“... The beginning of the trouble was possibly the friendship with the Sultan into which Ibn er Rashid saw fit to enter, a friendship blazoned to the world by the appearance of Shammari mares in Constantinoble and Circassian girls in Hail; but as for the end, there is no end of war in the desert, and grievance will serve the turn of an impetuous young sheikh.”                                                                                                                                                                                         Gertrude Bell 1907

After the Wahhabite wars and central Arabia in turmoil for about half a century, the dynasty of Ibn Rasheed of the Shammar tribe established itself at Hail/Hayjl in northern Nejd in 1836 and lasted until 1921. The beit Rasheed was one of the prominent households of the Jafaar lineage, a branch of the ashira of Abde, one of the four Shammar ashair. From 1838 the Emirs of the Jebel Shammar of the house of Ibn Rasheed from Hail were able to bring a large part of the Nejd to their side. Al Rasheed rivaled with the house of Sa´ud for predominance in Nejd and reached its heydays in the late nineteenth century and was seen by travelers as an embodiment of the ideal of a desert kingdom. As some European travelers (Wallin, Doughty, the Blunts, Guarmani, Bell, Nolde) visited Hail we have a detailed account of the Rasheed dynasty. A Ph.D. Thesis was done at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University in 1988 by Madawi Al Rasheed, a member of the house of Rasheed, based on this information as well as on oral tradition of her family and other Arabic sources. This allows us to gain an insight into this fascinating chapter of Bedouin history without parallel.

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“The majority of the Shammar were nomadic camel-herders with some sedentarized tribal lineages, the two notions, tribe and dynasty - which mainly describe cultural and political processes - became entangled with the economy of the group. The economy within which the Shammar tribe and dynasty operated consisted of a combination of pastoralism, trade and to a lesser extent agriculture (Rasheed). One of the factors responsible for political centralization among nomads was their contact with the outside world, in particular their relations with sedentary societies and interactions with more centralized states and empires. In the case of the Shammar, tribe and dynasty coexisted and were initially a single polity” (Rasheed), an observation, that also applies to most tribal groups and their realms in the history of the Bedouins. Only in recent time, after World War I, new states came into being with frontiers cutting through long established tribal areas. “The leadership of Abdullah Ibn Rasheed (1836-48) was initially an extension of his role as a tribal sheikh who had managed to establish his reputation and legitimacy among the Shammar. During the first decade of his leadership, he was still known as the sheikh, a term which was used to refer to the leader or head of the ashira. In Hail, the transformation of the role of the sheikh was gradual. It was only during the rule of Talal Ibn Rasheed (1848-68) and Mohammad Ibn Rasheed (1869-97) that this transformation was completed. This meant more political centralization, consolidation of power, increase in military hegemony, and the establishment of dynastic rule. This change was accompanied by the appearance of a new title: amir, an adoption that reflected the beginning of a process whereby a tribal “leader” became an oasis `ruler´ ” (Rasheed). The Barzan, as the palace at Hail was called, was situated near the market and the mosque and was surrounded by a wall with large towers. It consisted of two courtyards, a guest reception room, the amir´s private reception room, stables, kitchen, prison and a private quarter.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the stables of the Rasheedi amirs and the reputation of their horses attracted the  attention of the imperial powers such as the Ottoman, the Egyptian and the British governments. European travelers showed an interest as they visited and described these stables where the finest breed of the Arabian horse were kept. Some of these horses were sent as gifts to other notables, tribal sheikhs, and Ottoman governors and even the Sultan (annotation by the author) to cement political alliances. A small number of these horses found their way to the market at Kuwait where they were purchased by the representatives of the British government and sent to Bombay. This was a small-scale commercial activity as horses were precious animals to be appreciated and looked after. Their military value was the most important reason for keeping them. They guaranteed a military hegemony which exceeded that brought about by camels, which are slow and unsuited for hit-and-run military strategies although easier to maintain for long periods without water and food. In contrast, horses are well-suited for short military encounters near wells or water sources. The amir´s stables were again a spatial arrangement reflecting the political and military necessities of the time. The Hail leadership became stronger as a result of conquest and military expansion. Consequently, stables and horses were part of their military reservoir as well as enhancing their social and political prestige. (Rasheed).

