Mission to the Volga. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

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СКАЧАТЬ And so to Ibn Faḍlān, a figure who, like a wandering archetype, turns up in the most unexpected places and in the most unexpected guises. Who was Ibn Faḍlān? As is so often the case, it is easier to begin with who he was not. He was not an Arab merchant, or the leader of the mission, or the secretary of the mission, or a jurist. He was neither the figure inspired by the Arabian Nights, whom Michael Crichton created in his novel The Eaters of the Dead (1976), nor the Hollywood realization played by Antonio Banderas in the movie The Thirteenth Warrior (1999). He was not a Greek resident of Baghdad who had been converted to Islam and held a position of trust at the court of Caliph Muqtadir. In fact, we have only his own words to go by: his role was to ensure that protocol was observed; to read the letters of the caliph, the vizier, and Nadhīr, the representative of the king of the Bulghārs; and to present formally the gifts intended to honor the hosts of the mission. That he was educated is clear from his duties, and the instruction in Islamic law that he delivers to the Muslims of Bulghār would not have been beyond the ken of any reasonably educated Muslim. The king of the Bulghārs treats him as an Arab, though some scholars prefer to see him as a non-Arab Muslim.

      At one stage of reading this book, I liked to imagine Ibn Faḍlān as a character not unlike Josiah Harlan, a nineteenth-century American Quaker adventurer in Afghanistan, whose life has now been entertainingly written by Ben Macintyre in Josiah the Great: The True Story of the Man Who Would Be King. As Macintyre’s title intimates, Harlan is the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s short story, The Man Who Would Be King (first published in The Phantom Rickshaw, 1888), wonderfully filmed by John Huston in 1975 with Michael Caine and Sean Connery. Then when I read J. M. Coetzee’s remarkable Waiting for the Barbarians, I thought I could hear echoes of Ibn Faḍlān in the actions and behavior of Coetzee’s Magistrate.

      Yet Harlan, Coetzee’s Magistrate, and Kipling’s Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Drahot are weak adumbrations of Ibn Faḍlān. Ibn Faḍlān is a voice, or, rather, a series of voices: the voice of reason, when faced with his colleagues’ obduracy; the voice of decorum and dignity, and often of prudery, when confronted by the wilder excesses of Turkic behavior; the voice of shock, when horrified by the Rūs burial rite. Yet he is also the voice of curiosity, when exposed to the myriad of marvels he witnesses; the voice of candor, when he reveals how he is out-argued by the Bulghār king; and the voice of calm observation, as he tries to remain unperturbed so many miles from home, on the fringes of Muslim eschatology, in the realm of Gog and Magog.

      There is something quintessentially human about this series of voices. Like all of us, Ibn Faḍlān can be one person and many simultaneously. He is able to entertain contradictions, as we all are. Our sense of his humanity is highlighted by his avoidance of introspection. He is not given to analysis, whether self-analysis or the analysis of others. He strives to record and understand what he has observed. He regularly fails to understand, as we all do, and sometimes, defeated by what he has observed, he indulges his sense of superiority, as we all do. But he is not convincing when he does so. I find Ibn Faḍlān the most honest of authors writing in the classical Arabic tradition. His humanity and honesty keep this text fresh and alive for each new generation of readers fortunate to share in its treasures.

      My earlier comparison with Kipling is instructive in other ways. Like so much of Kipling’s work, for example, the nature of what might loosely be referred to as the imperial experience is at the heart also of Ibn Faḍlān’s account—nowhere more acutely, perhaps, than when he is bested in a basic legal disputation (munāẓarah) by the Bulghār king or when a Bāshghird tribesman notices our author watching him eating a louse and provocatively declares it a delicacy. And just as Kipling’s English mirrors the wit and pace of the table talk enjoyed in the Punjab Club, Ibn Faḍlān’s Arabic may perhaps mirror the conversational idioms of his intended audience (or audiences). There is mystery here though. Ibn Faḍlān’s audience remains as elusive as do he and the members of the mission, for his work disappears completely without a trace until, several centuries later, the geographer and lexicographer Yāqūt quotes it on his visit to Marw and Khwārazm. In Islamic scholarship, for an author to be read was for that author to be reproduced and quoted. There is no indication that Ibn Faḍlān’s work was ever read before Yāqūt!

