مرايا الأخر: مقاربة ثقافية ل رسالة ابن فضلان و انعكاساتها في الثقافة الغربية

Mirrors of the Other: A Cultural Approach to Ibn Fadlan’s Journey and its Reflections in Western Culture Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was a famous Arab traveller, a member of the embassy sent by the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars during the tenth century. Ibn Fadlan’s Journey has become an iconic text describing a number of geographical, historical and cultural aspects of civilizations from the East to the West. A number of distinctive creative works have been influenced by this text, including Eaters of the Dead, a novel by the American Michael Crichton, on which a film, The 13th Warrior, was based. The multiple reflections of this text in other civilizations differ in various ways from the original, some centrally and others marginally, in order for it to become centralized in these cultures. It can be viewed as a single journey that describes the passage through a number of countries. But, when it moves from one to another, civilization itself becomes a subject and the Other from the dominant culture that is a target for researchers. Therefore, the study seeks to investigate two of the texts derived from the original eastern text of Ibn Fadlan’s Journey, namely Eaters of the Dead and The 13th Warrior. This study aims to analyze how past and present authors have approached the Other from different perspectives, taking into account two dimensions. The first dimension seeks to investigate the way in which writers of both texts have been engaged in reflecting their nations. The second dimension is the influence of the changes of literary genre, basically from the main text to the derived texts, by looking at the totality of the target texts referred to, which appears harmonious and integrated, then following the image of the Other and its transition into these texts. Despite the significant efforts of Ibn Fadlan and Crichton to be unbiased, both authors appear to have been subject to unconscious bias that is difficult to identify clearly in their respective works. Ibn Fadlan’s text presents the Other as different, bad and dirty when looked at from his cultural perspective. Similarly, Crichton tries to give a western flavour to Ibn Fadlan. Therefore, the identity embodied in both texts and the film appears as if through broken mirrors that do not reveal the whole truth. The two dimensions are connected through an analysis based on the concepts of post-colonial studies that emphasize the role of post-colonial narrative, along with concepts such as identity, location, representation and resistance, ethnicity and universality.