Wallin noted in 1854: “These animals are more numerous here than in any other part of Arabia which I have visited… The stud of Abd Allah alone, I was told, contained nearly 200 horses, quartered upon the different villages of his land. A couple of these animals are sent yearly to Almedina with the pilgrimcaravan as a present for the Turkish Pasha, another couple to Mecca for the Governor of that town, sometimes a third for the Pasha of Baghdad, and during the late years Abbas has sent an expedition almost every year from Egypt, in order to purchase a number of horses for his extensive stud in Alkahira. Others are occasionally presented to the princes of the family of Saood, or sold privately to the Badawis of the neighbourhood.” Guarmani reports (1863) that in the pastures of Jebel Shammar near Hail 500 mares were grazing under the protection of 300 slaves. In 1879 the Blunts visited the large stud of Mohammed Ibn Rasheed and saw horses of which some came from Ibn Saud and some from the Anaza: “Ibn Rashid´s stud is now the most celebrated in Arabia, and has taken the place in public estimation of the stud of Feysul ibn Saoud´s which Mr. Palgrave saw sixteen years ago at Riad, and which he described in the picturesque paragraphs which have since been constantly quoted….Mohammed Ibn Rashid is now not only the most powerful of Bedouin sheykhs, but the richest prince in Arabia; and as such has better means than any other of acquiring the best horses in Nejd, nor have these been neglected by him. The possession of thoroughbred mares is always among the Arabs a symbol of power; and with the loss of supreme position in Nejd, the Ibn Saouds have lost their command of the market, and their stud has been allowed to dwindle. ….and at the present moment, if common report speaks true, hardly a twentieth part of the old stud remains at Riad. That Feysul´s stud in its days was the best in Arabia is probable, and it may be that no collection now to be found there has an equal merit; but there seems little reason for supposing that it differed in anything but degree from what we ourselves saw, or that the animals composing it were distinct from those still owned by the various Bedouin tribes of Nejd. All our inquiries, on the contrary (and we spared no occasion of asking questions), tend to show that it is a mistake to suppose that the horses kept by the Emirs of Riad were a special breed, preserved in the towns of Aared from time immemorial, or that they differed in any way from those bred elsewhere in Central Arabia….. With regard to Ibn Rashid´s collection at Hail we looked it over three or four times in the stables, and saw it out once on a gala day, when each animal was made to look at its best…. It being winter time and they ungroomed, they were all in the roughest possible condition, and as has been mentioned, our first impression was one of disappointment…..The first yard one enters in going through the stables, contained, when we saw them, from twenty-five to thirty mares. In the second were twenty more…. And it requires considerable imagination to look upon them as indeed the ne plus ultra of breeding in Arabia. We made the mistake, too common, of judging horses by condition, for, mounted and in motion, these at once transfigured” (Blunt).

The German Nolde visited Mohammad Ibn Rasheed in 1893 and reports that the common love for horses was the door opener to the sympathy of his host. Ibn Rasheed admired Nolde´s stallion Manek that much that he paid him a visit every morning. When the German left he was given as present a stallion and three mares, among them Ibn Rasheed personal mount, Farha. After Mohammad Ibn Rasheed´s death his successors, weakened by internal power struggles (assassination was the predominant death of the amirs of Hail) and a total change in international politics after the First World War, lost influence and in 1921 Ibn Saud took Hail, and most of the Shammar Bedouins left their homeland and crossed the Euphrates to join their brothers in Iraq, a scene captured vividly by the eye-witness Glubb in his book “War in the Desert” and cited in the last part of the chapter of Bedouin history in this book (or click here).