Abomination

From the outset, Arabic writing about travel and encounters with other peoples exhibited what Joseph Conrad once called ‘the fascination of abomination'.^{[1127] [1128]} One of the earliest such accounts to have survived is the report submitted to the court of the Abbasid caliph al-Wathiq (r.

Ibn Fadlan

One text dominated by Conrad's ‘fascination of abomination' is the Account of Ibn Fadlan, a member of the caliphal embassy that left Baghdad on 21 June 921 and travelled some 3,000 miles via Bukhara and the Ust-Yurt plateau into the peoples of the north, to arrive on 12 May 922 at its destination, the court of the king of the Volga Bulghars. This was a mission civilatrice, intended to establish Islam among the king's subjects.^[1129]

Ibn Fadlan was a functionary at the Baghdad court of the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir (r. 908-32). His role in the mission was to ensure that court protocol was adhered to in the presentation of the various gifts and missives that the mission had been provided with. At some point, either on his return from the Volga Bulghars, or during his year-long trek to the frozen lands of the north, he kept a record of the peoples he met, the things he saw, the customs he experienced and the marvels he witnessed.

Ibn Fadlan came face to face with living abomination by the River Volga when he encountered the Rus, a people of presumably Scandinavian origin trading in the northern Russian steppes and forest. The Rus threatened Ibn Fadlan's very sense of self: he could only liken them to palm-trees and to asses left to roam the fields. Every aspect of Rus behaviour he was exposed to violated his beliefs or practices: the lack of modesty and propriety shown when merchants copulated with their slaves in full view of their comrades; the lack of cleanliness, ritual or personal, when the Rus shared their ablutions in a communal basin; the lack of any reason or sense in their attempts to appease their many gods through animal sacrifice.

When he witnessed what was to him a bizarre Rus funeral, Ibn Fadlan's narrative was almost reduced to silence as his fascination with abomination became terror. He described how the rites were presided over by a woman known as the Angel of Death, rites that included the selection of a slave-girl to accompany her master on his voyage to the afterlife, preparation of funerary raiment, a funeral pyre, the slaughter of a dog, two horses, two cows and a cock and a hen. Ibn Fadlan's fascination with this abomination reached fever pitch when he described how the girl was taken on board the ship, repeatedly raped and then brutally slaughtered by the Angel of Death. The whole scene, as we hear it through his remarkably dispassionate words, is a spectacle of violence.

Yet the greatest challenge the violence posed for him came when one of the Rus, these embodiments of abomination, upbraided Ibn Fadlan and his co-religionists for burying their dead. One can sense the violence wrought on Ibn Fadlan by these events when he found corroboration of the Rus's words in the speed with which the ship is burnt to a fine ash.

Usama ibn Munqidh

In 1183, towards the end of a long life of chivalry, learning, poetry and warfare, Usama ibn Munqidh (1095-1188) completed his Book of Contemplation in his fortress at Shayzar in northern Syria.^[1130] It is a work intended to give its readers advice on how to live a good life. He did not have to travel to strange lands to witness marvels or monsters, for the crusades had brought Frankish embodiments of abomination to his very doorstep, the family castle of Shayzar.

Usama penned a famous description of the Franks that he came into contact with during his long career of active campaigning and politicking, depicting them as animals able to accomplish basic tasks such as the bearing of burdens but requiring no use of reason to do so. Usama presented his Franks as a conundrum: how could they fight so bravely and show such valour when they did not possess the set of basic emotions that he thought bravery and courage were predicated upon? For example, they did not display the sense of propriety that Usama and his fellow Muslims deemed necessary for keeping one's womenfolk safe. Thus we hear of a Frank who has his wife's pubic hair shaved by a male bath attendant, of another Frank who brings his daughter into the male bath, and of yet another Frank who finds his wife in bed with another man but merely rebukes the man for sleeping in his bed. Yet some Franks did exhibit some traces of reason and intelligence, especially those longest exposed to Muslims, who did not try to prevent Muslims from praying towards Mecca.

For Usama the abomination of the Franks was at its most acute in terms of justice and medicine. The fight between an aged peasant accused of compli­city with Muslim bandits and a young blacksmith was at such a far remove from Muslim legal courts, with their system of witnesses and notaries, and the ruling of the cadi. A Frankish doctor amputated a man's leg that a Christian physician in the service of Usama's uncle had healed through the application of a poultice. This doctor then proceeded to disregard the Christian physician's diagnosis of a woman whose humoral balance had gone completely out of kilter. He declared her insane, had her head shaved, took a razor and cut open her head in the shape of a cross and rubbed salt in her skull. Usama remarks that she died on the spot.

The violence of these abominations, be they of the Sri Lankan gamblers, of the peoples of the north or of the Franks, unsettled and fascinated those who witnessed them and who sought to communicate this fascination to their audiences.