Mission to the Volga. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

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СКАЧАТЬ of Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān but have relied instead on Wüstenfeld’s edition. In order to facilitate comparison between these quotations and the version of the text contained in the Mashhad manuscript, I have included in the translation of these quotations the paragraph numbers from Mission to the Volga to which Yāqūt’s quotations correspond.¹⁴

      IBN FAḌLĀN’S LOGBOOK: AN IMAGINED RECONSTRUCTION

      I present here a shortened version of Ibn Faḍlān’s text, an experiment in reconstructing the logbook that I imagine Ibn Faḍlān might have kept while on his travels. My version of the logbook ends abruptly. Of course this is an imagined reconstruction and I could have terminated it at the beginning of the list of Bulghār marvels (to which the description of the Rūs belongs).¹⁵

      NAMES

      One of the wonderful things about Ibn Faḍlan’s account is that we get to hear about so many unfamiliar places and, in the process, are introduced to many Turkic terms transcribed (presumably aurally and phonetically) into Arabic, and to listen to so many non-Arabs speak, via the intermediary of the translator(s) Ibn Faḍlān used. Of course, this abundance of transcriptions is rarely graphically straightforward.

      There is confusion surrounding the “correct” form of the toponyms and Turkic titles in which the text abounds. Whenever possible I have relied on the many studies of Turkic names and titles by scholars such as Peter Golden. The onomastic challenge is especially acute in the riverine topography of the journey from the Ghuzziyyah to the Bulghārs: §§34–38. A uniform solution to these names proved impossible, so I decided to apply a principle of minimal intervention. When the identity of the river proposed by scholars seemed close to the form of the word as written by the Mashhad scribe I accepted the reconstructed identification and made as few changes as possible to the form of the name given in the manuscript. The principle of minimal intervention means, for example, that the word swḥ becomes sūḥ and not sūkh, and bājāʿ does not become bājāgh. Please note, however, that ḥ*j (the “*” is used here and in a few other cases to represent an undotted consonant in the manuscript that could be read as bāʾ, tāʾ, thāʾ, nпn, or yāʾ) became jaykh. I have avoided, wherever possible, the addition of vowels to the consonantal skeleton of these names. On one occasion I could not decide whether the word smwr masked s-mūr or s-mawr, so I let it stand.

      This procedure of minimal intervention is not an argument for the onomastic accuracy of the manuscript. There has undoubtedly been considerable corruption in transmission, and the scribe of the Mashhad manuscript is not always as reliable as we might like. The procedure is simply a not very subtle solution to an impasse. I use the Glossary of Names and Terms to discuss Turkic terms and names and to survey the identifications offered by scholars.

      In the two cases in which we are fortunate to have lemmata in Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān (Itil and Arthakhushmīthan), I have adopted his orthography and vocalization.

      MY TRANSLATION

      Ibn Faḍlan’s text is brisk and characterized by narrative economy. I wanted my English to be the same. My translation aspires to lucidity and legibility. James E. McKeithen’s excellent PhD thesis (Indiana University, 1979) will satisfy the reader in search of a crib of the Arabic. There are two other translations into English, by Richard N. Frye (2005) and by the late Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (2012). They are both admirable: Frye’s is very useful for the studies he provides alongside the translation, and Lunde and Stone have produced a nicely readable version of the work. Both, however, effectively promote a version of Ibn Faḍlān’s text dominated by Yāqūt’s quotations.

      I have also added to the translation some headers, toponyms, and ethnonyms that help identify the principal agents and locations of the action.

      The Guide to Further Reading is intended to provide readers, students, and scholars interested in studying the work further with a representative catalogue of secondary scholarship on Ibn Faḍlān and his world. For ease of reference, it is therefore organized according to subject. I hope this will be a useful study aid to what can sometimes be a complicated bibliographical tumult.

      I have also prepared the Glossary as a repository of information that, in a publication intended for an academic audience, might be included in the form of annotations to the text. This approach has the added advantage of keeping to a minimum both the glossary and the annotation to the translation. Each glossary entry includes key references to the copious annotations provided by the scholars who have edited and/or translated the work. I hope that, in this way too, this version of the glossary can become a useful study aid.

      CONCLUSION

      To be sure, Ibn Faḍlan’s account is in many ways a strange book. It has no textual analogues, no other works from the third/ninth or fourth/tenth centuries we can compare it with. Its obsession with eyewitness testimony, connected ultimately with the practice of, and requirements for, giving witness in a court of law, is almost pathological. It contains many wonderful encounters, conversations, dialogues, and formal audiences—and we hear so many non-Muslims speak, from tribesmen of the Ghuzziyyah and the Bulghār king to the Rūs who mocks Ibn Faḍlān for the primitiveness of his religious observances. On top of all this, it is a cracking good read. I hope others enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed translating it and, along the way, kept alive my boyhood love of adventure stories.

      NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

      1 Relation, 51.

      2 Zetterstéen and Bosworth, “al-Muḳtadir,” 542; Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 188.

      3 See Kennedy, Prophet, 187; Zetterstéen and Bosworth, “al-Muktafī.”

      4 Zetterstéen and Bosworth, “al-Muḳtadir.”

      5 Massignon and Gardet, “al-Ḥallādj,” 102; Massignon, Hallāj. Mystic and Martyr.

      6 Shaban, Islamic History: A New Interpretation, 2:149–51.

      7 Reisebericht, xx–xxvii.

      8 Bukharaev, Islam in Russia, 39.

      9 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, 170.

      10 Riley-Smith, “The State of Mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300.”

      11 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 53–85; Zamora, “Christopher Columbus’s ‘Letter to the Sovereigns.’”

      12 Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, 34.

      13 Edwards, The Story of the Voyage, 26–27.

      14 These quotations are also available, with the corresponding Arabic, on the Library of Arabic Literature Web site.

      15 This reconstruction is also available, with the corresponding Arabic, on the Library of Arabic Literature Web site.

      MISSION TO THE VOLGA

      MISSION TO THE VOLGA

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