beau­tiful horse in Arabia Deserta itself.

Let’s now turn to reviewing the state of Desert Arabian horse breeding in the coun­tries that consti­tute its orig­inal home­land: Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, and the six Gulf coun­tries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates).

Desert Arabians in Yemen

There is a clear tendency in Arab towns­folk tradi­tion (as opposed to Bedouin tradi­tion) to trace back every­thing perceived as ‘ancient’ and ‘authentic’ to Yemen, from folk­songs to tribal genealo­gies. That is prob­ably why the Desert Arabian horse is thought by many non-​​Bedouin Arabs to orig­i­nate in Yemen, while Bedouin tradi­tion ascribes this horse to the area of Nejd in central Arabia. Most of present-​​day Yemen was known as Arabia Felix (Happy Arabia) by the ancient Romans, to distin­guish it from Arabia Deserta. The fertile valleys, the moun­tains covered with snow, and the large river valleys (wadis in Arabic) earned Yemen this beau­tiful name. The rest of Yemen, including the north­ern­most provinces of al-​​Jawf and Sa’ada, as well as the Western Tihama provinces and part of eastern Hadra­mawt, are part of Arabia Deserta per se.

A recent busi­ness trip to Yemen allowed me to learn that the great tribal confed­er­a­tions there still own a good number of desert-​​bred Arabian horses. The current government-​​supported Sheykh of one the largest such confed­er­a­tions, the Baqeel, owns about 40 Arabians, and he has appar­ently gifted one of those to the previous U.S. ambas­sador to his country. Another smaller tribe, the Juhannam, located in the Tihamah coastal desert on the Red Sea, is said to still keep rela­tively signif­i­cant numbers (several dozen) of Arabian horses. A pretty bay mare I saw in the streets of San’aa, the capital, was said to come from this tribe. Such short trips are by no means suffi­cient to yield enough infor­ma­tion about horse breeding in any country, and it is a heresy at this stage for me to say or write anything defin­i­tive about Arabian horses in Yemen. All I can say for now is that one pecu­liar feature of the Arabian horses of Yemen is that they don’t seem to have strains in the way the Bedouin of Northern, Eastern, and Central Arabia under­stand them — as family names for horses trans­mitted through dam lines (matri­lineal descent).

Desert Arabians in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates

Princely and ‘sheykhly’ fami­lies in these small oil-​​rich Arab coun­tries still keep small numbers of Desert Arabian lines, prob­ably not more than a couple dozen horses regis­tered by World Arabian Horse Orga­ni­za­tion (WAHO) in each country. There may be a few more unreg­is­tered horses in the hands of other indi­vid­uals. The Qatar ruling family keeps a few orig­inal desert horses mostly from the Wadnan and Hamdani strains. The Sultanate of Oman was an impor­tant provider of Desert Arabians to the regional powers (Egypt) and the global ones (Britain, often through India). I cannot verify the number of Desert Arabian horses orig­i­nating from Oman that are currently in the hands of the ruling family.

The UAE ruling Sheykhs have a few Desert Arabians from the Tuwaisan and Jellabi strains, whose ances­tors were received as gifts from the neigh­boring kingdom of Bahrain. There have always been, and there continue to be, frequent exchanges of such gifts between the ruling fami­lies of these four states, plus Bahrain.

Starting from the 1950s and ‘60s, many Bedouin Sheykhs (the majority from the Anazah confed­er­a­tion) left Syria as a result of the socialist agri­cul­tural reform poli­cies adopted by the govern­ment, which sought to confis­cate the vast agri­cul­tural estates of these Sheykhs-​​turned-​​landowners.

A number of these Sheykhs — espe­cially those who, for one reason or another, were not on good terms with Saudi Arabia, the other major recip­ient of disaf­fected Syrian and Iraqi tribes — moved to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates where their pres­tige and noble lineage guar­an­teed them a warm welcome and large subsi­dies from local rulers, who also granted them citi­zen­ship. Many Bedouin clans followed their Sheykhs into this new “Arabian Far West” where job oppor­tu­ni­ties deriving from the oil wind­fall abound. Some of these clans took their camel herds and horses with them. So these Gulf states ended up with some Desert Arabian horses from Northern Arabia Deserta (the part known as the Syrian Desert). Ancil­lary to these events, the horse export market from Syria to the Gulf Coun­tries flour­ished, and, as oil revenues skyrock­eted throughout the 1970s, reports abounded of Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Emirati Sheykhs/​businessmen flying back to Syria to obtain Desert Arabian horses — and Arabian hawks, camels, and goats — from the Syrian Desert.

Desert Arabians in Bahrain

Many Western preser­va­tion breeders are more or less familiar with the Desert Arabian horses of Bahrain. The writ­ings and regular reports of foreign visi­tors to this little arch­i­pelago have popu­lar­ized the living Bahraini herd. More recently, WAHO held its confer­ence there, allowing more people to visit the country and learn more about its horses.

