Ibn Fadlan’s Report on the Rus, Gog and Magog in Light of Recent Work on the Mashhad Miscellany

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.