Mission to the Volga. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

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 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