Risala of Ahmad ibn Fadlan

Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rašīd ibn Hammād was a 10th century Arab Muslim writer and traveler who wrote an account of his travels as the secretary to an ambassador of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars. Ibn Fadlan wrote an account of his journeys with the embassy, called a Risala. This Risala is of great value as a history, although it is clear in some places that inaccuracies and Ibn Fadlan's own prejudices have slanted the account to some extent.

The embassy's objective was to have the king of the Bolğars pay homage to Caliph al-Muqtadir and, in return, to give the king money to pay for the construction of a fortress. Although they reached Bolğar, the mission failed because they were unable to collect the money intended for the king. Annoyed at not receiving the promised sum, the king refused to switch from the Maliki rite to the Hanafi rite of Baghdad.

The embassy left Baghdad on June 21, 921. It reached the Bulghars after much hardship on May 12, 922. (This day is an official religious holiday in modern Tatarstan.) The journey took Ibn Fadlan from Baghdad to Bukhara and Khwarizm (south of the Aral Sea). Although promised safe passage by the Oghuz warlord, or Kudarkin, they were waylaid by Oghuz bandits but luckily were able to bribe their attackers. They spent the winter in Jurjaniya before travelling north across the Ural River until they reached the towns of the Bulghars at the three lakes of the Volga north of the Samara bend.

After arriving in Bolğar, Ahmad ibn Fadlan made a trip to Wisu and recorded his observations of trade between the Volga Bolğars and local Finnic tribes.

During the course of his journey, Ibn Fadlan met a people called the Rus, a group of Swedish origin, acting as traders in the Bulgar capital. His Risala is probably the most important eyewitness account of the Rus, a writer about whom little is known, but whose Risala has been translated into several languages. Key segments of it are universally cited in modern books about Vikings. It was his account that inspired author Michael Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead, the basis of the film The Thirteenth Warrior by Touchstone/Disney. “Ibn Fadlan was unique of all the sources,” says Noonan. “He was there, and you can trace his exact path. He describes how the caravans traveled, how they would cross a river. He tells you about the flora and fauna along the way. He shows us exactly how the trade functions. There is nothing else like it.”

In addition to the information one may obtained from wikipedia, Ibn Fadlan was himself a faqih, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, who served as secretary of a delegation sent by Caliph al-Muqtadir in 921 to the king of the Bulgars, who had requested help building a fort and a mosque, as well as personal instruction in the teachings of Islam. The Bulgars were a Turkic-speaking branch of the people whom the Khazars had split in the seventh century. One group migrated west, where they assimilated with Slavs and founded what became modern Bulgaria, west of the Black Sea; the others turned north toward the middle Volga region, where they continued to chafe under the rule of the Khazars, whose domination of the north Caucasus and Caspian region marked the northern limits of Abbasid power. In seeking assistance from Baghdad, the king of the Bulgars was seeking an alliance against the Khazars.

Presumably in order to avoid Khazar lands, the caliph’s delegation took a lengthy and circuitous route to the Bulgar capital, passing east of the Caspian Sea. Once there, it was Ibn Fadlan who gave religious instruction to the Bulgar king, so impressing him that the king gave him the kunya, or nickname, “al-Siddiq,” “the truthful”—the same kunya that had once been earned by Abu Bakr, the first caliph of Islam.

All told, the delegation covered some 4000 kilometers (2500 mi). In his Risala, Ibn Fadlan described the numerous peoples he encountered, and roughly one-fifth of his account is devoted to the Rus. “I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy,” he wrote. “Each man has an axe, a sword, and a knife and keeps each by him at all times.” The men, he observed, were tattooed with dark-green figures “from fingernails to neck.”

Viking arts of jewelry and bodily ornamentation were well-developed, and Ibn Fadlan described the Rus women as wearing neck rings of gold and silver, “one for each 10,000 dirhams which her husband is worth; some women have many. Their most prized ornaments are green glass beads of clay, which are found on the ships. They trade beads among themselves and pay a dirham for a bead. They string them as necklaces….” They also wore festoons of colored beads, large oval brooches from which dangled such items as knives, keys and combs, and what Ibn Fadlan described as “breast-boxes made out of gold, silver and wood.”

He had harsh words, however, for Rus hygiene: “They are the filthiest of God’s creatures,” he observed, and although he acknowledged that they washed their hands, faces and heads every day, he was appalled that they did so “in the dirtiest and filthiest fashion possible” in a communal basin of water, an ancient Germanic custom that caused understandable revulsion in a Muslim who typically performed ablutions only in poured or running water. (In the same year, Ibn Rustah, however, commended the Rus he observed as being “clean in their dress and kind to their slaves.”)

Their contact with Islam led some among the Rus to embrace the religion, though Ibn Fadlan astutely noted that old habits still had their pull: “They are very fond of pork and many of them who have assumed the path of Islam miss it very much.” The Rus had also relished nabith, a fermented drink Ibn Fadlan often mentioned as part of their daily fare.

Yet most of the Rus continued to observe their own religious practices, which included the offering of sacrifices. Ibn Rustah makes mention of a professional priesthood of Rus shamans (whom he calls attibah) who enjoyed very high status, and who had the power to select as a sacrifice to their gods whichever men, women or cattle they fancied.

Witnessing a band of Rus merchants celebrating the safe completion of a Volga voyage in 922, Ibn Fadlan described how they prayed to their gods and offered sacrifices to wooden figures stuck into the ground, and they begged their deities to send merchants with plentiful silver coins to buy what they had to sell.

He also witnessed, along the Volga, the dramatic funeral of a chieftain who was cremated with his ship. His oft-quoted description of this rite is one of the most remarkable documents of the Viking Age, filled as it is with grim details of the dead leader laid out in his boat amid a treasury of expensive items, rich foods and strong drink, as well as a dog, horses, oxen, and poultry, and accompanied by the body of a slave girl who had volunteered for the honor of being slain and burned with her master.

Beyond this, Ibn Fadlan was privy to scenes of drunkenness and lewd behavior that were clearly shocking to a pious, erudite scholar from Baghdad. But he was no moralizer: After making note of the conduct, he moved on in his narrative without condescension.

Other than Ibn Fadlan, few if any Muslims from the Middle East or Central Asia made the trek to the Norsemen’s distant homelands. However, Muslims in al-Andalus, in the southern two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula, could travel to Scandinavia relatively easily by sea, and several appear to have done just that, probably to trade. In the mid-l0th century, a Córdoban merchant named al-Tartushi visited the Danish market town of Hedeby. He was none too impressed, for although, at 24 hectares (60 acres) in area, Hedeby was the largest Scandinavian town of the time, al-Tartushi found it a far cry from the elegance, organization and comfort of Córdoba. Hedeby was noisy and filthy, he wrote, with the pagan inhabitants hanging animal sacrifices on poles in front of their houses. The people of Hedeby subsisted chiefly on fish, “for there was so much of it.” He noted that Norse women enjoyed the right to divorce: “They part with their husbands whenever they like.” Men and women alike, he found, used “an artificial make-up for the eyes; when they use it their beauty never fades, but increases.”