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The district of Nejd has been the chief breeding locality for these horses for many centuries. Contrary to tradition, however, even the finest animals are neither so large nor so swift as American thoroughbred horses. The qualities that have made the Arabian horse famous are its beautiful proportions, endurance, and intelligence.
There was a most unseemly scuffle; the Turco-German contingent tried to seize the mullah; the Arab congregation defended him strenuously from arrest. In the confusion that worthy man got clear away and joined his family in Nejd. Jihad is incumbent on all Moslems if against infidel aggression.
The Grand Sherif could hardly have stood alone as an independent sovereign, for he was continually menaced on the one side by the dissenting Omani, and on the other by the unbelieving tribes of Nejd, against whom his frontier was defenceless. He could not, with his own resources, protect the pilgrim routes from plunder and on the pilgrimage all the prosperity of Hejaz depended.
He, with a darker gray and a chestnut, all Arabs of pure breed from Nejd, none of which it is said can be obtained except by free gift, or rare capture in war, took the eye most with their make and shape.
Perhaps it is symptomatic of a more bellicose temper in Islam that the last few years have witnessed the rapid spread of two new puritan, fanatic movements the Ikhwan and the Salafîya. The Ikhwan movement began obscurely about ten years ago in inner Arabia the Nejd. It is a direct outgrowth of Wahabism, from which it differs in no essential respect.
But on the destruction of the Arabian Caliphate in 1259, the Sherifal family seems to have set itself up independently, relying only on the casual help of the Egyptian Sultans and the Imams of Sana to protect them against the Bedouins of Nejd and Assir, now hardly any longer, even in name, Mohammedans.
In his youth he was instrumental in placing Tourki on the throne of Oman, and after a few years of stern application to business he brought the bellicose families of the Gara tribe under his power; and his influence was felt far into the interior, even into the confines of Nejd.
This was obviously an adaptation of Western nationalism to the traditional Arab ideal of a theocratic democracy already realized in the Meccan caliphate and the Wahabi government of the Nejd. This second stirring of Arab nationalism was likewise of short duration. Turkey was now ruled by Sultan Abdul Hamid, and Abdul Hamid's Pan-Islamic policy looked toward good relations with his Arab subjects.
They only tap the most promising ones, and those that grow farther west in the Mahri country, as they produce an inferior quality, are not now tapped at all. The best is obtained at spots called Hoye and Haski, about four days' journey inland from Merbat, where the Gara mountains slope down into the Nejd desert.
So rapid has been Ikhwanism's progress that it to-day absolutely dominates the entire Nejd, and it is headed by desert Arabia's most powerful chieftain, Bin Saud, a descendant of the Saud who headed the Wahabi movement a hundred years ago. The fanaticism of the Ikhwans is said to be extraordinary, while their programme is the old Wahabi dream of a puritan conversion of the whole Islamic world.
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