(Also included in this issue of the World
was Joyce Gregorian Hampshire's "extemporaneous" welcoming speech
to the 1990 Al Khamsa convention. She died before she could
edit it into written form. Charles and Jeanne Craver took on
the project for her.)
I WANT TO
GIVE YOU,
as best I can, some sense of what Al Khamsa is and what Al Khamsa
isn't. Because two directions of Al Khamsa horses have been
published, there is sometimes a sense that we are a registry.
This is not the case at all. Our group is primarily a fraternal
and educational group. We like each other, and we like to talk
about the horses which interest us.
Our work is to find out, through
study, documentation and research, as much as we can about the
Arabian horses of Bedouin origin as it exists today, or as its
descendants exist today in the United States, and then to share
this information with others
I think it is important to understand
that this is a very open group. You do not have to own an Al
Khamsa horse to become an Al Khamsan. All you have to do is
be interested in where the Arabian horse came from, what are
its Bedouin roots, what was the Arabian horse before it reached
the West, and how these concepts apply to the horses we have
in North America today.
Like any special interest - an interest
in a particular type of porcelain or china or painting or furniture
- this is a little bit of a quixotic interest. To someone else,
it may seem silly for a person who is only interested in the
works of a particular 18th century cabinetmaker to go into raptures
over a fragile table an ignore any number of nice, more modern
pieces. In a way, that's how most of us in Al Khamsa are. We
will go into ecstasies over something which fit into what we
are fascinated by, and be blind to many other beauties which
surround us but which simply don't happen to fit into our particular
sphere of interest.
It's important not to say that an Al
Khamsa horse is better than another horse. Better for what?
That's not the point. The point is: which horses today still
carry within them this antique lineage, this romantic connection
with the horse of Arabia Deserta ... the horse of the Bedouin?
There is a chapter in T.E. (Lawrence
of Arabia) Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," first published
in 1927 in a private edition, in which he tries to describe
for Western readers how black and white everything is in the
desert, that there are no shades of grey. That is how he phrased
it. When you're in the desert, it is just the sand and the sky
and survival. "This is my well and if you drink from it you're
dead." Everything is black and white.
Our culture's closest connection with
this attitude would be parts of the Old Testament, coming from
the same type of Semitic background: eye for eye, tooth for
tooth, this is right, this is wrong. The Ten Commandments, not
the Ten Suggestions.
Black and white is a very important part
of how the desert-dwelling Bedouin saw life. A horse was pure
or impure. I think to a Bedouin the concept of Egyptian-related
or Al Khamsa-related would be a bit amusing. It makes good sense
for us in our society, in the way we use horses. I use those
terms all the time. I have my Al Khamsa horses, I have my Al
Khamsa-related horses...that means something to me. It would
mean nothing to a Bedouin except these are a bunch of impure
horses whose mothers have been dishonored.
So when you get interested in the Al
Khamsa horse, you begin to take on a bit of the black/white,
yes/no, pure/impure attitude, and it's quite a job to keep that
attitude in its historical perspective: what you think or say
or write about reflects the people and their practices which
you are studying, not necessarily what you personally feel as
a 20th century American, or how you use horses.
Each Bedouin tribe had its own magic
blend of bloodlines, it own strain, its own group of horses
which, of course (in their view) were better than any other
tribe's group of horses. They were like secret weapons, faster
than another tribe's horses so that the tribe members could
live to run away and raid another day.
When you read the commentary of travelers
in the East regarding what can be learned from the Bedouins
about horses, it's often interesting to look between the lines.
Basically, what these travelers learned was the whatever Bedouin
tribe they were talking to bred the best, the fastest, the most
enduring horses, and that was it. Because, after all, what were
the Bedouins going to say: "We breed the sixth best horses
in the desert?" Of course not.
The wonderful thing about studying Al
Khamsa horses is that it gives you the vicarious pleasure of
traveling through books, through other people's words, through
old photographs, through sketches and engravings, in a world
which absolutely doesn't exist anymore - a warrior-based society
that had also a very gentle, very life-nurturing, very tender
side - an oral culture full of epics and poetry, and a culture
which raised, fortunately for us, the most exquisite horses
the world has ever seen.
They didn't look exquisite in their own
setting and in raid condition, however. When you look at early
photographs, those in the Raswan book, for instance, you see
little racks of bones standing there with their heads down and
their ears lopped to the side. How does national champion "so
and so" possibly have any relationship with this poor little
mare? But that poor little mare was probably pregnant, carrying
a man into battle, galloping miles, getting water every third
day if she was lucky, living, on a handful of dates. When she
was taken out of that context, as travelers often found, and
brushed more than twice in her lifetime, and given food and
water, all of a sudden the beauty was there.
To the Bedouin eye, the beauty was always
there. They knew. But they were seeing through a lens of practicality
which we don't have. We tend to want to see horses all plumped
up and pretty and shiny ... but it is the inner beauty of the
desert horse that really shines through.
The reason that all Arabian horses
are not Al Khamsa horses is that by definition, an Al Khamsa
horse has to trace in every line of its pedigree back to the
horse-raising Bedouin tribes of Arabia. For example, a vast
proportion of our Al Khamsa horses are Egyptian, but it isn't
their being Egyptian that makes them Al Khamsa. It is the fact
that the Egyptians got them from the Arabs. It is a quick and
very useful piece of information to say that this is an Egyptian
horse, but what makes it an Al Khamsa horse is that one step
further back to the desert Arabs.
