noble horses of arabia

- By Monika Savier
NOBLE HORSES OF ARABIA
ASIL ARABIANS Vol. VI
published now
The Asil Club proudly presents volume no
6 of their documentation in three languages.
1000 pages make up a voluminous work in
the customary stylish presentation and high
printing quality. To bridge the cultures of
Orient and Occident, to celebrate the asil
Arabian horse as a World Cultural Heritage,
these were the tasks the Asil Club has put
down as theirs from their founding in the
1970ies. This year’s innovation and logical
consequence is to have a translation into
Arabic as well, in addition to an English
and a German version.
Up to now, 50,000 copies have been made
of all 6 volumes combined. Some items in
the book are remakes, but the founder of the
Asil Club Dr Georg Olms and his colleagues
and assistants have succeeded once more
in finding and publishing exciting and still
unpublished texts, reports, paintings, and
lithography’s from the history of Arabian
horses. Volumes I-III have been out of print
for some while and are highly priced now
in antiquarian sales.
Why the fascination with this book? For
anybody breeding asil Arabian horses,
meaning those that tail back to exclusively
Bedouin breeding, it offers a great amount
of historical and scientific information. The
book imparts the importance of maintaining
this heritage of Arabian Bedouin breeding,
the authentic asil Arabian. Maintaining the
pure Bedouin tradition, never introducing
foreign blood, has been a religious dogma
in the Arabia Deserta area for centuries.
This original line breeding resulted in a
valuable Arabian horse the Asil Club strives
to preserve world-wide.
To add to that, the Club maintains a positive,
if out of mainstream, attitude in favour of
the horses, taking position strongly against
any kind of horse manipulation for the
purpose of showing, and taking a critical
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“The publication ASIL ARABIANS is a
precious documentation of this outstanding
breed of horses and provides a rare insight
into all aspects of the Asil Arabian as an
important part of the Arabian cultural heritage.”
H.H. Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,
President of the U.A.E.
view of the world-wide trend for “breeding
for beauty only”. The members of the Asil
Club are quite justified in deeming weird
the inherent danger of getting a negative
influence on the performance and character
traits of this powerful horse breed that way,
of even of replacing them with a globalized
standard Arabian with the showing gene
built in. The classical Arabian type should
be preserved, keeping up all of his aspects
and traditional traits as the most beautiful
performance horse in the world.
When having this book in your hands, it’s
quite normal to give in to curiosity and to
leaf through the voluminous part with the
pictures of asil Arabian horses of members
of the Asil Club all over the world. The
Asil Club has a long-standing tradition.
Many breeders have been members of the
Club for two or three family generations.
Which is why it’s so interesting to compare
the development of the horses, aided by
the pictures in the photo part. It’s almost
nowhere else that you can find the ancestors
of today’s show winners and breeding horses.
When comparing the grandget with their
grandparents, it’s often plain astonishing.
Did they take their photographs differently
at those times, or did we really change the
breed so dramatically by selection?
It’s not only the horses that have changed.
The structure of members in the Club has
adapted to geopolitical changes. While 25
years ago, when volume III had just been
published, there were mainly German and
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US breeders, completed by a few state
studs from the Arabian countries publishing
their (riding) horses, the Club is de facto
multicultural today. In volume IV, many
private breeders from almost all European
and the Arabian countries present their
horses. The number of ridden horses among
the asil Egyptian Arabians, however, has
decreased.
After during the last century, the Arabian
horse had lost in importance even for the
Bedouins themselves, with a major part of
the gene pool being exported to Europe and
the US, today he has re-gained an important
role for the social life of many groups of the
Arabian population in most of the Arabian
countries. As a consequence, purchasing
missions of a new kind are flourishing,
this time moving from East to West and
re-importing the asil Egyptian offspring to
Egypt and the Middle East…
Even there, the world has changed for horses.
Apart from the Syrian Badia, Bedouin
horse breeding has switched locations from
the black Bedouin tents of the barren half
desert to sometimes luxurious stables on
the outskirts of the big cities. There, their
box stalls are often better built and equipped
than the surrounding houses and huts, but
as there is no space available, there is a
total lack of exercise and natural rearing in
a herd. This is one of the reasons why the
knowledge, derived from their country of
origin, of how to deal with desert Arabians
is more essential than ever. Seen that way,
the new Asil Book can be seed as a kind of
“instruction manual” on how to avoid side
effects from faulty rearing.
However, what is the essence of an Arabian
horse for breeders today? What is it that
puts reason out of existence nowadays, as
soon as it comes to beauty and shows? No
matter whether in the outskirts of Cairo, in
Aachen, Paris, or Dubai, is it the projection
of unfulfilled ideals? Humans with their
bit of power use the horse’s
energy and beauty, in return
offering passion, even
ecstasy –which have resulted
in jealousy and the desire to
control, culminating in our
almost complete control of
horse reproduction.
Ideologically speaking, the
Purebred Arabian is the ideal
to strive for, and the asil
desert Arabian in particular,
being the specimen of
Arabian horse who has been
above any doubts as to his
pure identity for generations.
This Arabian fills the role of
the “better self” for people
in two ways: for one thing,
he is a transnational symbol
of peaceful connective
communication
between
today’s Western culture
and the Eastern one, and
for the other thing, he is the
perfection of horse beauty
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and horse grace, loving people in addition.
The book presented here, with the Asil
Club in the background, is a well-structured
platform for people from Eastern as well as
from Western cultural areas whose common
denominator are asil Arabians in breeding,
on shows, and on the racetrack.
Don’t miss this collection of historical and
recent articles, pictures, photographs, and
drawings telling about the friendship and
the passion and synergetic relationship
between people and asil Arabian horses.
ASIL ARABIANS
NOBLE HORSES OF ARABIA vol. VI
A documentation published by Asil Club
e.V. Sixth, totally revised and amended edition. German, English, Arabic. 944 pages
and 500 pictures, mostly in colour. Georg
Olms Verlag Hildesheim, Germany, 2007