Why Purity is an Issue?! An Essay by Yasser Ghanim al-Tahawi
Studying the different episodes of the Arabian breed’s history is a very rewarding and enlightening process. Even for me as an Arab, I am still learning. I had some core knowledge driven from my culture as an Arab in general, and specifically of Bedouin origin, but there is a lot of historical context that I am still learning and trying to understand in a better way. Thanks to the research of Edouard Al-Dahdah and other Arab researchers, we are building a better understanding of the parameters that formed and maintained the culture around the breed, and allowed for the breed to survive many turbulent periods in its long history. It is a miracle that such a breed could remain largely pure and distinctive not only for a few centuries but for millennia, considering how widely celebrated and traded it was all over the ancient world over at least the last 14 centuries! Is Purity the Issue? A question was raised before during the famous dispute between the WAHO and AHRA around the purity of some WAHO horses imported to the US. At that time Kees Mol, the famous WAHO thinker, wrote in the 1998 WAHO official report: “The WAHO definition of a purebred Arabian was not a ‘compromise’ at all. It was adopted as the only possible definition of a purebred Arabian which could ACCURATELY AND HONESTLY reflect the reality of existing breed purity in any of the voting member registries, including the AHRA.” Just to recall together the mentioned WAHO definition, that Kees Mol mentioned, is: “A PURE-BRED ARABIAN HORSE IS ONE WHICH APPEARS IN ANY PURE-BRED ARABIAN STUD BOOK OR REGISTER LISTED BY WAHO AS ACCEPTABLE.” The report continues to justify this ambiguous definition by stating: “Our investigation revealed that even the simple requirement of pedigrees which trace in EVERY line to ‘the Orient’, could not be met by any of the 7 studbooks initially approved by WAHO.”
“The nomadic horse-breeding tribes did have very strong beliefs in purity and were undoubtedly master breeders. To them, their horses were a necessity, their strength and powers of endurance were vital lifelines. Pedigree aside, if a horse looked, performed and above all survived like an Arabian, then asil it must be.” “Every story has a beginning, and to go even further back in history, the uncompromising truth is that idea of the ‘purebred Arabian horse’ as a completely separate pure breed is simply not scientifically acceptable, on zoological, biological, archaeological, historical or geographical grounds. The lands from where the ‘breed’ is said to originate were never isolated.” This is the logic upon which the WAHO definition was made by the founders, and the philosophy behind a completely new world that was started by the WAHO in 1974 and allowed horses with proven impurity to become the vast majority of the so-called WAHO Arabians today. The report includes many examples of these horses with proven impurity! In this article I am not going to argue with every point in the WAHO report. I fully understand where they come from. Kees Mol in his frame of thought could not be more honest and true to his beliefs and cultural background, and so were the other WAHO founders, I assume. This is exactly the problem when cultural constructs are interpreted out of context through different cultural frameworks with insufficient knowledge and understanding of the original culture that created and shaped these constructs. In this article I am going to speak from the side of the original cultural framework of the Arabian horse. I will try to provide brief analysis of the values, drivers and the historical context that surrounded the breed over history. The reader can then relate this to some of the above arguments and try to find out for himself the key misunderstandings that led to the wrong conclusions about the notion of purity. Note: You may refer to a related article published in both the Khamsat magazine in the US and the Arabische Pferde magazine in Germany under the title “The Origin of the Strains”. Another article published on the Daughters of the Wind blog was titled: “The Reestablishment of the Arabian Breed” for more detailed analysis of the historical context.
Going through the introduction of this official WAHO report, we find more elaboration in statements like: “The Arabian horse always has been, and still is, surrounded by myths and fantasies, many of which were invented in the 18th and 19th centuries …”
1. Cultural Values
“The most persistent myth is that purity of blood as we now know it was always meticulously controlled from the time of the domestication of the first horse, and that the interior of the Arabian subcontinent was completely closed off to the rest of the world.”
Culture is key in this discussion. The Arabian horse is the product of the Arab Bedouin culture. This must be an axiom, which I think no one would deny. It is culture that should serve as our primary reference for understanding the background of the breed. 53
