Mission to the Volga
Page 11
NOTES
1 In his entry on the “Bulghār” Yāqūt gives this name as Asad, though his other references to Ibn Faḍlān’s full name use Rāshid. Presumably “Asad” is a scribal error.
2 The word mawlā that I have translated, in this instance, as “patron” expresses a central feature of Islamic social organization known as walāʾ. The term covers several relationships, including the ownership and manumission of slaves, the patronage of clients, and the protection and support of freeborn men and membership of a person’s household. In our text mawlā is used to express patronage and clientage, as here (and also §§5, 43–47), ownership of a slave, as in §§55, 76, 80, 84, 85, 86, and the status of being a manumitted slave, a freedman who would continue under the patronage of their manumitters, as in §3: see Crone, “Mawlā.”
3 Many Arabic works from the classical period were dictated, and we often find indications of this. Even when books were written down by their author (as opposed to being dictated to an amanuensis), they often preserve this gesture of orality by continuing the practice of using indications of orality such as “he (i.e., the author) said.” See §§2, 6, 7, 27, 28, 47, 48, 49, 50, 69, 71, 73, 74, 89, for the instances of this use of “he said” in the text.
4 The word rendered as “representative” is safīr, the modern Arabic for “ambassador.” It seems that Nadhīr, a high-ranking member of the caliphal court, presented the letter from the king of the Volga Bulghārs to the caliph and so acted in an ambassadorial role, as the king’s representative or go-between. His mawlā (freedman, manumitted slave) Sawsan, in turn, represents Nadhīr on the embassy and is therefore called the “envoy” (rasūl). Ibn Faḍlān represents the caliph.
5 This “medication” is presented to the king in §41 (“unguents”). It later featured prominently as the reason for the king’s conversion to Islam: see DeWeese, Islamization, 72–81, especially 76–78.
6 Ibn Faḍlān records some thirty days of stopover time at the fourteen halting posts at this stage of their journey.
7 Literally, “five days.” Presumably, Ibn Faḍlān means that Aḥmad ibn Mūsā—who was to sell the estate of Arthakhushmīthan and provide the embassy with the money required by the Bulghār king to build the fort—left Baghdad on the fifth day (reckoning inclusively) after the party’s departure, on the sixteenth of Safar (June 25).
8 The word translated as “soldier” is ghulām. It can denote any man, free or slave, closely bound in service to his master. I have rendered it variously as “soldier,” “retainer,” “man,” and “male slave.” See Sourdel, “Ghulām: 1,” and Bosworth, “Ghulām: 2.”
9 A curious echo of Q Nisāʾ 4:121: «Their destination is Jahannam. They will find no way to escape.»
10 See Q Insān 76:13. Zamharīr is explained as the burning cold of Hell.
11 From late November–early December, 921 to the end of February, 922.
12 This is a crucial instance of an awkward term in the text, bayt, which can designate variously a “tent,” a “chamber,” or a “house.” Here the word bayt is contrasted with the other predominant term for “tent” in the text, qubbah, properly a “domed structure,” rendered here and elsewhere as “yurt.” I am unsure what, exactly, is descibed by the phrase “a chamber inside another chamber.” The alternative is to render the phrase as “a tent inside another tent, with a Turkish yurt of animal skins inside it.”
13 This is the only mention in the extant text of the involvement of Sawsan’s “brother-in-law.” The “jurists and instructors” mentioned in §3 are here reduced to one jurist and one instructor.
14 I take the point to be that the Turk does not recognize God as a member of the Turkic pantheon. According to Canard, Voyage, 102, n. 74, the caliph is intended by the word rabb.
15 It is possible that Ibn Faḍlān is drawing a more exact picture, so the phrase may mean that they used their clothes to fan the flames, causing sparks to leap from the fire. I thank Professor Philip Kennedy for this suggestion.
16 That is, on the morning of 17 Dhu l-Qaʿdah, 309 (Tuesday, March 19, 922).
17 I translate the phrase idhā bi- with this and similar expressions, of varying emphasis. I want to bring out the strong presence of eyewitness testimony, which predominates in Ibn Faḍlān’s account.
18 An allusion to Q Muddaththir 74:50–51. See also §76.
19 This is a key instance in the text of an ambiguous use of the Arabic term rabb in Ibn Faḍlān’s account of the Turks and the Rūsiyyah. As a form of address, rabb can be applied to a human in a position of leadership, but is often reserved for addressing God. The point Ibn Faḍlān makes about monotheism and reason is that the Ghuzziyyah Turks have neither revealed law nor a set of social customs based upon natural law determined through the use of reason. Ibn Faḍlān’s picture of them reveals that they are henotheists who base their social practices on a strict code, though he apparently does not think this qualifies as ʿaql, reason.
