Mission to the Volga. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan
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being held in his honor. Al-Ṭabarī was buried in his home, under cover of darkness.
Ḥanbalite agitation was at its most violent in 323/935, when the caliph al-Rāḍī (r. 322–29/934–40) was compelled formally to declare Ḥanbalism a heresy and to exclude the Ḥanbalites from the Islamic community.
And then the authorities had al-Ḥallāj to contend with. Abū l-Mughīth al-Ḥusayn ibn Manṣūr, known as al-Ḥallāj, “the Wool-Carder,” was a charismatic Sufi visionary. In the markets of Baghdad he preached a message of God as the One Truth, the Only Desire. He installed a replica of the Kaaba in his house and passed the night in prayer in graveyards. He appealed to the populace to kill him and save him from God, and, in a fateful encounter in the Mosque of al-Manṣūr in Baghdad, he is said to have exclaimed, “I am the Truth.” In other words, he shouted, he had no other identity than God.
The administration was terrified of the revolutionary appeal of al-Ḥallāj and considered him a threat to the stability of the empire. He was arrested and an inquisition held. His main opponents were Ibn al-Furāt and Ḥāmid ibn al-ʿAbbās, both of whom feature in Ibn Faḍlān’s account. (It was one of Ibn al-Furāt’s estates that was to fund the building of the Bulghār fort, and Ḥāmid ibn al-ʿAbbās provided the mission with a letter for the king of the Bulghārs.) It was a singular event to see both men in agreement in their opposition to al-Ḥallāj. They so hated one another that, when Ibn al-Furāt had been accused of financial corruption and removed from the vizierate, Ḥāmid, who was to replace him, was restrained from a vicious attempt to pull out Ibn al-Furāt’s beard! Al-Ḥallāj was executed on March 26, 922, two months before the mission reached the
Bulghārs.5
It was from this “City of Peace” that the embassy departed, following the Khurasan highway, but the first leg of their journey was fraught with danger. They made their way to Rayy, the commercial capital of al-Jibāl province. In military terms, this was one of the most hotly contested cities in the whole region. In 311/919, two years before the departure of the mission, Ibn Faḍlān’s patron Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān had been killed in a failed attempt to oust the Daylamite Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī from control of the city. Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī was later formally invested by Baghdad as governor of Rayy (307–11/919–24). At the time of the mission, then, the caliphate, the Samanids, and the Zaydī Daylamites were engaged in constant struggle for control of the region.
There were other powerful local actors at work in the area, too. Ibn Abī l-Sāj, the governor of Azerbaijan, was a force to be reckoned with. So too was Ibn Qārin, the ruler of Firrīm and the representative of the Caspian Zaydī dāʿī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Qāsim. Al-Ḥasan ibn al-Qāsim was the successor to al-Uṭrūsh (“the Deaf”) (d. 304/917), restorer of Zaydī Shiʿism in Ṭabaristān and Daylam. Both were powerful men hostile to Abbasids and Samanids. This is why Ibn Faḍlān notes, with some relief, that Līlī ibn Nuʿmān, a Daylamite warlord in the service of al-Uṭrūsh and al-Ḥasan ibn al-Qāsim, had been killed shortly before the embassy reached Nishapur (§4), and why he points out that, in Nishapur, they encountered a friendly face in Ḥammawayh Kūsā, Samanid field marshal of Khurasan. The mission thus made its way briskly through a dangerous region and, in order to proceed to Bukhara, successfully negotiated its first major natural obstacle, the Karakum desert.
Such was the world in which the caliphal envoys lived and against which Ibn Faḍlān would measure the peoples and persons he met on his way to the Volga.
WHY?
Why did Caliph al-Muqtadir agree to the king’s petition? What did the court seek to achieve? What were the motives behind the mission? The khwārazm-shāh in Kāth (Khwārazm) (§8) and the four chieftains of the Ghuzziyyah assembled by Atrak ibn al-Qaṭaghān (§33) are suspicious of Baghdad’s interest in spreading Islam among the Bulghār. The Samanid emir shows no interest in the mission. He was still a teenager, after all (§5). Should we be suspicious too or emulate the teenage emir?
