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Re: [RC] Horse Racing in Arabia/Middle East - Maryanne Stroud GabbaniIf anyone has answers for this, please post to the list. I'd also be very interested in this as I've been trying to trace horse racing in this part of the world for some time. As best as I can figure out, the Brits brought in flat-track racing when they came to Egypt in the 1800's.Prior to the British occupation of Egypt, the country was run by the Mamelukes for about 700 years or so. Mohamed Ali, who started the Egyptian dynasty that ended with King Farouk's departure in 1952 was an Albanian soldier in a Mameluke regiment that was sent to fight the French under Napoleon when they invaded in the early 1800's. He proceeded to murder his ex-colleagues after a memorable banquet in the Citadel of Cairo after he took power. As the Mamelukes were leaving, they had to pass through a narrow passageway to the outside, and while they were in the passage the gates at both ends were closed. Mohamed Ali's men opened fire on his guests and killed them all with the exception of one man who managed to climb the walls of the passage ON HIS HORSE and escape. Pretty good riding, I'd say. The passage is still there and I wouldn't want to try it. The Mamelukes were very involved with horse breeding and a historian friend of mine told me that a Mameluke war horse was considered trained at the age of 11, so they were extremely systematic about it. As far as I know, however, any horse racing was a very casual sort of thing. "Hey, Ahmed, bet my grey can beat your chestnut to those palm trees" rather than the kind of nonsense put forth by Hopkins in his story. You don't waste 11 years of training war horses on a silly race. In the Arabian peninsula as well, horses were led by camel from place to place and then used at the last minute for a raid. A man's wealth was reckoned in animals, so again in the Nejd, racing would have been pretty illogical. Race horses were primarily found in the northern areas nearer to Turkey and Iraq, where there was a longer history of contact with Europeans. The Brits also brought in a bunch of big European horses to "improve" the breed for the locals, whatever that means. Our baladi Arabs that haul carts loaded with steel bars and huge water drums show the draft influence sometimes, but Arabised and miniaturised, in a sense. Racing in the modern sense of the word is a sport of leisure and relative wealth. If you can only afford to keep one or two horses AND you need them for your work whether it's farming or war, racing just isn't practical. It's interesting to note that when I was looking at seeing endurance get established in Egypt, I was thinking more along the model of AERC with the goal being care of the horses. Unfortunately, the UAE/FEI came first and we got desert flat racing with disastrous results. Now Egyptian FEI rides barely get 25 participants and most of them are riding unconditioned horses because they don't have the time to bring them along properly. They go through horses like kleenex. It's pretty horrible. Most of the serious riders have nothing to do with these rides because we like our horses and want them around for a while. Where's the model for this riding? It isn't traditional at all. It was learned from a bunch of wealthy Gulf Arabs who had too much time on their hands and spent it at the race tracks of Europe. Now that the UAE influence is starting to wear out, we are working again from the ground up to do things the right way. Maryanne Cairo On Wednesday, January 7, 2004, at 07:32 PM, Linda B. Merims wrote: Susan (suvut) said:
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