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Originally Posted by kahnjar1
For the benefit of "newbies" to this Forum, and to avoid further confusion, it should I think be noted here that the term "Habaabi" is used by Omanis to describe non Omani daggers. It is NOT a term, used for a specific style of jambiya.
This statement was made by Ibrahiim elsewhere in his posts.
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Salaams All, let me quote to you what I was told by a Yemeni just the other day...
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"These daggers are also called Habaabi in Yemen because as you can see when you strip the word down it becomes obvious that it means of Abha... or Abha region''. Unquote. (Abha being the capital of that region.)
I have to say I am not at all convinced but the chap may be right...he is a weapons sword and dagger dealer... It is such a closed region historically that very little detail is available. Should more evidence come about on the subject of terminology I will report it.
The pronunciation is interesting since it should actually be heard as
Abhaabi but that is extremely difficult to say requiring a fully aspirated
AH ...Habaabi is simply an easier pronunciation.
However
khanjar 1 what is much more important to researchers is the essence of this weapon and how it developed and its obvious linkage to Omani daggers.
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=14878
For the uninitiated the trade link by sea between Oman(Muscat) the Asir(Jazan)...and Zanzibar in the mid 19th C is KEY. At the mid point in the 19th C Oman embarked on huge development in Zanzibar at the very same time that the Royal Omani Khanjar was designed by the Rulers wife.
Wikipedia is not a bad place to start looking for Asir...and where the difficulties are outlined as ~
Quote" By 1920, however, 'Abd al-'Aziz, founder of Saudi Arabia, had begun to recoup the losses of the House of Sa'ud and to unify most of the Peninsula under his rule. As part of this campaign, he sent his young son Faisal - later king - with an expeditionary force to occupy 'Asir, and from then on 'Asir was controlled by the House of Sa'ud - a situation formalized in 1934 with the signing of the Treaty of Taif between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Even then the region was still largely unknown to the West. In 1932, H. St. John Philby, one of the first Europeans to explore and map the Peninsula, did enter 'Asir, but as he didn't publish his observations until 1952,
the area remained one of the blank spots on the world's map." Unquote.
The main port is Jazan also noted well in Wikepedia and a key centre well placed over the centuries for regional trade..
The weapon is peculiar and has confounded experts and specialists down the ages...The prestigious
www.omanisilver.com even has a handful of such daggers wrongly written up as Omani..such is its similarity to The Royal Omani Khanjar...invented or redesigned from the Muscat Dagger by Sheherazad in about 1840/50 with some flair added from Indian design in the Hilt. I stress that it was the hilt which she was responsible for..See The Omani Khanjar for further details.
Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.