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Desert-bred Saluqis
'If
it were not for the chase, there would be no pleasure.'
Why the spelling Saluqi rather than the standard English spelling Saluki? Thereby hangs a long
tale! As a young diplomat in the late 1950s I was sent to study Arabic at the School of Oriental & African Studies,
University of London and subsequently at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, Shemlan, Lebanon. Here I became immersed
not only in the language but in all aspects of life in the Middle East, where I was to spend much of my later career.
I served for varying periods in Syria, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Iraq, but I also
had occasion to visit nearly all the other Arab countries as well as Turkey and Iran. Part of my Arabic studies included reading
some of the pre-Islamic and later poetry and it was here that I first came across references to the Bedouin hunting with a
hound they called Saluqi in classical Arabic. So that is how I came to know the hound, long before I learned
about the Saluki in the West, and as I lived and worked among the Arabs for many years afterwards, speaking their language,
it became natural for me to call the hound Saluqi or rather Sloogui as it is pronounced everywhere in colloquial
Arabic from Morocco to Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. Contrary to popular belief in the West, the Arabic word Saluqi
does not mean Sighthound but is an adjective describing a person or a thing from a place named Saluq, which according
to Arab tradition was an ancient town in Yemen not far from modern Ta'izz where the Saluqi originated. In
these pages I refer for the most part to the hound in the Countries of Origin rather than to the breeds that h ave
been developed in the West. As I was to discover later, Saluqi is also the spelling used previously by other
Arabists with experience of these hounds in the Middle East, such as Colonel H A R Dickson and Hajj Abdallah Philby. Then
as now, it was rare to see a Saluqi in the Middle East, without making a determined effort to do so, as they are
generally kept out of sight of covetous eyes. It was not therefore until the early 1970s that I saw my first one.
I was living with my family in Oman and a British friend, who owned a beautiful red feathered dog, called Pasha, which he
had brought with him from Jordan, offered him to me as he was returning to the UK and did not want to put an elderly dog through
quarantine. However he had second thoughts later, as he felt the dog would be too upset by the change, and instead put it
down. It was then that I resolved that when circumstances permitted I would have a Saluqi. However, as a diplomat leading
a kind of nomadic existence, constantly moving between different countries and returning periodically to the United Kingdom,
with its then strict quarantine for dogs, it was not until the mid-1980s that I realised my goal. Oddly enough, my first
hound was a British-bred Saluki! My wife and I were at Crufts before being posted to Iraq and an introduction to a well-known
breeder there led to the acquisition of a delightful little bitch, as we thought it might be interesting to take a puppy back
to the region of its origins. We arranged for the puppy to be sent on to us by air, as we were driving to Baghdad and
could not take her with us. However, fate decided otherwise: the Iran-Iraq war reached a peak, Baghdad airport was closed
and it was impossible to send the puppy to us, so she had to stay with her breeder and we had to think again.
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