Mission to the Volga

by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

  Baghdad, with its population of between a quarter and half a million people in the fourth/tenth century, was the world’s largest consumer of luxury goods, and trade was buoyant, but it was also a city on the brink of lawlessness and anarchy. It was poorly managed, food supplies were unreliable, famine was a regular occurrence, and prices were high. There were sporadic outbreaks of disease, largely because of the floods occasioned by municipal neglect of the irrigation system.

  Factionalism was commonplace, and religious animosities, especially those between the Shiʿi community and the Ḥanbalite Sunnis, under the energetic direction of the theologian and traditionist al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Khalaf al-Barbahārī (d. 329/941), frequently erupted into violence. Although doctrinally quietist and sternly opposed to formal political rebellion, the Ḥanbalites, followers of Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), did not disregard divergent expressions of Islamic belief or public displays of moral laxity. They took to the streets of Baghdad on several occasions to voice their disapproval of the corruption of the times. The great jurist, exegete, and historian al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) is thought to have incurred their wrath when he pronounced a compromise verdict on a theological dispute concerning the precise implications of Q Isrāʾ 17:79:

  Strive through the night—as an offering in hope that your Lord may raise you to a praiseworthy place.

  This verse had been adopted by al-Barbahārī as a slogan, following the realist and anthropomorphic exegesis of it advocated by his teacher, al-Marwazī (d. 275/888). According to the Ḥanbalites, the verse declared that God would physically place Muḥammad on His throne on Judgment Day—anything less was tantamount to heresy. According to several sources, Ḥanbalite animosity to al-Ṭabarī persisted until his death, when a mob gathered at his home and prevented a public funeral 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 Ar
abic 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,” and Margarita Zamora draws attention to the equal weight given spiritual and worldly (i.e., commercial) ambitions in the “Letter to the Sovereigns.”11 Christopher Hill has been the most persistent and persuasive exponent of the religiosity of the seventeenth-century Puritan worldview, in which every aspect of man’s behavior is seen through a religious prism.12 In the wake of the feting of William Dampier upon the publication of his New Voyage round the World in 1697, the Royal Society urged seamen to greater scientific precision in their journals, “to improve the stock of knowledge in the world and hence improve the condition of mankind.”13 And by improving “the condition of mankind,” we can savor the ambiguity between Enlightenment reason and the mission civilatrice that would come with conversion to Christianity.

  It is muddle-headed to consider religious motives as mere justification for interference in “foreign” affairs. The caliphal court would not have known what we mean by these distinctions. Such a line of reasoning attempts to separate and differentiate between a mutually inclusive set of notions: missionary activity, conversion, trade, and expansion of the caliphate. What I am advocating is respect for the integrity of Ibn Faḍlān’s account.

  YĀQŪT’S QUOTATIONS

  The Arabic text of Ibn Faḍlān’s book exists in two formats: as part of a manuscript contained in the library attached to the Mausoleum of the imam ʿAlī al-Riḍā in Mashhad, Iran, discovered in 1923 by A. Zeki Validi Togan (the text translated in this book as Mission to the Volga); and as six quotations in Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān (Dictionary of Places) (also translated in this book).

  Yāqūt ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī (574-75–626/1179–1229) was a biographer and geographer renowned for his encyclopedic writings. “Al-Rūmī” (“the man from Rūm”) refers to his Byzantine descent, and “al-Ḥamawī” connects him with Ḥāmah, in Syria. In his topographical dictionary Kitab Muʿjam al-buldān, he included quotations from Ibn Faḍlān’s account, which remained the principal vestiges of the work until Togan’s discovery of the Mashhad manuscript in 1923.

  The geographical dictionary of Yāqūt includes excerpts from Ibn Faḍlān’s book in six lemmata:

  1. Itil: Wüstenfeld 1.112.16–113.15 = Mashhad 208a.4–208b.9 → §68 of the present translation.

  2. Bāshghird: Wüstenfeld 1.468.17–469.15 = Mashhad 203a.7–203b.3 → §§37–38 of the present translation.

  3. Bulghār: Wüstenfeld 1.723.6–19 = Mashhad 196b.18–197a.12; 1.723.19–724.9 = Mashhad 203b.5–204a.3; 1.724.9–725.4 = 204a.4–204b.7; 1.725.5–726.16 = 205b.1–206a.12; 1.726.16–727.1 = 206b.2–10; 1.727.2–3 = 206b.14–16; 1.727.3–10 = 206b.17–207a.5; 1.727.10–12 = 207a.9–11; 1.727.12–13 = 207a.16–17; 1.727.14–21 = 207b.4–11; → §§2–4, 39–44, 48–50, 51, 53–56, 59, 61–63 respectively of the present translation.

  4. Khazar: Wüstenfeld 2.436.20–440.6 (only 2.438.11–14 matches the extant text in the Mashhad manuscript) = Mashhad 212b.15–19 = §90 of the present translation.

  5. Khwārazm: Wüstenfeld 2.484.10–485.23 = Mashhad 198a.17–199a.3 = §§8–11 of the present translation.

  6. Rūs: Wüstenfeld 2.834.18–840.12 = Mashhad 209b.17–212b.15 =. §§74–89 of the present translation.

  Yāqūt frequently remarks that he has abbreviated Ibn Faḍlān’s account, occasionally criticizes him, and expresses disbelief in his version of events. He stresses that his quotation of Ibn Faḍlān’s passage on the Rūs is accurate and implies that it is a verbatim quotation. This raises, in my mind, the possibility that Yāqūt may not be quoting Ibn Faḍlān so accurately in the other five lemmata. And a close comparison between the passages on the Rūs in both sources reveals that, here too, Yāqūt’s quotation may not, strictly speaking, be verbatim but may have been subjected to modification, paraphrasing, and rewording. (I say “may have been” because it is likely that Yāqūt was quoting from an ancestor to the actual Mashhad manuscript.) Furthermore, in the lemma devoted to the Khazars, Yāqūt confuses quotations drawn from al-Iṣṭakhrī’s midfourth/tenth century work Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-mamālik (The Book of Highways and Kingdoms) with the quotation he took from Ibn Faḍlān, although it is also possible that this section of the Khazars has been taken from al-Iṣtakhrī’s text and added to Ibn Faḍlān’s account by the compiler of the Mashhad manuscript.

  For the sake of completeness and in order to make clear the differences between Yāqūt’s versions and the work translated as Mission to the Volga, I include Yāqūt’s quotations from Ibn Faḍlān translated from Wüstenfeld’s edition; please note, I have not consulted any of the manuscripts 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 t
o 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.