My local library is a twofold oddity: it has more librarians than visitors, yet no discernible system of ordering its shelves. Entering, a visitor might find six or seven of the staff sitting around chatting, presumably, pensively, asking each other “what was it we were supposed to do with all these papery things? Were we supposed to sit on them? Use them as fuel? Refrigerate them?”, each shaking their heads in turn. Confused by this, the reader might be even more puzzled to find over on the shelves, How to Train your Dragon in the animals and pets section, Mein Kampf in the life improvement section, or Carol Anne Duffy in the poetry section. Arranging books ad hoc isn't all bad. It means that, even once you have searched the section where anyone whose alphabetical knowledge (and GCSE results) extends higher than the letter 'U' would have placed the book you are looking for, you still stand a chance of finding it in other areas of the library. This is how I came across the Penguin compilation Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (sandwiched upside down between Bridget Jones and Angus, Thongs, and Full-frontal Snogging).
While it cannot claim to be rightfully placed between these two masterpieces, this small volume is a fascinating insight into the mind of a man who travelled a vast distance in a time when the world must have seemed much larger. That man, Ibn Fadlan, set out from Baghdad in 922 AD, and journeyed through central Eurasia on a diplomatic mission, meeting on the way several semi-Islamic, semi-pagan tribes and a group of Vikings on the Volga River. The diary he kept both before and during this encounter is an eloquent and meticulous account of these peoples' cultural practices, and of how they differed from his own. To travel to other societies is to explore unknown regions of the mind as well as of the earth, to discover that people of other countries have a different understanding of the world in many slight and subtle ways. The old saying that 'the past is another country, they do things differently there' may be a cliché but Fadlan's journal makes it obvious that it is true; he allows the reader a glimpse not only of another land and another time but also of another way of thinking.
The mental patterns of Fadlan struck me as relatable in one way yet alien in another; relatable in the sense that both we and he are transported into a world we find strange, and his attempt to gauge its strangeness from small and quotidian differences, such as the currency, habits of hygiene, the weather, the food, and so on, seemed like a comfortingly normal experience of travel. When one remembers a holiday one's mind does not seize upon a broad, cohesive concept of a country; it haphazardly creates a collage of sensory memories, some of which are extraordinary, some of which might be as mundane as what one ate in a certain restaurant, or where one slept, and Fadlan's diaries suggest he thought in the same way. Yet he also seems unfamiliar because he is so credulous. As could be guessed, he was devoutly Islamic. But the strength of his faith does not account for the way he looked at the world. Most believers today, if indeed they do believe that evidence of God's hand may be found in the natural world, also have to acknowledge that we know of scientific laws which can govern the system without his intervention in every minute case. It is common, therefore, for believers to think these very laws crafted by Him (or Them, or Her), hence why many religious people have no problem accepting evolution. Yet Fadlan lived in a time when so many natural phenomena were unexplained, and seemed supernatural,seemed like evidence of God's direct intrusion into the natural world rather than the workings of laws he may or may not have laid down. Thus he sees in lightning the wrath of Allah, discerns in the stirring undulations of the Aurora Borealis battalions of hostile spirits arranging for battle. Of course in both these instances he reverses the basic sceptical principle of forming a belief from the evidence – he presumes Allah exists, then finds evidence of his work in everything. On the whole his mentality is charming and benign, a pair of spectacles through which we can see a more fantastical world. His rather obstinate way of thinking also leads to some comically ironic confrontations with other equally fervent believers in different gods.
Whilst Fadlan's notes show how, like an optical illusion, the world may seem physically different to those who gaze on it with different presumptions, they also detail how these same presumptions can greatly and sometimes horrifically influence the way we behave. For instance, during his stay with them, a chieftain of the Volga Vikings dies. These in some ways civil, pragmatic people also believe that they must accompany the death of a noble with the ritual murder of one of his servant girls, so that she may join him in the afterlife. Accordingly, they round up the dead man's household, and ask for a volunteer. One girl, seemingly unaware of the brutality of the travel arrangements required for her to journey with her lord to paradise, assents. She is then lead into a tent, where, in order to drown out her screams and maintain the naivety of the other girls, loud music begins to play. She is then raped six times, strangled, then killed by a stab through the ribs and cremated alongside the chieftain. Such meticulous atrocities make for painful reading, especially when one remembers that all of what is described probably happened, and certainly happened, in essence if not in exactitude, in many times and many places. The sleep of reason, as Francisco Goya tells us, produces monsters, and though I do not mean to morally equate Fadlan's Islamically inspired fancies about the natural world with the butchery of a child, they do both arise from an unfounded hypothesis – that there is a supernatural order which humans can influence in their favour by certain actions – which may manifest harmlessly, but may also make monsters of us.
