Mission to the Volga. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan
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of the Islamic community.
We know about the events and its actors from a remarkable book by Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, a member of the mission. Yet all of the members of the diplomatic mission remain shrouded in obscurity, especially the book’s author.
Sadly our other extant sources make no mention of this adventure. We rely exclusively on the information provided in the book to enable us to reconstruct the composition of the embassy. The only other early source that mentions any of the characters involved is an annalistic chronicle known as Experiences of Nations, Consequences of Ambition (Tajārib al-umam wa-ʿawāqib al-himam), by the civil servant, philosopher, and historian Miskawayh (d. 421/1030), and, even then, not in the context of the embassy but of the affairs of the reign of al-Muqtadir.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
It is difficult to work out from Ibn Faḍlān’s book who took part in the mission and who played what part.
1. The Representative: Nadhīr al-Ḥaramī. The man placed in charge of the embassy, who did not actually travel, was the official assigned to recruit the personnel and finance the mission. He seems to have enjoyed al-Muqtadir’s confidence, and it is likely, from his name “al-Ḥaramī,” that he was a eunuch who guarded the harem. In addition to organizing the embassy, he entrusted it with (at least) two letters: one was addressed to Atrak ibn al-Qaṭaghān, the field marshal of the Ghuzziyyah (Oghuz Turks), along with several gifts; the other was addressed to the king of the Bulghārs. It is clear from the account that Nadhīr had been in communication with the field marshal and with the Bulghār king. His relationship with the Ghuzziyyah is based on their host-friend system, described in the text, and the Bulghār king had written to him asking for more medication (this is an otherwise unattested detail that features prominently in some non-Arabic accounts of the Bulghārs’ conversion to Islam).
2. The Envoy: Sawsan al-Rassī. Sawsan is bound to Nadhīr as his freed man. Sawsan’s name “al-Rassī” is obscure but may indicate that he was of Turkic or other Central Asian origin. Sawsan would presumably have been well acquainted with the geopolitics of the region. We discover, when the embassy leaves al-Jurjāniyyah for the Ustyurt, that he is accompanied by a brother-in-law, who is not mentioned elsewhere in the account.
3. The Local Expert: Takīn al-Turkī. Takīn (the name is a Turkic honorific) was well acquainted with and known in the area. The khwārazm-shāh, the Samanid governor of Khwārazm, recognizes him and refers to him as a slave-soldier and notes that he had been involved in the arms trade with the Turks, suspecting that he is the prime mover behind the mission. On the Ustyurt, we meet him chatting with a fellow Turk, and, in the enforced stay in Bulghār, he informs Ibn Faḍlān of the presence there of a giant from the land of Gog and Magog.
4. The Soldier: Bārs al-Ṣaqlābī. Bārs may have been the Samanid commander, the chamberlain of Ismāʿīl ibn Aḥmad and governor of al-Jurjāniyyah, who defected, in 296/908–9, with a force of some 4,000 Turkish slave-troops from the Samanids to Baghdad. Ibn Faḍlān’s account provides no substantial information on him.
5. The Financier: A further member of the mission is Aḥmad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārazmī, who is appointed as the agent for the estate from which the mission is to receive its principal funds. Unaccountably, he leaves Baghdad later than the embassy and is easily thwarted in his attempts to reach Bukhara. The mission, therefore, must proceed without the funds the king of the Bulghārs so badly wanted.
6. The vizier Ḥāmid ibn al-ʿAbbās, who otherwise does not feature in our account, has entrusted the mission with a letter for the king.
7. The king is represented by a Khazar: ʿAbdallāh ibn Bāshtū, the Bulghār envoy, was a Muslim of Khazar origin, who may, according to some scholars, have been involved in the dissemination of Islam throughout Volga Bulgharia. The French scholar of Ibn Faḍlān, Marius Canard, thinks he is a political refugee from Khazaria and sees in his ethnic identity a clear indication that Khazar enmity was the occasion of the Bulghār petition.1 From his actions in Khwārazm, it is clear that ʿAbdallāh’s advice was respected by the mission.
8. The jurists and the instructors. These nameless individuals are an enigma. When the mission is about to set out from al-Jurjāniyyah, we discover that there is only one instructor and one jurist. The jurist and the instructor decide not to continue to Bulghār territory. No reason is given.
9. The retainers or slave-soldiers. It also appears, from the report of the departure from al-Jurjāniyyah, that the mission was accompanied by retainers or slave-soldiers (ghilmān), who likewise do not continue. This is the sole reference to them in the account.
10. The guide. The mission picks up a guide named Falūs, from al-Jurjāniyyah. It is not clear whether this guide also acts as the tarjumān, the interpreter.
11. The interpreter. Ibn Faḍlān mentions “the interpreter” in twelve paragraphs: §§19, 20, 30, 31, 38, 40, 45, 47, 61, 84, 85, 88. It is unclear how many interpreters there are. The king’s interpreter was presumably ʿAbdallāh ibn Bāshtū al-Khazarī, whom he sent to Baghdad with his petition, although the text does not say that he fulfilled this function for the king. We also meet Takīn al-Turkī acting in the role of interpreter. Were there more interpreters, one the mission brought along with it as the “guide” from al-Jurjāniyyah and one serving the king of the Bulghārs? The interpreter not only translates on behalf of the embassy but also provides cultural commentary on some of the phenomena and customs observed by Ibn Faḍlān.
12. 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