About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

7 Comments

  1. This sure makes Vikings look bad. They convince one of their own girls to kill herself and then they all get to have sex with her right before the suicide? I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but who or what is “Ibn Fadlan”? Monstrous things surely happen every day in jungle/sandland but no one literate and who has access to the “media” can report them. So that means they don’t happen? To sum up, Fadlan might have seen something, which he may or may not have understood and may or may not have reported correctly. Since it made white people look bad, it has been seized upon and will be cited until the end of

  2. The Persian Ibn Rustah had a more favorable impression of the Rus than this Ibn Fadlan person.

    Fadlan’s description of the Rus as being crude in hygiene seems hypocritical. Does he not realize how the vast majority of humans lived in his own time? Including his own people? Perhaps the Vikings were cruder than most however.

    I have talked to a relative who was in Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the 1980’s/1990’s and he said most of the natives still wiped their bottoms with their hands. He said that is why you do not offer to shake their hand. Nor will thy offer their hand. If things have changed since then it is only very recently and due to Western influences.

    Now if they were like that in the late 20th century imagine what most of the Arabs/Moslems were like in the Middle Ages.

  3. I also recollected that a priest mentioned that he traveled in Pakistan and Afghanistan 35-40 years ago before he was a priest and that the inhabitants of villages in Afghanistan defecated in the open without any shame.

    When anyone in his party tried to get privacy for a bowel movement the children in the village would follow them and watch as well.

    So Ibn Fadlan being shocked on hygeine rings hollow.

  5. I have this book. Ibn Fadlan was basically an emissary from Baghdad tasked with visiting a distant ruler (in modern-day Russia) who wished to convert to Islam and was requesting funds and advice on how to worship properly. Back then, 1,000 years ago, Baghdad was the capital of the world and the center of civilization, so Ibn Fadlan’s mission was to the outer edges of the known world. Extremely interesting window on that era! I highly recommend it.

  6. Which book? You know, title, author/editor, publisher, year of publication. The book I read Faldan’s account in is Eyewitness to History, edited by John Carey, Harvard University Press, 1987.

    • “Mission to the Volga”, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, translated by James E. Montgomery, foreword by Tim Severin, New York University Press, 2017.

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