      TURMOIL

      The world Ibn Faḍlān lived in and traveled through was in turmoil. The caliphal court, the treasury, the vizierate, the provinces, Baghdad’s population, religious sectarianism—everything was in a state of upheaval. In Ibn Faḍlān’s account we read of the strange surprises and uncustomary peoples he encountered, but he says almost nothing about Baghdad. As Baghdad and the caliphal court provide the religio-political context for the mission, no matter how eastward looking it may be, it is worth visiting Baghdad in the early fourth/tenth century.

      Baghdad was the Abbasid capital founded by Caliph al-Manṣūr in 145/762, with its Round City known as the City of Peace (Madīnat al-Salām), a Qurʾanic echo at its spiritual heart. The Baghdad of the early fourth/tenth century is the Baghdad of al-Muqtadir’s reign. At the age of thirteen, al-Muqtadir was the youngest of the Abbasids to become caliph, and he remained caliph for some twenty-four years, with two minor interruptions totaling three days.

      A period of stability and possibly even prosperity, one might imagine—but not according to modern scholarship, which views al-Muqtadir’s caliphate as an unmitigated disaster, a period when the glorious achievements of his ancestors such as Hārūn al-Rashīd were completely undone.² State and caliphal treasuries were bedeviled by chronic lack of funds, with variable revenues from tax and trade. Caliphs and their viziers were constantly caught short of ready money. The fortunes of the recent caliphs had teetered constantly on the brink of bankruptcy.

      Upon al-Muqtadir’s accession to the caliphate, the rule of al-Muktafī (289–95/902–8) had witnessed a revival in the establishment of caliphal control. The western provinces, Syria and Egypt, had been brought into line, the Qarmaṭians had been defeated by Waṣīf ibn Sawārtakīn the Khazar (294/906–7), and the coffers of the treasury were adequately stocked, to the sum of 15 million dinars.³

      During al-Muqtadir’s caliphate, however, the center once again began to lose its grip on the periphery. Egypt became the private preserve of the rival Faṭimid caliphate, Syria began to enjoy the protection of the Kurdish Ḥamdanid dynasty, and the Qarmaṭian threat erupted once more, in a series of daring raids on cities and caravans, culminating in the theft of the Black Stone from the Kaaba in 317/930, by the Qarmaṭian chieftain Abū Ṭāhir Sulaymān. The eastern provinces had already consolidated the autonomy of their rule. Armenia and Azerbaijan had become the exclusive domains of the caliphally appointed governor Muḥammad ibn Abī l-Sāj al-Afshīn, until his death in 288/901. Transoxania and, by 287/900, Khurasan were under Samanid rule, and Sīstān was the seat of the Ṣaffarids (247–393/861–1003), founded by the coppersmith Yaʿqūb ibn al-Layth, a frontier warrior (mutaṭawwiʿ) fighting the unbelievers to extend the rule of Islam.

      In 309/921, the year the Volga mission left Baghdad, al-Muqtadir’s reign did enjoy some military success, when Muʾnis, the supreme commander of the caliphal armies, was invested with the governorship of Egypt and Syria, and the Samanids gained an important victory over the Daylamites of Ṭabaristān and killed al-Ḥasan ibn al-Qāsim’s governor of Jurjān, the redoubtable Daylamite warlord Līlī ibn al-Nuʿmān, near Ṭūs, an event to which Ibn Faḍlān refers (§4).

      The treasury’s fiscal and mercantile revenues were heavily dependent on the success of the caliphal army, and no stability could be guaranteed. Apparently al-Muqtadir did not care in the least about stability: he is reputed to have squandered more than seventy million dinars.⁴

      The dazzling might and splendor of the imperial Baghdad of al-Muqtadir’s reign were fabulously encapsulated in his palace complexes. I like in particular the spectacular Arboreal Mansion. This mansion housed a tree of eighteen branches of silver and gold standing in a pond of limpid СКАЧАТЬ