AL-Mawrid Journal

We intend, through this article, to reflect on Ibn Fadlan's journey as the problematic journey that has attracted the attention of critics and scholars in various fields due to its distinctive weaving of interdependent links with dynamic styles that polished the travel experience and garnished it with a set of discourses open on the self and the other. In addition, the travel statement forms itself in the general structure of the journey, expressing an early awareness of the adventure and extending bridges of communication in search for the mythical of the other, the awareness of whom has become an integral part of the self-awareness.

Travel literature is not the journey, but the existence and sovereignty of a nomadic life makes the spread of travel literature a natural matter, as what establishes a literary genre or a pattern is the presence of a reader who interacts with it and gives it the legitimacy of survival. If we add the need for political authority, it becomes clear to us the necessity of existence, not its luxury. This explains to us the spread of geographical literature in the third century AH, which we can consider as the century of stability of the Arab Islamic state in terms of expansion, as is the case in terms of the formation of sciences. Hence, the birth of the journey was a readable art that represented an obsession with identification and exploration. It is the same thing that preoccupied the writer himself. But when we recapture it as a novel, a film, and a series, and with the obsessions of different cultures, then we must stop in front of these transformations, not to read the Bulgarians through the eyes of the Arabs, but rather to read the Arabs cultural prism of the nations that have been restored to them as well. In addition to examining the reasons for these migrations.. Perhaps this is the most prominent angle that deserves to be monitored, for us, here.
There is no doubt that Ibn Fadlan’s Journey is a foundational text of the relationship between the South and far North. It provides information about how they saw each other. In terms of style, this report is empty of ideological intention or affectation. In the words of Michael Crichton, "Ibn Fadlan had a distinct voice and style. He was imitable. He was believable. He was unexpected". Ibn Fadlan spontaneously expresses the astonishment at what he observes in different landscapes and cultural environments.
Michael Crichton, in his ‘’Eaters of The Dead,’’ changes the course of things. “And after a thousand years,’’ Crichton ‘’felt that Ibn Fadlan would not mind being revived in a new role, […]”. He decided to invent his own account from the factual one. The man coming from the South will give up his civilization in favor of the North wildness. He comes to the far North as ambassador and mentor but ends up being a warrior. The compilation Crichton made of Ibn Fadlan’s eyewitness that ‘’led to the epic poem of Beowulf’’, as he states, created that astonishing verisimilitude of Crichton’s far North. This technique made many Arab scholars believe that it is a work of collected fragments of the actual account, an illusion accentuated by a movie, The 13th Warrior, then a television series, Saqf al-Alam (Roof of the World).

This study aims at studying the rhetoric of the travel discourse in Ibn Fadlan's journey. The study is based on reading and analysing the narrative components that make up the journey from a rhetorical perspective that monitors the argumentative dimensions it undertakes. Then, we go beyond the artistic and aesthetic aspects of the journey to extracting the argumentative dimensions within the narrative components such as narration, dialogue, news, description and style.
This study aims at approaching Ibn Fadlan’s travel account from a rhetorical-argumentative perspective which analyses the mechanisms and constituents that make the travel a rhetorical and an argumentative discourse. The importance of this study stems from the fact that it looks at the travel discourse from a new perspective that diverges from what researchers have exhaustively studied mainly the studies of the travel account on the basis of a narrative study, be it a structural narrative or a semantic narrative. This has made these narrative studies neglect many of the purposes for which the travel accounts were written, especially that they turn a blind eye to many important guides in this rhetorical type such as the general context in which these travel texts are composed, the cultural patterns produced by the travelers, and the communicative-argumentative aims that they seek to achieve. This has raised our interest in approaching the travel discourse from a rhetorical perspective that attempts to shed light on the journey through monitoring the argumentative mechanisms that seek to add credibility to the discourse and revealing the influential intentions that are implicit in them. Thus, the fundamental questions that this research aims to answer are: How was the rhetoric of Ibn Fadlan’s travel achieved? What are the narrative components that the traveler relied on to achieve the argumentative dimensions and reach the goal of influencing the recipient?

This article aims to reveal the different ways in which descriptive components operate in the body of the travelogue while distinguishing them from contemporary fictional narrative texts such as the novel, the story, and the poem in which the descriptive component is present in varying degrees. This methodical choice made in the approach might also control the components of the rhetoric of description in a specific genre, which is, in this case, the travelogue.
To address this issue, we should envision the description in this case through two aspects:
A- On the one hand, a communicative situation that requires those who study it to define its dialectic dimensions and view it as a form of a dialogue between the traveler and the reader. Here, the researcher finds himself drawn to the study of this communicative situation of the description or the descriptive passages and texts included in the travelogue.
B- On the other hand, we deal with the description as an utterance, that is, a descriptive syllable or a descriptive sequence within a major discursive structure represented by the travelogue.
Therefore, this article aims to determine the distinctive and plausible features of the description that we envision through this dual perspective.
The inclusion of the description in the megastructure of the travelogue and the communicative situation that includes the recipient represents the first axis of the dynamic approach to the description proposed in this article. If the description is supposed to convey knowledge of the discovered world, it also lends itself to procedures that reveal Otherism. But the traveler, as he tends to integrate the Other in his traveling discourse, may attempt to assimilate him, dominate him, and re-represent him according to his own cultural and ideological molds, and thus the ambition of description shifts from desiring to reveal the other and present him to the reader, to falling into stereotypes and ready-made cliches. This will be discussed in the second axis by analyzing descriptive texts from Ibn Faḍlān's travelogue.

