'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 and which has come therefore to be associated by the Arabs with the origin of the breed. However, there were in antiquity several other places from which the adjective saluqi might have been derived: Saluq in Armenia, and 3 towns called Saluqiyah, one near Selifke(Turkey), another near Antioch (Turkey) and third near Baghdad (Iraq). The latter was the capital of the Seleucid dynasty (312 BC to 65 AD) and the adjective saluqi may have been derived by the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula from the simliar sounding word(s) for Seleucid used in the Aramaic and Syriac languages spoken there by the various peoples of that part of Mesopotamia, but so far irrefutable evidence is lacking. In these pages I refer for the most part to the hound in the Countries of Origin rather than to the breeds that have 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.

In the following pages I describe how I acquired my Saluqis and later bred them. I also describe how the progeny have done in Britain.

Finally I shall give an overview of how I see the situation of the Saluqi in those Arab Countries of Origin that I have been able to visit so far as well as in some countries on the periphery. I have not included Afghanistan or the Indian sub-Continent where I have no direct experience of the wide variety of Saluqi-like hounds there that I have seen only in pictures. Equally I have not included the hounds of the Sahel region of North Africa, as again I have no direct experience of them, but from the photographs sent to me by correspondents it would appear that there too a wide variety exists. I shall leave it largely to my own pictures to tell the story, but for those who would like more detailed information I also list the references to articles and books that I have written and some films that I have made on the various subjects touched on.

Welcome to the site! Ahlan wa Sahlan!

Terence Clark