The Royal Stud of Bahrain now keeps a nice and infor­ma­tive Web site about its herd of Desert Arabians at http://www.bahrainroyalstud.com/arabhorse.htm. One can refer to the Web site for up-​​to-​​date infor­ma­tion about the number of extant Bahrani strains, their history, and photos and videos of repre­sen­ta­tives of each strain. Addi­tional Bahraini Desert Arabian horses are in the hands of other members of the Bahrain Royal family, espe­cially the current King’s uncles, which do not appear on this Web site.

I will defer a more detailed discus­sion of the status of Arabian horses in Bahrain, including its fragility and the chal­lenges it may face in the future, to another venue. Suffice it to say here that the Desert Arabian herd of Bahrain, with its twenty-​​plus different strains and rela­tive genetic diver­sity, is today, along with the Tunisian and Syrian herds, the main hope for outcrossing Egyptian-​​heavy and inbred Desert Arabian lines in Western coun­tries, and that Bahraini horsemen are aware of the impor­tance of this price­less heritage.

Desert Arabians in Saudi Arabia

According to Bedouin tradi­tion, the areas of the Arabian Penin­sula which consti­tute the present Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are the cradle of the Desert Arabian horse. They are also home to most of the horse-​​breeding tribes. Starting from the first decade of the last century and up to the 1930s, King Abdul Aziz Al Saud (known to Arabs as Ibn Saud), whose family had ruled the greater part of the Arabian Penin­sula for most of the nine­teenth century, was able to crys­tal­lize the energy of the Bedouin tribes. Until then, the Bedouin had been focused on inter-​​tribal warfare and faction­alism, and Ibn Saud was able to turn this energy from a force of divi­sion to a force of unifi­ca­tion. Ibn Saud united most Arabian tribes (Mutayr, Atayba, al-​​Dhafir, al-​​Ajman, Harb, al-​​Suhul, Qahtan, Subei’, Bani Khaled, al-​​Dawasir, Bani Hajr, al-​​Murrah, al-​​Sherarat, al-​​Hawazin, Bani Atiyah, Juhaynah, Balii, plus some sections of the Anazah and Shammar) under the flag of the Wahhabi creed, a rigorist doctrine of Islam.

After their adop­tion of Wahhabism, the tribes became, as is often the case with new converts to any creed, quite extreme in their obser­vance of the new doctrine. Previ­ously, most Bedouin were, in Western terms, “non-​​denominational Muslims.” They didn’t fast regu­larly (rather, a constant state of their harsh nomadic lifestyle), they were influ­enced by all sorts of rites and super­sti­tions, and they did not dili­gently go on the annual pilgrimage, the Hajj. Ibn Saud orga­nized the tribes into a regular army (the Ikhwan, Arabic for “Brothers,” as in brothers in reli­gion) that conquered the terri­tory of what is now Saudi Arabia. They would have gone much farther if the British and their own king had not stopped them. The British hastily imposed bound­aries between the lands conquered by Ibn Saud and the neigh­boring British protec­torates of Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait.

The Ikhwan continued raiding in Iraqi and Jordanian terri­tory, and Ibn Saud went through the greatest diffi­cul­ties before he finally crushed the rebel­lion, arrested its main leaders, disbanded the whole Ikhwan, and took away their primary mili­tary weapon and means of trans­porta­tion: the Desert Arabian horse. He had the horses and camels of the Bedouin tribes collected and concen­trated in his stud farms and accel­er­ated the settle­ment of the tribes.

Starting from the 1960s, the oil boom and the resulting devel­op­ment of modern means of trans­porta­tion and commu­ni­ca­tion brought about immense changes to the Kingdom, with conse­quences on its economy and society that are still being felt today. Saudi Arabia was increas­ingly becoming a magnet for Bedouin and non-​​Bedouin indi­vid­uals from all over the Arab world and beyond, a sort of Far West at the time of the Gold Rush in Cali­fornia, for whoever was seeking rapid wealth and seem­ingly unlim­ited oppor­tu­ni­ties. The Saudis were them­selves becoming more and more exposed to the rest of the Arab countries.

During the same period, a number of part­bred Arabian horses from Iraq and Lebanon made their way to Saudi Arabia for racing purposes. These horses with high percent­ages of English Thor­ough­bred blood had already over­taken the race­tracks of Beirut, Baghdad, and major venues in Egypt, almost completely driving out the Desert Arabian that had hith­erto formed the bulk of the race­horses at these tracks until the mid-​​1950s. Some of these part­bred horses found their way into Saudi royal studs. The concen­tra­tion of very large numbers of Saudi Arabian desert horses in a small number of stud farms increased their vulner­a­bility and the odds of cont­a­m­i­na­tion by foreign blood.