20 Q Shūrā 42:38.
21 This is the first mention in the text of an interpreter.
22 The Mashhad MS reading tagharrasa is an unattested form. I suspect it conveys a notion that the bather has “planted” something in the water he washes in.
23 I thank Professor Geert Jan van Gelder for explaining this use of qāma ʿalā to me.
24 An echo of Q Yūsuf 12:23.
25 There is a lacuna of one word in the manuscript.
26 The term used is al-jannah, a standard Arabic term for Paradise. It recurs regularly throughout the treatise when reference is made to the Turkic or Rūsiyyah otherworld. In Yāqūt §4.4, the structure in which the Khazar khāqān is buried is called “the Garden.”
27 The Arabic expression rendered as “those who” is highly irregular: -hum man (pronominal suffix with man as relative), for the relative pronoun alladhīna or simply man without the suffix -hum.
28 In accordance with the custom described in §23.
29 But not his birth mother, in accordance with the custom described in §22.
30 This statement seems to imply that Ibn Faḍlān was not familiar with the practice of sheep shearing.
31 A paraphrase of Q Isrāʾ 17:43.
32 The last two rivers listed are normally identified as follows: the Jāwshīn is changed to Jāwshīz and is thought to be either the Aqtāy or the Gausherma, and the Bnāsnah is usually written as Niyāsnah. However, these rivers are located north of the region in which Ibn Faḍlān encounters the king of the Bulghārs. McKeithen observes that: “Ibn Faḍlān here takes the opportunity to account for all the rivers that were crossed by him during his stay in the land of the Ṣaqālibah” (Risālah, 82, n. 232). It is possible, of course, that completely different rivers may be intended and that Ibn Faḍlān may not be in a rush at this point in the text to list all the rivers he traversed irrespective of their geographical locations, so I have not altered the spelling of the river names.
33 Ibn Faḍlān is reckoning inclusively, counting the day the caravan departed, the second of Dhu l-Qaʿdah, and the day it arrived.
34 The medication referred to in §3.
35 Presumably the other kings get their share of the meal also.
36 The translation of this phrase is conjectural. It is usually explained in terms of fermentation—that is, letting it sit for a day and a night means the drink does not develop intoxicating properties and so would be permissible for Muslims to drink. If this is the meaning, then I would translate: “so called because it takes a day and a night to make.” But Ibn Faḍlān’s text does not say that he and the envoys drank the wine but that they rose to their feet three times while the king drank and delivered his oath. It is Yāqūt’s quotation of the passage that adds the verb wa-sharibnā, “and we drank.”
37 This is one of two places in the text where the title “king of the Bulghārs” is used, rather than “king of the Ṣaqālibah”: see also §69.
38 “God’s bondsman” is the meaning of the name ʿAbdallāh. For the fuller
version of the hadith, see Risālat Ibn Faḍlān, ed. al-Dahhān, 118 and n. 1.
39 As explained in §6.
40 Commentators and translators rarely agree that the king’s remarks imply that Ibn Faḍlān was an Arab. Canard, Voyage, 109, n. 163, thinks that the term ustādh, “master,” cannot refer to the caliph but only to the vizier. I suspect that the king intends Nadhīr al-Ḥaramī by the term.
41 This was in §14.
42 The iqāmah is a second call to stand in prayer, uttered after the adhān by the muezzin, as he stands behind the imam, when the latter is about to begin leading prayer. It consists of the text of the adhān, with the addition of the phrase qad qāmat al-ṣalāt, “prayer has begun.” According to Shāfiʿī practice as observed by the caliphal court, the formulae taken from the adhān were uttered once in the iqāmah, and qad qāmat al-ṣalāt was uttered twice, whereas, according to Ḥanafī practice—the practice (madhhab) followed by the Samanids of Bukhara and to which the Bulghārs and the other steppe Turks converted—all the formulae were uttered twice. See the detailed note by Canard, Voyage, 110–11, n. 165. My thanks go to Professor Shawkat Toorawa for explaining this to me.
43 What the king means by this reference to the first caliph, renowned for his honesty, is unclear.
44 The sāʿah qiyāsiyyah refers to a practice of dividing night and day into twelve hours: “the clock worked on ‘unequal’ hours, that is, the hours of daylight or darkness were divided by twelve to give hours that varied in length from day to day” (Hill, “Sāʿa,” 655). A proportional hour may thus be longer or shorter than an astronomical hour, depending on latitude and time of the year. I am grateful to Professor van Gelder for this explanation.
45 The Qurʾan was divided into seven equal portions for recitation over the seven days of the week: see von Denffer, ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān, 69–70. My thanks go to Professor Toorawa for the reference.
