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Old 6th July 2012, 07:06 PM   #36
Ibrahiim al Balooshi
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Buraimi Oman, on the border with the UAE
Posts: 4,408
Default The Copy.

Salaams all; Note to Forum.

I have described in some detail the living ethnographics of Oman seen through the eyes of The Omani Khanjar and Omani swords. To the untrained eye these may appear as copies. Essentially they are, however, they need to be viewed as hand made copies of an exact style demanded by the particular tribe or expected of a specific regional design.

To that end no additional designs are permitted. You cannot , for example, tell a silversmith to design a khanjar(or a piece of traditional Omani jewellery) with your own idea of what it could look like i.e. It must conform to the laid down pattern (or one of them) of that region from its history.

Therefor when producing a new Khanjar for say a UAE KHANJAR OF THE RULING FAMILY (see # 14) we look at originals in museums and take photographs and do research to determine what we can and cannot do. There may be a specific hilt or a choice of hilts and we may have some say in the quality of blade, however, in general and over all, the khanjar must be a faithful copy of the original style..absolutely. By original I mean of a Khanjar which is the oldest available ~ often going back about 100 years.

The same applies for daggers etc from other regions;

There is no such thing as a dagger or a sword or a piece of Islamic jewellery which is not a faithful copy of a previous item.

The character and appearance of a specific family dagger which may have begun life more or less identical to another from the same family does, however, change through the years not just by being added to (with the half dozen or so accoutrements and any one of scores of different belts) or by the slight variance in the patina but by allowable changes in blade and hilt and by repairs.

So for the serious student of Omani Khanjars and other regional ethnographics it is vital to hoist in the basic lesson; The Copy.

Regards,
Ibrahiim al Balooshi.
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