This article regards the cultural, ethnic, and political primary sources of 10th-century Abbasid Arab Muslim traveler and ambassador Ahmad ibn Fadlan in his journey along the Volga river basin, including his depictions of the pre-Christian European Finns, Slavs, and the Turkic Muslim Bulgar tribes.

Historical and Cultural Background:

Today part of the massive dominion of the Russian Federation, in the 10th and 11th centuries, the wilderness along the large Volga River in central-southern Russia was still free of Slavic rule. The dominant and thriving Slavic Kievan empire originally built by the invading Vikings ("Varangians") did not convert nearly all Slavic cultures to Orthodox Christendom until 988 upon the conversion of Vladimir the Great. Other extant Slavic nations during the timeframe included Bohemia (today including the Czechs and Slovaks) before its annexation by the Germans, Bulgaria, Poland, Croatia, and more. From the 5th century onward, Turkic peoples marched westward from Central Asia, settling along the Volga river, the Caucasus, and today's Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where the Slavs of the later Russia had not exerted full dominion yet. The racially-Mongol tribes today seen in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and eastern Russia had not entered the region as extensively as seen today until the 13th-century Mongol conquest of Asia. The foremost powerful Turkic tribes were the Tatars, Bulgars, and Khazars. In the 9th century, the Turkic peoples almost in entirety submitted to Islam, but retained their non-Arabic Turkic languages. From the late 8th century onward (until being obliterated by the Kievan Slavs), the most powerful of these peoples was the Khazar kingdom. Apparently acting as a vassal, the Bulgars became the most powerful Islamic Turkic tribe in the region. The Khazars leaders later converted to Judaism, an event that is academically quite debated and mysterious in terms of its reason. It is generally accepted that the Bulgar Islamic hordes remained independent from Khazar rule but functioned as a tributary vassal.

The growing role of Islam in Turkic culture, and the resultant Jihad against the non-Muslim Turkic minority and the Russian Christians naturally caught the eye of their southerly Islamic neighbor, the Sunni Abbasid Islamist state centering around Baghdad. The fundamentalist Abbasid caliphate was the central force of the Islamic world, and arguably the world's greatest superpower, as most of Europe outside of the increasingly-dominant German and Byzantine empires were suffering from internal conflict and only growing statehood for the brief time being. The Iraqi state's reigns stretched from Libya to Iran, and from Armenia to Oman and Yemen. Its wealth, trade, and mathematical advancements dwarfed even the most advanced local kingdoms outside of their rule.

To expand their realm, to ensure the triumph of the Jihad of Islam throughout the world, and to hinder the expansion of the growing Christian kingdoms in the east (Byzantium, Kievan Russia, Bulgaria, etc.), the Abbasid Caliph al-Muktadir sent a missionary embassy to meet the Islamic Turkic tribes along the Volga to open trade agreements, to built mosques, and to hold diplomatic audience for pan-Islamic partnership (as the Abbasids, in effect, ruled the near entirety of the Islamic world). Along with the embassy came famous 9th-10th century Arab writer, traveler, historian, and diplomat Ahmad ibn Fadlan, ibn al-Abbas, ibn Rashid, ibn Hamad [#GE'/ %(F #DA/DF] (one name). Along his journey, he made famous and rare primary source documents depicting the early local tribes of the Turkic, Finnic, Slavic, possibly Hungarian, and possibly also the Germanic (the Vikings) races. Though the Iraqi embassy failed due to the inability to meet with the Turkic kings sufficiently, his experience gives us one of the few pictures of the separate ethnic European and Turkic tribes before and during Christianization. His venture is depicted, albeit absurdly loosely, in the Michael Crichton novel Eaters of the Dead and the film The 13th Warrior, starring Omar Sharif and Antonio Banderas as Ahmad ibn Fadlan.

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