Ibn Fadlan was a unique example of a mature and well-advised diplomat who represented his environment, his state and his nation in the best way. He was not satisfied with just executing the delicate diplomatic mission assigned to him by the able Caliph, but was also keen to record many intelligent and comprehensible observations of aspects of diplomatic and protocol life that He witnessed it in those countries, such as the way ambassadors were greeted, hosted and honored, and the inhabitants described their faces and colors, their clothes, jewelry, filth, their level of intelligence, their headscarves, and the shapes of their dwellings The way of residence and the beliefs they owe, the way of their worship, their social and family customs and traditions upon death and burial, and the trade of companions.
The man was the son of the city of peace, lived in its shadows and tasted the sweetness of its luxury, wealth and palaces, as well as its good climate and its cultural and social level, following - from his position - The political course of the Islamic world, aware of its nations, peoples, tribes, religions and traditions, and most importantly, that he was aware of their geography, paths, rivers, mountains, and other areas that are difficult to meet with one person. There is no evidence of his success in his mission and his ability to overcome the difficulties he went through during it.
Ibn Fadlan demonstrated a remarkable ability to capture what is of interest to researchers today, in what he recorded of smart observations about the conditions of the peoples he lived and the manifestations of their lives, and the countries he passed through on his journey. and its parts of what was in circulation, and he also dealt in his observations and captures some matters related to the conditions of administration, the army, commerce, health, foods and other matters about which obtaining information was an important matter for travelers; and more important to today's historian. In the following pages, we will try to get acquainted with these axes, based on the verified text of his journey, and other sources.

The writer reviews Ibn Fadlan’s journey in its socio-cultural context, bearing in mind the results of that journey in an accurate description of many social and cultural manifestations of the peoples of that region in the tenth century AD, with the eyes of a Muslim man/faqih coming from Baghdad, the metropolis of the world at the time, and from an open society in its perspectives. Islam on other civilizations and cultures.
And because Ibn Fadlan spared no effort in documenting many of the customs and lifestyles of these peoples, the writer followed the chapters of the book, especially in the places where Ibn Fadlan focuses on describing a specific event, such as the Russians dealing with their dead, and classifying them into rich people who have a special burial ceremony, and the poor. They have other burial ceremonies, as he described the reality of the religiosity of those peoples. Some of them are "pagans", and he described some rituals of offering sacrifices and vows to idols without naming them as such, and other peoples, some of whose members flatter Muslims who pass by them, repeating the two Islamic testimonies of Faith in front of him, but in fact They are not Muslims and do not believe in Islam.
The writer did not fail to follow Ibn Fadlan's careful observation of the economic disparity between his society, which enjoys clear prosperity, and the societies he passed through during his journey, especially since some of those societies were Bedouins, and he also described their way of living, movement and customs.
The writer concluded that Ibn Fadlan's journey was an important historical document that informed us about the life of the peoples through which the itinerary of the journey went through in the ceremonies of worship, marriage, divorce, the status of women, customs, intimate relationships, and funeral rites, while not forgetting the other social aspects of peoples' lives. Which alone documented its affairs, conditions and customs.

