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Old Yesterday, 07:21 PM   #1
Jim McDougall
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Location: Route 66
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Default Wahabite dagger ? or janbiyya?

While I have some familiarity with Arabian janbiyya and khanjhar (the regional distinctions for these terms are still vague to me), this larger version acquired years ago remains a puzzle.
I have seen references referring to these as 'sabaki' (?) and described as Wahabite daggers.

All I can surmise from the Wahabite term is referring to a revisionist and more orthodox school of Sunni Islam which originated in Arabia in the 18th c.
In the complexities of unrest in Arabia at around the turn of the century, there were factions of Wahabite followers known as IKHWAN, and fought in the many conflicts over the decades in Saudi Arabia.

The Paris based French orientalist artist Ludwig Duetsch (1855-1935) had visited Egypt numerous times from 1885 thru 1898, but as far as I found never visited Arabia. In his 1900 painting "The Nubian Guard", the figure is seen wearing several weapons in his sash, with one of these daggers included. Clearly artistic license is at hand, and it appears he drew from various antiquities circulating in France at the time, however as we know, the weapons of many countries and spheres often pooled in colonial situations.

The photo of the tribesman is an Ikhwan warrior c.1900, and one of these seen.

Can anyone clarify more on the proper term and regional or tribal associations of this dagger? Was it indeed a form preferred by Wahabites?

In studying the remarkable Hajj of Sir Richard Burton, where as disguised as a Sufi cleric he was able to penetrate both Mecca and Medina, there is an illustration (I have not yet relocated) with him wearing one of these.
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