The king asked the caliph for instruction in Islamic law and ritual practice, a mosque and a minbar to declare his fealty to the caliph as part of the Friday prayer, and the construction of a fort. The Baghdad court’s reasons for acceding to the request are not specified. There is no discussion in the account of the lucrative trade route that linked Baghdad, Bukhara, and Volga Bulgharia; of the emergence of the Bulghār market as a prime source of furs and slaves; or of the Viking lust for silver dirhams that largely fuelled the northern fur and slave trade. Yet there are hints. We learn of the political and religious unrest in Khurasan (bad for the secure passage of trade goods), of the autonomy of the Samanid emirate in Bukhara, and of how jealously the trade links between Bukhara, Khwārazm, and the Turks of the north were protected by the Samanid governor of Khwārazm.
Scholars have speculated on the motives of the mission. Was it intended somehow to bypass the Samanid emirate and secure the Bulghār market for Baghdad? International diplomacy did not exist in isolation but was in many ways the official handmaiden of mercantile relations. Trade was fundamental to the economies of the northern frontier and also a factor in the commission of the embassy: a fort, along the lines of Sarkel on the Don, would have provided the Muslims with a stronghold from which to resist the Khazars and control the flow of trade through the confluence of the Volga and the Kama and would have been a statement of Islamic presence in the area. Or is this speculation just the imposition on the fourth/tenth century of our own obsessions with economic viability?
For Shaban, this diplomatic adventure was a “full-fledged trade mission … a response to a combined approach by Jayhānī and the chief of the Bulghār.” Shaban thinks the Volga mission was a cooperative venture between the Samanids and Abbasids masterminded by al-Jayhānī, an assertion for which there is no shred of evidence. He reasons that the Samanids needed allies to help control the Turkic tribes north of Khwārazm.6
Togan, who discovered the Mashhad manuscript in 1923, suggested that conversion to Islam as conceived and practiced by the caliphal court in such a distant outpost of the empire would have acted as a corrective to Qarmaṭian propaganda, to Zoroastrian prophecies of the collapse of the caliphate at the hands of the Majūs (a name, in Arabic texts of the period, for fire-worshippers, i.e., both Zoroastrians and Vikings!), and to Shiʿi missionary activity, and would have countered the spread of any of these influences among the already volatile Turkic tribes.7 Togan was a Bashkir Bolshevik who had fallen out with Lenin over policies concerning Togan’s native Tataristan and was living in exile in Iran. It is hardly surprising that he read the mission in such richly ideological terms.
According to one commentator, the court must have reasoned that, by controlling how the Volga Bulghārs observed Islamic ritual, it could control their polity, a position that owes more to modern notions of political Islam than to an understanding of the fourth/tenth century.8
Do we need to be so suspicious? Of course, the religious overtones of the king’s petitions were sure to appeal to the caliph and his court. Here was a foreign ruler who had embraced Islam, requesting religious instruction, as well as the construction of a mosque and a minbar from which he could acknowledge the caliph’s suzerainty, and seeking assistance against unspecified enemies, presumably the Khazars, although the Rus’ always represented a threat. The construction of a fort on the Volga bend would have followed the precedents set by both Rørik’s hill-fort, built by the Rus’, and
Sarkel, built on the Don by the Byzantines for the Khazars.
It might be helpful to take a brief look at some disparate examples of the Christian ideology of trade, travel, warfare, and expansion. In 1433, Dom Manuel justifies the Portuguese voyages of discovery:
not only with the intention that great fame and profit might follow to these kingdomes from the riches that there are therein, which were always possessed by the Moors, but so that the faith of Our Lord should be spread through more parts, and His Name known.9
Jonathan Riley-Smith has argued that religion and self-interest were inseparable in the outlook of the early Crusaders.10 Stephen Greenblatt discusses the “formalism” of Columbus’s “linguistic acts,”