Not all the royal herds were equally affected. It is said that at least two Saudi princes keep a fair number of Desert Arabians from old desert blood­lines, predom­i­nantly from the Hamdani and the Swayti al-​​Farm strains. Outside the royal herds, it is rela­tively cumber­some to sort out which tribes and clans have kept their horses pure and which have not. Fortu­nately, the vast majority of the horses that came to the USA from Saudi Arabia arrived before these changes took place, or just as the country was under­going its rapid modern­iza­tion, and so some of this blood is preserved in the USA until today.

Iraq

Iraq is unique among Arab coun­tries in that it is the only one with the poten­tial to become a regional power. It has the human, histor­ical, agri­cul­tural, and water poten­tial of Egypt, combined with the oil, wealth, and strategic poten­tial of Saudi Arabia.

Histor­i­cally, the pashas, the land-​​owning aris­toc­racy, and the wealthy merchants of Iraq have played roles similar to their Egyptian coun­ter­parts (the pashas) in Desert Arabian breeding. In addi­tion to its settled popu­la­tion, Iraq is today home to the largest Bedouin tribes, now entirely settled: large sections of the Anazah, most of the Shammar, the Jubur, the Tai, and all of the Dulaym, the Muntafiq, the Bani Lam, the Ubayd, the Juhaysh, and many others live there. Some even claim that up to 40 percent of Iraq’s popu­la­tion is composed of Bedouin tribes, often settled in areas with names now familiar to most of us. The Shammar and the Tai make up a large part of the northern Iraqi town of al-​​Mawsil (Mossoul). The Zoba tribe of the Shammar confed­er­a­tion form a third of the popu­la­tion of now infa­mous al-​​Fallujah and all of the town of Abu Ghraib. The Dulaym are settled in Al-​​Qaim and Ramadi. Many of these tribes have been breeding Arabian horses for centuries and have continued doing so until very recently.

It seems that it is Iraq’s sad fate to be invaded by the domi­nating global power of the time. It was invaded by the Mongols, the Ottomans, the British, and now the Amer­i­cans (with the British yet again). The British army invaded Iraq for the first time during World War I in 1914 and ulti­mately with­drew, leaving tens of thou­sands of English Thor­ough­breds and Australian Walers behind. These horses even­tu­ally mixed with the local horse popu­la­tion, a good part of which was of Desert Arabian stock. This resulted in a stan­dard breed of horses that is known today all around the Middle East as the ‘Iraqi.’ These horses were exported all over the Middle East — to Lebanon (some­times making their way from Lebanon to Syria), Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and else­where, and had consid­er­able racing success wher­ever they went. They were also widely used for breeding in all these countries.

Inside Iraq, the Iraqi govern­ment bought many of these part­bred Arabs for its state-​​owned stud farms, and made sure these horses were distrib­uted in stal­lion depots all across Iraq. Their impact on areas inhab­ited by Bedouin horse-​​breeding tribes was simply devas­tating. A stal­lion depot in the village of Al-​​Bughah in the Iraqi Jazirah (Upper Mesopotamia) located in the midst of the dira (nomadizing area) of the Juhaysh inflicted huge damage upon the Desert Arabian horse popu­la­tion of that tribe and neigh­boring ones. Many Bedouin would bring mares to these govern­ment stal­lion depots and breed them a horse that was usually a part­bred because it was conve­nient or simply out of igno­rance. Today, more than 90 percent of the Iraqi stud­book accepted by WAHO is composed of such part­bred horses. At the time the Iraqi stud­book was in the works, many Desert Arabian horses were NOT regis­tered, either because the regis­tering author­i­ties discarded them or because the Bedouin refused to register them, for fear of confis­ca­tion by the Iraqi author­i­ties. The Iraqi Bedouin kept breeding these horses until the begin­ning of the 1990s, after which the survival of the fami­lies took prece­dence over the survival of their horses.

Another compli­cating factor, quite sepa­rate from the problem of Iraqi part­breds with English Thor­ough­bred blood, is the close inter­ac­tion of Arab tribes in the North of Iraq with Kurdish and Turcoman (settled) tribes that keep other indige­nous strains (Kurdish, Turcoman, Tazi, etc.). In northern Iraq, Kurdish and Arab areas overlap; there are many adjoining villages — one Arab, one Kurdish — and the horses often share the same pasture. Yet another aggra­vating factor was that, following the inva­sion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraqi mili­tary offi­cers (most of them of Jubur, Tai, Dulaym, and Shammar tribal back­grounds) brought back many horses as war prizes from the WAHO-​​approved registry in Kuwait. The vast majority of these Kuwaiti horses were not Desert Arabian. These horses — often with Crabbet, Polish, and other non-​​Desert Arabian blood — were then mixed with the local Iraqi stock throughout the nineties.

