When Asia Was the World: Ibn Fadlan

One of the most annoying people on tv is the celebrated conservative drunkard Christopher Hitchens. Now I'm not without some admiration for the man. He writes well and he rigorously applies the principles of his thinking without partisan coloring. This is not to say he has no party--he's clearly a doctrinal conservative--but the man does not sacrifice his principles for the sake of party loyalty, adapting his opinions to the convenience of the leaders he agrees with most of the time. He calls them as he sees them, even if the way he sees them is, as noted above, terribly annoying.

So I don't fault the consistency of his intellect; I only fault the maturity of it. It's more than the open contempt he shows for anyone who disagrees with him, but maybe it's that core of disrespect, that surface only quality to his thinking that bothers me. A case in point is the book he wrote last year and paraded about on all the talk shows on which he gives good face, God Is Not Good. The title itself displays the bluntness of his plodding faculties. The title, as the book itself does, invokes a simplistic world view--things are either good or not good, no room for nuance or perspective here. Now I'm not a person to dismiss that there are moral absolutes in the world; I believe there are. But I wouldn't infer from that that we live in a world that is cluttered with absolutes. In the subtle universe of human behaviors and beliefs, true moral absolutes are a rarity. How the conception of the divine interacts with humans in their historical affairs is certainly one area that woud be entirely too filled with subtleties and complexities to allow us to say revering and following the dictates of God can be something entirely good or entirely bad.

Hitchens, of course, isn't really arguing that God is good or not good. In his book, he argues that God isn't at all. With all the zeal and surety of an 8th grade intellect, he lays out a two point case that (1) God is the figment of a collective superstition and (2) that figment has caused deep and irreparable harm to human society without a compensating good during the history of the world. Of course we all can recall arguments from fellow adolescents to the effect, "What good is religion? After all, religion caused the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition; religion causes terrorism today. All the wars and suffering of history got justified by men in the name of God. Grown ups only tell you to believe in God so that you'll go to heaven and not worry about things sucking right here on earth."

Hitchens lays out the case a bit more cleverly, but doesn't deviate much from this thesis. He holds to the view that religion is little more than a parasite feeding off of the material success of civil society. The inadequacy of this view is underscored in the second chapter of Stewart Gordon's When Asia Was the World. Gordon, in reviewing the journey from Baghdad to the kingdom of the Bulgars by Ibn Fadlan in the 10th century, draws out the absolute necessity of religion in the creation of civil society. That is, without the development of patriarchal, monotheistic, domineering religions, with all their harms and benefits to mankind, civilization would never have become secure and stabilized enough for religions to feed off of them.


In the first chapter, Gordon walks us through the Buddhist world of 7th century east and south asia. In the story of Ibn Fadlan 300 years later, it is the Islamic empire built by the Caliphs while the Tang Dynasty stagnated and the Europeans wallowed in the Dark Ages that a violence-justifying religion brought commerce, luxury, enlightenment, and peace to a wide swath of the known world. It wasn't the human propensity to truck and barter that laid the foundation for the success of the Caliphate; it was the Muslim faith, acting as a social cement.

Gordon provides an instructive contrast. Whether it's Mongolia, Macedonia, Rome, Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, or Arabia Felix, new empires always arise from the periphery. In the medieval world on the fringes of settled civilizations, Ibn Fadlan traveled in his life from the semi nomadic region of his birth to the semi nomadic lands that his fame today rests on. The patterns of interaction between the Cains and Abels, between the settled communities and the nomads of both the Arab desert and the central Asian steppes were nearly identical. While there was a necessary commerce between the wandering herdsmen and the town dwellers, trading animal hides and meat for grains, metalworks, and handicrafts, more often than not the conflicts between their cultures led to feuding and violence.

Herding tribes fought one another for dominance of the wilds between towns in ever expanding and shifting systems of alliance of tribute. Towns competed with each other across barriers of language, culture, and positioning along the great transAsian trade routes. The small kingdoms pushed back the barbarian nomads and the nomads raided the towns for plunder. Without a coherent system for consolidating identities and loyalties to the diverse language and culture groups, no empire could ever hold sway for long. The introduction of a coherent monotheistic faith gave an overarching common ground for these cultural mosaics; and being a religion, this common ground could realistically assert itself as the moral high ground when disputes between regional interests erupted.

Now this is not to suggest that 10th century Islam was a peaceful or culturally homogenous realm--far from it. Islam surpasses even Christianity in the intractability and vehemence of its doctrinal schisms. The blend of local customs into the faith and the politics of regal conversions as always complicated the religious, commercial, and military alliances that held the civilization together. Ibn Fadlan's mission itself was a political and economic failure. The king of the Bulgars had been less than honest in his supplications to the Caliph. King Almish didn't want to convert to Islam--he was already a Muslim--but only sought a display of wealth from the Caliph to intimidate his local rivals.

Ibn Fadlan himself never delivered the money the king had requested--and which it turned out Almish didn't need anyway. The importance today of Ibn Fadlan's journey isn't his political accomplishments, but the journal of descriptions he left of the Viking raiders he called the "Rus." His objective and accurate descriptions, coming from a scientific culture that valued factual accuracy more than mythology gives a unique outsider's view of this preliterate Norse culture as well as the scope of world commerce afforded by the stability of the Islamic unification of central Eurasia.


Both the political stability and the rational historical records are gifts of monotheism, whether Abrahamic or Taoistic. Next time your teenager, or your inner teenager, starts ranking on how insidious religion is, remind him that religion also created as well as corrupted human society. I mean, after you beat him senseless in the name of Baby Jesus, that is.