Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North

"Between about 700 and about 1400, the intellectual centre of the world was nowhere near Europe. You’ve got a bit of Bede and, I suppose, Aquinas, who builds on Aristotle. Aristotle comes to Aquinas through Grosseteste, but above all via Anna Komnene. She commissions commentaries on Aristotle and these texts start to arrive back with the Crusades. The fundamental intellectual superpowers of the world were in China, in the Khmer world, in South Asia, and in the great Islamic empire. And in places like Samarkand, Bukhara, Herat, Damascus, and Mosul. That’s where all scholars flocked to—from whatever background, whatever nationality, and from whatever religion. Ibn Fadlan was an ambassador who was sent to go and explore the north. The lateral world of exchange between Baghdad, at the centre of the world—along the silk roads towards China and the Mediterranean and the Gulf and the Indian ocean—was mostly urban and sophisticated. There was good order, there were laws, there were passport controls. Your ethnicity was always recorded and what you were carrying was recorded. It was hugely bureaucratic. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The north was filled with people who didn’t, by and large, live in cities, partly because of the harsher climate, which made it harder to live off the land. He was sent to go and explore who lived there and what they had to offer. And since Herodotus, that lip above the Black and Caspian Seas—the Steppe belt that eventually carried the Mongols—had been filled with all sorts of different peoples, mostly tribal peoples. They reared their sheep and, above all, their horses, which they sold into the sedentary world. The horse was the engine of movement and trade. So in the early 10th century, Ibn Fadlan is sent on a mission to Vulgar Bulgaria, which is a long way into the north of Russia. He reports on all the different peoples he meets on the way. I suppose it feels like I know him as well. Every time he meets people, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He meets people who pluck lice from their own pubic hair, crush it under their skin, say ‘yum’ and look at him and wait for his response. He doesn’t know whether they’re doing it specifically to unsettle him, to test him, or whether that’s how some of these people live. He gets to people who worship frogs or have a giant phallus around their neck, or others who worship cranes. He is gathering this information and explaining the world he sees, trying as hard as he can not to be judgemental. It’s a kind of early anthropology. How accurate and reliable it is is, perhaps, a different story, but it’s a world where knowledge and gathering information is important. It’s a kind of Arabic equivalent of the De Administrando period, describing a world beyond the palaces and bathhouses of Baghdad. It’s paying interest and attention to people who may or may not be important or useful and trying to learn and find out about them. We forget that, as animals, human beings are very curious about each other. Ibn Fadlan is trying to explain who all these people are. When he arrives in Vulgar Bulgaria, someone says, ‘ I’m a Muslim already because we had a doctor here who I think was Muslim and he converted me’ and recites a prayer. Ibn Fadlan is thrilled. There’s the concept from the Qur’an of the ‘Ummah’—the community of all believers together. But he also notices that when they bang their foot or step on something by mistake they all invoke the Sun god of the Nomad world. He recognises that people will say what they need to say, rather than necessarily be accurate. He is a man who is trying to make sense out of complicated, difficult things. He’s on a diplomatic mission, so there are bound to be things that he omitted—because diplomats always leave out uncomfortable things. It’s a text that’s filled with humour, of a man describing a world that is unknown. And I suppose that’s a theme for me, looking at different parts of the world that have important significance and value and yet get overlooked because we’re always staring at our own reflection in the mirror. The Caliph, the leader of the Islamic world, was based in Baghdad. Islam rises in the Arabian Peninsula, in Mecca and Medina, but the engine room moves very quickly, after Mohammed’s death, to places like Damascus and Mosul and Baghdad – that bit right at the heart of the world, because that bit controls east-west, west-east, north-south and beyond. Ibn Fadlan’s modern equivalent would be an American ambassador reporting back from Beijing or from Kazakhstan, or a British diplomat calling back in from Tehran, saying, ‘here are these people, this is why we need to work out how to deal with them, here’s what they eat, here’s how they live, here’s the things that they think are interesting and important, and this how we try and get on with them.’ There’s lots of that sort of stuff—that the Vikings are all tall as willows etc. He’s not the only one who’s thrown us a dummy. There are lots of Arab writers who are commenting on the Vikings and talking about their tattoos and explaining how they use sex and treat their women. One thing that is important to know about the Viking trade is that, in Europe, we were interested in it for things like lapis for our art, gold, silver and precious metals, and, eventually, books and ideas. But we have absolutely nothing to sell. We don’t have any precious metals. We’re good at growing crops, that’s about it. We have to work hard as a result, and that’s maybe why we fight so much. What we do have a lot of is women and children. And the scale of human trafficking through the Viking world was huge. Again, there’s a corrective here because, when we think of slavery, we only think about the slave trade from Africa to the Americas. “Eventually, the Vikings start to build cities. They start off as trading stations and eventually become cities—places like Novgorod and Smolensk and Kiev. All of them have a street called ‘Slave Street’.” In fact, slavery has been a human condition for a very, very long time indeed. Our ability and willingness to enslave is not just to do with skin colour, it’s not just to do with a particular moment of Europe’s history where we can round up millions of less-well defended Africans and ship them to work for free, killing millions in the process. It’s about the fact that by and large, no one has really thought that there is a problem with enslaving until very recently. And that should warn us as to why, in many parts of the world, slavery still hasn’t been eradicated and human trafficking is still a major problem—even within the continent of Europe. So, some of what we know about the Vikings and their activities comes from Ibn Fadlan. But you can find backup through sources like silver coins or from rune stones, such as in Lake Mälaren outside Stockholm. They’ll talk, for example, about the death of Ingvar who headed south and made a fortune for himself and died in Serkland, which was the land of the Saracens. Eventually, the Vikings start to build cities. They start off as trading stations and eventually become cities—places like Novgorod and Smolensk and Kiev. All of them have a street called ‘Slave Street’. They start to become stable environments where, actually, they have their own commercial needs that start to evolve away from slave trading."