It seems impos­sible that amidst this grim back­ground, some Desert Arabian horses would have survived in Iraq uncon­t­a­m­i­nated. Never­the­less, in the face of all these hard­ships, limited numbers of Bedouin clans have kept many unreg­is­tered Desert Arabians pure, espe­cially in the North (among the Jubur, the Tai, and the Shammar) and the Center of the country (the Ageidat). There are, no doubt, some gems still to be discov­ered there. I would esti­mate there are perhaps 500‑1000 Desert Arabian horses remaining in Iraq, most of them not regis­tered in the Iraqi stud­book accepted by WAHO. To find them, it is neces­sary to go to the clans and fami­lies who have been breeding Desert Arabian horses for a long time and trans­mit­ting the horses from father to son. These are the people most likely to have remained adamant about the purity of the horses of their forefathers.

Syria

Syria is today home to most of the Anazah tribes and to some of the Shammar and other major horse-​​breeding tribes. About 2000 Desert Arabian horses from 40 different strains are regis­tered in the WAHO-​​approved stud­book, most of them Bedouin-​​bred. A second group of about 300 Bedouin horses that had been left out of the initial regis­tra­tion process was recently approved by WAHO. Together, these two Syrian stud­books account for the largest and most diverse group of Desert Arabian horses remaining in Arabia Deserta today (the Bahraini group is a close second).

The Syrian horse regis­tering commis­sion did quite a decent job of regis­tering the horses of the Bedouin and resisted various pres­sures to register non-​​Desert Arabian horses of doubtful back­ground. The pictures appended to this article show the huge variety found in Desert Arabian horses now living in Syria. All the horses from Syria pictured are either desert bred, or their sires and dams or all four grand­par­ents are desert bred. In some instances they were still bred by the same Shammar and Anazah Bedouin tribes that gave these horses their strain names some 150 to 200 hundred years ago (al-​​Khdilat for the Kuhaylan Khdili, Ibn Nowag for the Kuhalyan Nowag, Ibn Sahlan for the Ubayyan Seheili, al-​​Maraziq for the Saglawi Marza­kani, Ibn Jlaidan for the Kuhaylan Ibn Jlaidan, etc).

In other instances, the horse’s ances­tors were acquired by sheep-​​breeding tribes (called Shawaya), the names of which are less asso­ci­ated (at least by West­erners) with horse-​​breeding: the Agaydat, the Naim, the Bu Shaaban, etc. In the course of the second half of the twen­tieth century, the sheep-​​breeding tribes have grown wealthier than their more powerful, “more Bedouin” camel-​​breeding neigh­bors, mainly because they were closer to the best pastures and water than the camel-​​breeding tribes who were the tradi­tional horse-​​breeding tribes. When the Syrian govern­ment (and the French mandate before it) adopted the policy of settling the tribes, those tribes who were already herding sheep (which need more water and pastures than camels) or engaging in agri­cul­ture for part of the year obvi­ously had an incumbent’s advan­tage over the camel-​​herding tribes and were successful in holding the areas they had been culti­vating. Many of the Anazah camel-​​breeding tribes chose the exit option and moved to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf coun­tries. Some took their horses and camels with them (see above), but others kept them in the hands of their sheep-​​breeding neigh­bors. Thus, in many cases the sheep-​​breeding tribes ended up with some of the most valu­able Desert Arabian horses.

All these horses are an invalu­able resource for Desert Arabian breeders world­wide, who need to encourage Syrian Desert Arabian breeders to breed their horses to horses of similar or equally pure origins and not to horses of Polish, Crabbet, Russian, or French blood­lines, some­thing which the Syrian breeders are increas­ingly tempted to do. The Syrian stud­book is today where the USA stud­book was almost a hundred years ago. The over­whelming majority (about 85–90 percent) of the horses are Desert Arabian. It will take concerted efforts to keep this situ­a­tion from deteriorating.

Jordan

Only horses owned by the Jordanian Royal family were regis­tered in the Jordanian WAHO-​​approved stud­book, and none of those horses alive today are Desert Arabians.

The orig­inal Desert Arabian horses of the Royal Jordanian Stud have been bred with Crabbet and Spanish and other non-​​Desert Arabian blood­lines for about forty years now. Never­the­less, many unreg­is­tered horses are owned by Bedouin of the Huwaytat and Bani Sakhr tribes. Very few of these can qualify as pure Desert Arabians. The famous Ruwalah tribe of the Anazah tribal confed­er­a­tion has all but lost its Desert Arabian horses. Some years ago the Ruwalah brought ten of their horses to Lebanon for racing; these horses had 25 percent or more English Thor­ough­bred blood.

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