46 This is an indication that Ibn Faḍlān remained with the Bulghārs until the end of the summer and so presumably would not have made the crossing of the Ustyurt back to Khwārazm until the following spring, at the earliest. Markwart, “Ein arabischer Bericht über die arktischen (uralischen) Länder,” 279–80 and 331–32, argues, in terms of astronomical data, that Ibn Faḍlān’s claim (that this took place on the night of May 12–13) cannot be an accurate assessment of the hours of daylight in May. He prefers to see this as taking place in July. According to Czeglédy, “Zur Meschheder Handschrift,” 225–27, Ibn Faḍlān is organizing his narrative by type of observation. See also McKeithen, Risālah, 97, n. 283. The “boiling cooking pot” is a trope of geographical lore concerning the northern regions in Arabic texts. The conversation with the muezzin revolves around the organization of the day in terms of the five ritual prayers: see Monnot, “Ṣalāt.”
47 This is the only allusion to the return of the embassy I can detect in the account (aside from the fact of the preservation of the account itself).
48 The passage is obscure and can mean either that the Bulghār word for “female slaves” is the same as that for “apples” or that the apples are called something like “slave apples.” Perhaps Ibn Faḍlān picked up a smattering of Bulghār or else acquired this information from the interpreter or a local informant.
49 The Prophet Muḥammad was also known as Aḥmad: see Q Ṣaff 61:6. Both names derive from the same triliteral root pattern in Arabic. The Bulghār’s name is Ṭālūt, the Qurʾanic name for Saul: Q Baqarah 2:247–49. McKeithen, Risālah, 111, n. 335, suggests that Ibn Faḍlān may be endeavoring to represent a Turkic name.
50 These are Q 1, Sūrat al-Fātiḥah and 112, Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ, respectively.
51 The Arabic states: “there is not one of them whose bottom can be attained.”
52 This is the market the Rūsiyyah use in §74.
53 It seems that Gog and Magog are separated from the outside world by both a gate and a wall.
54 It seems that the Wīsū are surprisingly knowledgeable about the Muslim apocalyptic legends of Gog and Magog. The reference to “the Wall” is to the wall that the Qurʾan says the Horned Man (Alexander the Great) built to imprison Gog and Magog. For analogues in Arabic sources to the fabulous fish that feeds Gog and Magog, see Canard, Voyage, 116, n. 228. The qāla that occurs at this point in the text is the qāla that indicates that someone has finished speaking.
55 There is a lacuna of one word in the manuscript.
56 The text of the Mashhad manuscript is obscure. Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlān, 43, translate: “and if a woman from Khwārazm is present.” I have adopted their rendering. They explain this in terms of the requirement that a corpse must be washed by a Muslim woman; as the nearest source of Muslim women was Khwārazm, they infer that “Islam had not extended to Bulghār females” (228, n. 79).
57 See §33, where the Ghuzziyyah are forced to pay the same tribute.
58 See Yāqūt §4.4, for how these hostage brides fare at the Khazar court.
59 This phrase is obscure and the Arabic syntax is far from clear. Ibn Faḍlān is thought by many to be describing tattoos of trees and other forms, but the practice of tattooing is unattested for the Vikings and he may mean that they have the images of trees and other shapes painted on them, perhaps using a plant dye.
60 Viking women often wore a scoop for ear-wax, together with other items for personal grooming, attached to a chain worn around the neck or under a broach. It is this scoop that Ibn Faḍlān calls a knife.
61 A second occurrence of this allusion to Q Muddaththir 74:50–51; see the account of the Ghuzziyyah at §18.
62 Ibn Faḍlān’s Arabic implies that, for the Rūsiyyah, this communal wash is a binding ritual.
63 Ibn Faḍlān shows that he is aware that the funerary practice of the Rūsiyyah is not fixed but admits variation based upon wealth. See §71 for a similar recognition of variation in Bulghār funerary ritual based upon tribal status. Variations in the funerary practice of the Ghuzziyyah seem to depend on tribal membership and wealth: see §27.
64 Professor van Gelder refers me to al-Tanūkhī’s Nishwār al-muḥādarah, 2:184.1–185.4 for an anecdote that revolves around the term jawānbīrah, an arabicized borrowing from Persian which appears to mean a “middle-aged” woman. I suspect, though I have no hard evidence, that, with this unusual phrase, Ibn Faḍlān may be trying to communicate a more menacing aspect of the Angel of Death than simply telling us her age.
65 See §27 for the “Garden” of the Ghuzziyyah and Yāqūt §4.4 for the “Garden” of the khāqān of the Khazars.
66 See, e.g., §72 for the vassalage of the king of the Bulghārs.
67 Wüstenfeld 1.112.16–113.15 = §68.
68 Wüstenfeld 1.468.17–469.15 = §§37–38.
69 Yāqūt lists thirteen deities—fourteen, if we include the sky god.
70 An echo of Q Isrāʾ 17:43.