The Journey of Alienation: A Critical Analysis of Ibn FadLan's treatise, edited by Haidar Mohammad Gheibah

This research is analyzes the study done by Gheibah on Ibn-Fadlan’s treatise. Gheibah regards the treatise as a text which emphasizes the incapacity and failure of Arab Islamic civilization. The most important point of the article is that Gheibah’ text reveals the change of Ibn-Fadlan from the glorious political and religious strength Abbasids to a state of defeat and alienation. According to Ibn-Fadlan treatise، the Islamic character undergoes changes to be empty of the original identity، reforms into a western subject، and is overpowered by the success in the west، and become naturalized and baptized into the social texture of the western society. He also reveals the idea on which Crichton built his novel to create doubt about the merits of eastern civilization by forcing the traveler، Ibn-Fadlan، to be overwhelmed by the west and create an imaginary picture of the contact between the two civilizations: the Islamic Arab world and the pagan Viking world، while the victory belongs to the latter. In this way، the two civilizations are misrepresented in the treatise under study.