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Ibn Fadlan’s Report on the Rus, Gog and Magog in Light of Recent Work on the Mashhad Miscellany
 
PIIS086919080021386-1-1
DOI10.31857/S086919080021386-1
Publication type Article
Status Published
Authors
Jonathan Shepard 
Occupation: Research Associate
Affiliation: University of Oxford
Address: United Kingdom (Great Britain),
Journal nameVostok. Afro-Aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost
EditionIssue 4
Pages65-74
Abstract

The fullest extant text of Ibn Fadlan’s Risala, kept at Mashhad in Iran, is well-known in facsimile although the manuscript awaits full codicological investigation. Recent work on the manuscript’s other texts has reappraised the ‘Mashhad Miscellany’ as a whole, notably the role of the poet and traveller Abu Dulaf, and suggested that that Ibn Fadlan’s text was written in less formal Middle Arabic. This prompts five general observations. Firstly, given the turbulence in the Caliphate’s central lands, Ibn Fadlan can have had little expectation of returning to Baghdad from his mission to the Volga. Secondly, his text is essentially an apologia for failure – and a kind of ‘job application’. Thirdly, he offers firsthand information about the peoples of Gog and Magog and the Rus, both of concern to Muslim scholars and leaderships: the former for their liability to break out and herald the End Time; the latter for their recent, devastating raids on the Southern and Eastern Caspian. Fourthly, he may well offer reassurance that, for all their barbarism, the Rus should not be identified with Gog and Magog, while indirectly advocating peaceful coexistence with the Khazars, despite rivalries and religious differences. And fifthly, eyewitness descriptions of a giant from Gog and Magog and of the Rus would have been of particular interest to emirs in the Caspian region – the front line for potential breakouts or raids – as also to those in the Samanid dominions. Ibn Fadlan’s may have composed his ‘job application’ with an eye to these potential employers.

KeywordsAbbasids, Caspian, Gog and Magog, Ibn Fadlan, Mashhad, Middle Arabic, raid, Rus, Samanids, trade
Received12.08.2022
Publication date06.09.2022
Number of characters30484
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Table of contents

ABBREVIATIONS / СОКРАЩЕНИЯ
1 Considering that Ibn Fadlan offers a unique eyewitness report of Islamic belief, customs and devotions among the peoples living between the Aral Sea and the Middle Volga in the early tenth century, one might expect the manuscript containing the fullest version of his text to have undergone careful scrutiny. This, however, is not the case. There has been no scholarly examination of the manuscript since Z.V. Togan discovered the manuscript in the Imam Reza shrine’s library at Mashhad in 1923; he subsequently edited and published the text [Togan, 1939]. Although clear facsimiles have been made, study of the folios and the bindings – full codicological analysis – has not yet been done [Treadwell, 2020, p. 46–48; Treadwell, 2022]. Consequently, the dating of the Mashhad manuscript remains uncertain, while surprisingly little attention has been paid to the makeup of its contents as a whole. Of the four texts transmitted by the manuscript the ones with which it begins and ends – respectively al-Faqih’s Kitāb al-Buldān (‘Book of Countries’) and Ibn Fadlan’s Risala (‘Message’) – have attracted much study. In comparison, the two shorter texts in the middle purporting to be travelogues, written by the poet and traveller Abu Dulaf, have been overlooked. The same goes for the linking passages, attributable to the self-styled compilers and editors of the Mashhad Miscellany (working in the second half of the tenth century). The travelogues and the linking passages have attracted little comment since that of the mid-twentieth-century authority on (and editor of) Ibn Fadlan, A.P. Kovalevsky [Kovalevskii, 1956, p. 46–47].
2 Two findings made in connection with a project devoted to Ibn Fadlan may alter the picture somewhat. Firstly, James Montgomery has, on the strength of his new edition and translation of Ibn Fadlan’s Risala, postulated that the original text was written partly in a register lower than the classical Arabic one would expect of a polished literary text or a diplomatic report. Much of it is, he suggests, in ‘Middle Arabic’, the less formal register that was normally used for the spoken word [IbnF1, p. 182–183; Montgomery, 2022]. Secondly, Luke Treadwell has added to pre-existing scholarly doubts about the veracity of two texts in the Mashhad Miscellany recounting the purported travels of Abu Dulaf, written by him in the first person. Treadwell reaffirms the scepticism that Abu Dulaf’s second travelogue – an itinerary across the Southern Caucasus and Iran, much of it to do with mineralogy, flora and folktales about natural phenomena – has long incurred from scholars [Treadwell, 2020, p. 49, 55, 58–60, 67–68]. In a study entitled ‘Who compiled and edited the Mashhad Miscellany?’, Treadwell goes further than this, casting serious doubt on the historicity of Abu Dulaf’s accompaniment of a Samanid embassy to the East, recounted in his first travelogue. He also rejects the authenticity of the scholarly notes purportedly written by the so-called compilers and editors of the Miscellany. The notes linking the four texts and the critical comments on them are, he suggests, the handiwork of Abu Dulaf, ‘a notorious itinerant entertainer’, ‘playing tricks on his audience and his patrons’ [Treadwell, 2020, p. 49–51, 59–60, 65]. The notes, together with the travelogues written in Abu Dulaf’s name and perhaps even aspects of the Risala of Ibn Fadlan form, in Treadwell’s view part of an elaborate literary hoax. The presence of ‘the three unknown texts’ together in the Mashhad Miscellany is the product of ‘a single mind’, Abu Dulaf’s [Treadwell, 2020, p. 59–60, 68–69]. Only the text of al-Faqih’s ‘Book of Countries’ is transmitted in something like the form its author intended.
3 Work on this revisionist thesis is still underway. Treadwell recognises that, so far as the Rus are concerned, modern scholars’ confidence in the accuracy of Ibn Fadlan’s report rests on its corroboration by ‘recently discovered archaeological and ethnographic data’ [Treadwell, 2020, p. 53]. He accepts that Abu Dulaf, in an effort to make his literary hoax more plausible, did draw upon some authentic materials. To that extent, his thesis about the Risala of Abu Dulaf and Abu Dulaf’s responsibility for the Mashhad Miscellany does not seriously diminish its value in providing an eyewitness account of the Rus on the Volga. And, anyway, a general historian such as myself is hardly qualified to comment on tenth-century Arabic literary styles and conventions. It does, however, seem worth making a couple of remarks about the text, before offering a few general historical observations. Firstly, the question of the interrelationship between Ibn Fadlan’s Risala and the two travelogues written in Abu Dulaf’s name is bedevilled by the question of the style or register in which the latter two texts were originally written. We do not yet know how far Abu Dulaf’s travelogues were originally in Middle Arabic, as parts of Ibn Fadlan’s Risala were, according to James Montgomery: detailed work on their language is yet to be done [Treadwell, 2022]. Until that time there is no really compelling reason to place the Risala in the category of virtual fiction. A second remark follows on from Montgomery’s postulate that the Middle Arabic register of much of the Risala has been obscured by the predisposition of its modern editors to polish up the style to the standard of classical Arabic, on the assumption that no text in a lower register would have been thought worth preserving. This predisposition of editors entails a rather circular argument. Indeed, it raises the question of how many other texts may have undergone literary polishing, at the hand of premodern copyists or modern editors. One or two other Middle Arabic texts are, in fact, known, and they will receive attention towards the end of this piece. Our main concern, though, is to make a number of general historical observations, some so obvious as to be seldom thought worth making, others linking up sections of Ibn Fadlan’s report with the broader historical context, the widespread apprehensions and events occurring around the time of his journey to Volga Bulgaria.

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