The editorial board of (Al-Mawrid) decided to republish a topic of historical importance on Ibn Fadlan, It was written about six decades ago by the venerable scholar Dr. Mustafa Jawad (1906-1969 AD), As one of the first Iraqi researchers who dealt with the life of Ibn Fadlan and his mission to the land of the Saqlabah in the year 309 AH, and also as one of the second generation of Arab researchers, who contributed during the second half of the twentieth century, to informing the readership of the importance of this traveler Al-Baghdadi and the uniqueness of his journey, after the writings The early definition of the pioneer generation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This topic appeared for the first time in the translations of Arab personalities, in a jointly-authored book entitled "Persons of Destiny", published in Baghdad in 1963 by Al-Nahda Library, Published in association with the Franklin Printing and Publishing Company in New York. In it, he dealt with the personality of Ibn Fadlan, and what was known about the limited information about his life history, preserved by the most important source that conveyed much of his journey and immortalized his memory for centuries, which is the “Dictionary of Countries” by Yakut Al-Hamawi, revealing his diplomatic mission and its civilized dimensions, the exceptional interest of Orientalists and Arabs in him, and the story of the discovery The manuscript of his only journey in the world, and he published it in Arabic and other languages. Despite the passage of this long time since the publication of the topic, it seems that it is not known to many scholars, despite its importance at the time of its publication, Including his definition of the quotes of Zakaria bin Muhammad bin Mahmoud Al-Qazwini (died in 682 AH) from the texts of Ibn Fadlan’s message, the quotation of which was not known to some of those concerned with the journey in the Arab world until recently. As well as what he wrote about the efforts of the Arabist, Sheikh Muhammad Murad Al-Ramzi, who published in Arabic in 1908 a huge book in two volumes entitled “Fabricating the News and Immunizing Antiquities in the Chronicles of Qazan, Bulgar, and the Tartar Kings”, on the history of the countries that Ibn Fadlan intended and the peoples that inhabited them over the centuries, in which he collected most of the narrations. Which Al-Hamwi and Al-Qazwini quoted from him, and it is a documentary book that is also important for everyone concerned with Ibn Fadlan’s studies, but the scarcity of its edition – it seems – made it far from being dealt with by Arab researchers.

The research presents a study that answers or discusses the question of what is the best evidence for modern anthropology, and it is heading towards understanding the first ethnographic text in history about the Vikings through Ibn Fadlan’s message and talking about the energy of an entire century and how to progress in the bumpy road and mapping Describing an irreversible global economy is a continuation of the story of the great discoveries of the Middle Ages and the road to Eurasia through Bukhara and Gorgan, the pre-modern world, with its pagan nations outside the outposts of the Muslim world, and reinventing the self, This is because if a Muslim leaves his geographical borders, his mental borders become turbulent, as there are other humanities, societies without the Qur’an, cultures without Allah! The struggle for wealth in front of a man of a rich religion and a wealthy society, who came from Baghdad, the jewel of the ancient world, in front of Europe in the process of formation, Europe, which struggles for survival against a wealthy nation, prioritizes God and religion. Heavy find. Under the historian's sharp gaze, you find more clarity in the image of a man, a humble believer, a little lever that lifts the universe, and this is what this study shows.

The journey of Ibn Fadlan in the year (309 AH. / 921 AD.) its regard one of the first Arab-Islamic journeys, which received exceptional attention from researchers and investigators. Because it is one of the first Arab trips that reached us, and perhaps its importance lies in the information contained in it about the nations and peoples visited by Ibn Fadlan, and he wrote about their customs, traditions, life style and religions.
This research highlighted the great and distinguished role of the city of Baghdad in particular and Iraq in general; because it is the center of the Arab-Islamic world, represented in the capital Baghdad, from which Ibn Fadlan\'s journey began, and we have tried to mention the editions that emerged from this journey through the efforts of orientalists and Arabs.

It appears that nothing in Ibn Fadlân's testimony is exclusively Scandinavian, apart perhaps from the funeral pyre established in a boat. It is therefore particularly risky to consider this very detailed text as a source of reliable information on the Vikings or Varegans, without a minimum of criticism. The reverse is also true: Slavists would be wrong to consider this account in the same way as the Scandinavians. If I have to answer the question of the ethnicity of Ibn Fadlân's Rous, with my comparative eye, I can only confess that I do not know. Scandinavianized Slavs? Slavicized Scandinavians? Both are possible. We will remember that at the beginning of his account, Ibn Fadlân indicates that he left with three companions: Sûsan ar-Rassî, the envoy of the Caliph, Takîn, a Turk, and a man named Bâris, that is to say, Boris, who was designated as a Slav.

At the outset, it is necessary to reconsider, with great humility, the two works carried out by Ahmed Walidy Zaki Toghan in the publication of the Mashhad manuscript of Ibn Fadlan's journey in Leipzig in 1939, and the investigation of Dr. Sami Al-Dahan presented it with his founding introduction in Arabic in 1960, as they are the two essential works in introducing the journey that preceded every other work. After these two basic works, all the research, investigations and referrals owe them a great deal, and it would be unfair to go through them in a hurry or to deny them.
The edition of Ibn Fadlan's Journey that we made is primarily for Tughan and for painting, and we prove that here to avoid any confusion.
Dr. Ghaiba's edition appears to be more important than the previous edition of Ahmed Abdel Salam Al-Baqali, which also considered Crichton's novel work as a historical reference, due to the impact of Dr.Ghaiba He was absent from a large group of Arab intellectuals and academics, and because the other editions did not achieve the spread that the occult edition achieved because it was printed by publishers who only care about the local market.
Our investigation for the trip was printed in 2003, after which many articles and comments appeared that either did not see the edition, and those comments kept repeating with ideological enthusiasm what Dr. Haider Ghaiba, or she has seen the edition and disavowed it and attributed the illusions of absence to herself or to an anonymous writer, as we shall see. In both cases, there are two objective lessons that have become a platform for some Arab culture: the self-sufficiency of some of its intellectuals and their closing in on their knowledge.
In our investigation of this trip, we consulted the University of Oslo in Norway about the presence of a professor by the name of Per Fraus-Dolos who was working there, and they answered that there was no such name throughout the history of the university. This completely refutes the allegations of Crichton and whom that translated it.