In the West, we don't see thing nearly
as black and white as people living in the desert do. Our view
of horse breeds in Europe and America is entirely different
from the purity obsession of the horse-breeding Bedouin. We
create types. We need something heavy to pull cannons - okay,
you breed different things together and eventually you come
up with something you may call a Hanoverian. It can pull cannons
very nicely through the mud for the army. Latter you discover
it makes a tremendous sport horse too, if you've got the strength
to ride it. It is a breed, but it's made up of different good
horses selected for their qualities to create that breed.
Thoroughbreds, which come very close
to being as pure as the Arabian as a breed, are nevertheless
based on a mysterious foundation of royal mares in England.
Nobody is really quite sure what the royal mares were, but they
were top-crossed with oriental sires, some of whom were Arabian,
and some were from other eastern horse-breeding countries. Eventually,
they were selected for speed, and the modern Thoroughbred emerged
with its tremendous variation both in size and appearance; its
one constant was that it was bred for tremendous speed at short
distances.
Even the breeds that come closest to
being pure in the Bedouin sense of the word are not immune to
our tampering. The indigenous ponies which grow up in pockets
of Europe of in Britain are, as far as we can tell, indigenous
native breeds. In many cases they are much like prototypical
wild horses in that they will all be the same color, with no
markings. Even so, we can't resist tampering with them - throw
in an Arabian stallion for a couple of years to get them a little
higher up on the leg or a little more this or that.
This is a very roundabout way of saying
that Westerners have tended to treat the Arabian in exactly
the same way. They knew that the Arabian was a good horse in
many ways, that it had exceptional powers of endurance, that
it was a very easy keeper. The fact that it as beautiful was
a plus - people have always known that the breed was beautiful.
But in fact Arabians were selected for their endurance, their
easy keeping...the things that made a great light cavalry horse.
At one time, the British army resisted
riding Arabs because they were too small ... until the Indian
campaigns taught them that all the big horses dropped dead at
a certain point. It is a lot nicer to be on a small horse that
is alive and still carrying you, than standing next to your
big, impressive, dead horse!
So Arabs enjoyed a certain amount
of use as officers' mounts toward the end of the 19th century
during some of the Eastern campaigns
of the British army - but along with all the good qualities
of the Arab horse, the one thing the West could never get past
was that the horse was just too darn small. What are you going
to do with a 14, 14.1, 14.2 hand horse? So what if it can carry
280 pounds of officer and equipment for thousands of miles,
it's still too small. From the very beginning, tinkering with
the Arab blood and trying to produce an improved, Europeanized
Arab horse was just something that was done.
The people bringing Arab blood into Europe
and the first people bringing Arab blood into America were not
thinking in terms of preserving the Bedouin horse. Their thought
was that "whenever we need a Bedouin we can just zip back
to the desert and get one." They were trying to create,
for their own purposes, an Arab horse which would be more Westernized.
The very first American Arabian stud
book has a big section for the Americo-Arab, which was a cross
between Arabian horses and descendants of a horse named Henry
Clay, who was Randolph Huntington's
most admired horse. It's reported that
Henry Clay trotted something
like 75 miles with five people in the buggy, and was perfectly
fine and fit the next day. Sort of a prototypical Morgan type
of trotting horse. Henry Clay's blood crossed with the Arab
was considered to make the perfect horse for the Americas.
The same kind of thing was going on in
most European countries, and most countries that were importing
Arab horses - where various kinds of horses were considered
to be Arabs. We see this to this day. Schreyer's beautiful paintings
of Berbers in North Africa riding horses that are wearing North
African harness and blinders - and all horses that are "Eastern"
but not Arab - are constantly described as "The Bedouin on Horseback."
The Bedouin of Arabia was not a North African in a turban riding
a horse with blinkers. The Bedouin of Arabia was the guy in
the kaffiyeh riding a little mare with a chain around its nose.
It's a very specific thing we're talking about.
But to the Westerners, all those Eastern
horses were Arabs, the same way all those Eastern people were
Arabs: an Egyptian was an Arab, a Moroccan was an Arab, all
those people were Arabs, and their horses were Arabs. So we
have a vast number of Arabian horses today which are wonderful
horses, beautiful horses, have many fine qualities, but whose
pedigrees are an incredibly complex mix of blood: blood which
came from here, blood which came from there. Some of its Eastern
but not Arab, and these are accepted today as Arabian horses,
as they should be, because they are far more a breed than almost
any other breed that exists in the world today...and within
this context of purity and consistency, the Al Khamsa Arab selects
horses that are pure by Bedouin standards, not by Western standards,
not by European standards. Even a Bedouin would say, "This
is an Asil horse, this is a pure horse."
Those are the animals that we have become
obsessed with, finding out where they are, are they still alive,
do they have any offspring by appropriate mates? Then the lure
of the collector inevitable takes things to the point of ridiculousness.
It's not enough that two Al Khamsa horses be bred together,
but they must come from the same strain, the same background,
the same Arab tribe. We create breeding programs.
For the newcomer, especially, it's nice
to know that there is tremendous room within this definition
of Al Khamsa for complete creativity in establishing a program.
Fortunately, we have in this very small percentage of all living
Arabs today, a very wide range of foundation stock coming at
different times from different parts of the desert, which have
been bred together over the years in different patterns. Some
of these are fairly easy to describe, some you really have to
study in more detail. Some have very obvious practical reasons
for breeding together right away; some you are breeding for
something down the line, four or five generations away...
Today, the Arabian horses is seen
as boom and bust. Prices were driven up, up, up for a number
of unpleasant and venal reasons, none of which had absolutely
anything to do with the value of the horse or its well-being.
When this artificial market broke, the poor commodity was blamed.
In fact, the horse is the innocent bystander. It had nothing
to do with the human factors that drove the prices up. Poor
thing, it was just being a good horse.