It was strange to me, and to many scholars, that Ibn Fadlan's literary journey remains, with the richness of its multifaceted revelations, And it leadership in the early documentation of the history of a new region of the medieval world is located at its farthest, far from the pens of ancient Arab authors, so that only three sources were mentioned, and quoted from, which are all the results of the efforts of orientalists, Arabists and Arab researchers, throughout 220 years of research and investigation. Exactly about any information or indication, express or implied, in this regard for him and his trip. I often wondered what the ancient Arabic manuscripts could hide, from signs and sayings that have not been discovered until today that might show some of the text's best on Al-Fdlany in works that preceded or followed Al-Hamwi and Al-Qazwini.
Within this direction comes my attempt, in which I proceeded to shed light on the ancient Arab sources that mentioned Ibn Fadlan and quoted from his text with reference to it, In the hope of revealing what adds new to the field of study, and I achieved this aim, When I succeeded in discovering four old authors, they mentioned Ibn Fadlan, and they quoted from his journey in their cosmographic works, and they are:
1. Ali bin Abdul Rahman bin Shabib Al-Harrani, in his book “Jami’ al-Funun wa Salwa al-Mahzoun”.
2. Siraj Al-Din Omar bin Al-Muzaffar bin Al-Wardi, in his book “Khuridat Al-Ajaa’ib and Farida Al-Ghareeb.”
3. The unknown writer who compiled the manuscript "Mrat Al-kayinat sharh eajayib Al-makhluqat" Manuscript.
4. Ibn Iyas Al-Hanafi, in his manuscript book “Nashq Al-Azhar fi A’ajab Al-Aqatar”.
Thus, the number of heritage books that dealt with Ibn Fadlan and took from his journey and stipulated his name to seven books increased, In the meantime, discussing the opinions expressed by some investigators and researchers regarding the true authors of three of the four books whose authors I discovered quoting from Ibn Fadlan's text, and addressing the efforts of some Arab researchers, Arabists and orientalists who dealt with the three sources found before by studying and debating, and deliberating upon them.

Despite the scanty information available about Ibn Fadlan’s life, and the reluctance of the authors of the ancient Arabic sources to translate him and to include any data that could illuminate the most prominent stations for researchers, except for what was mentioned by Yaqout Al-Hamawi in the “Muejam Al-Buldan”, but the encyclopedias and modern Arab and foreign knowledge circles are celebrated him, and presented him in individual articles written by specialists, relying on what he wrote on his unprecedented journey to that remote location in the far north of the world at the time, and on what was reported by Al-Hamwi, and on a huge store of research and detailed studies by orientalists and Arabists who impressed their admiration for the information contained in his travel blog. Exceptional in value, from the early and unwritten history of the Asian and European peoples through which they passed.
In order for this special issue to fulfill the echoes of the reception of this Baghdadi traveler in the modern era, (Al-Mawred) places in the following pages the complete texts of what was reported by the most prominent Arab and foreign knowledge circles and encyclopedias about him, and they are arranged in alphabetical order below:
1-"Al-Aʻlām", Khairuddin Al-Zirikli.
2- "Encyclopedia of Islam", authors group.
3- Dairat Al-Ma’arif, Butrus al-Bustani.
4- Encyclopaedia Islamica, a group of authors.
5- Mu'jam Al-Mu'allifin,( Authors’ Dictionary), Umar Rida Kahhala.
6-Al-Mousoua'ah Al-A'rbiah Al-misrah, (The Facilitated Arabic Encyclopedia), a group of authors.
These references dedicate different areas to Ibn Fadlan and his journey, according to what their authors and contributors planned for them in terms of shortening or expanding the presentation of the materials, In the “Encyclopedia of Islam” and the “Great Islamic Encyclopedia,” the material about him was abundant, rich and full of information, but it was brief and scanty in the “Authors’ Dictionary” and “The Facilitated Arabic Encyclopedia,” not exceeding a few lines, and between this and that came what he mentioned about him. Al-Zarkali and Al-Bustani in their encyclopedias. We note here that this section of the magazine was the only one to publish a translation (of Ibn Fadlan's article) from the English version of "Encyclopedia of Islam", written by the editor-in-chief of (Al-Mawred) Dr. Youssef Iskandar, a material that has not been previously translated into Arabic.