Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024): 437-463

“Out of Love for You”:                                                         
Orienting Rūs Expressions of Emotion in Arabic Geography

Tonicha Upham

Institute of Historical Research, London

Abstract
This article approaches gender and power through the study of emotion as a means of refreshing and updating 
the study of Rūs gender using Arabic geographical sources. Considering Arabic geographical and historical 
sources on the Rūs that deal with the concept of funerary sacrifice, in particular those that posit the possibility 
of male as well as female sacrificial victims, I examine the conditions attached to the practice of sacrificing men 
in these sources. I do so primarily by focusing on the semantic usages of ḥubb (love) as it relates to the Rūs, 
exploring the potential for wider emotional exploration within geographical discussions of the Rūs and in the 
context of their  use by researchers today.

We do not really know how these values, beliefs, sentiments, emotions and feelings 
were organized at any given point in time during the Arabo-Islamic past. What, 
then, are the schemes of emotional organization which obtained in the pre-modern 
eras? What variations, fluctuations, alterations, and articulations were they subject 
to by different writers at different times? Are we justified in endeavouring to devise 
a universalist, transhistorical framework for the study of the emotions? Are we to 
search for a polarity of pleasantness vs. unpleasantness as a foundational category for 
emotions in the pre-modern Arabo-Islamic tradition? At all events, how do we proceed 
to chart variations in the articulations of emotional matrices over time?

 — James Montgomery1

Drawing on Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān’s fourth/tenth-century Risāla for his descriptions of the Rūs 
in the seventh/thirteenth century,2 Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī expresses a sense of wonder that he 
uses as justification for his comprehensive quotation of Ibn Faḍlān. He writes: “I find his 
account so astonishing that I quote it as I found it” (faḥakaytu mā dhakarahu ʿalā wajhihi 
istiʿjāban bihi).3 

1.  James E. Montgomery, “Convention as Cognition: On the Cultivation of Emotion,” in Takhyīl: The Imaginary 
in Classical Arabic Poetics, ed. Geert Jan van Gelder and Marlé Hammond, 147–78 (Exeter: Gibb Memorial Trust, 
2008), 171.

2.  See Luke Treadwell, “From Kitab to Risala: The Long Shadow of Yaqut’s Version of Ibn Fadlan’s Account,” 
in Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age: Diplomacy and Islam in the World of Ibn Fadlan, ed. Jonathan Shepard 
and Luke Treadwell, 41–65 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2023).

© 2024 Tonicha Upham.  This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.



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Yāqūt’s statement helpfully absolves him of responsibility for any potential errors 
conveyed in his quotation of Ibn Faḍlān’s letter and moreover aligns with the views he 
professes at the outset of his Muʿjam al-buldān concerning the alteration and abridgment 
of the work of others.4 More importantly still, Yāqūt offers here an acknowledgment by a 
geographer writing in Arabic of an emotional response to information on the Rūs. We might 
view this in line with Zayde Antrim’s characterization of geographical writings as a form of 
“textual performance” that can elicit a variety of forms of action and reflection on the part 
of the texts’ audiences, including a desire to alter, edit, or revise.5 In Yāqūt’s case, we see a 
desire to replicate with a disclaimer.6

Yāqūt is not alone in his wonder and astonishment concerning the Rūs, or al-Rūsiyya, 
a largely mercantile people operating along the river routes of present-day Ukraine and 
Russia. Across a lengthy and varied application of Arabic geographical writing to the 
study of the Rūs, accounts of funerary sacrifice, in particular, have drawn the attention, 
astonishment, and shock not only of geographers composing geographies, encyclopedias, 
chronicles, and ʿajāʾib works but also of early modern and modern scholars and audiences 
across multiple academic disciplines. Yet despite these layers of emotional reaction to 
Arabic geographical writings on the Rūs, there has been little consideration of emotion 
within the texts themselves. With the exception of scholarly treatments of Ibn Faḍlān’s 
Risāla, which at times fleetingly refer to the eyewitness observer’s shock and horror, the 
emotional expression of observational subject, observer, geographer, and researcher has so 
far not been subjected to detailed examination.

The present study addresses some initial emotional possibilities in approaches to Arabic 
geographical writings on the Rūs, with a focus on the emotions attached to reports of 
the practice of funerary sacrifice. Descriptions of funerary rituals, often involving 
human sacrifice, are a well-studied aspect of Arabic writings on the Rūs. Accounts of this 
pre-Christian practice in fourth/tenth-century geographies and in later works making use of 
the same material offer a detailed array of information on funerary cremation, inhumation, 
and sacrificial killing useful not only for the study of the Rūs but also for the study of the 
Viking world more broadly, the field in which these sources are frequently utilized.7 Within 

3.  Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān, Mission to the Volga, trans. James E. Montgomery (New York: New York University 
Press, 2017), 55. Quoted in Treadwell, “From Kitab to Risala,” 59 n. 93. Treadwell takes this wonder to indicate 
surprise that the pagan Rūs had become Christian and were thus so vastly different at the time of writing. 
Treadwell, “From Kitab to Risala,” 59. 

4.  Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, The Introductory Chapters of Yāqūt’s “Muʿjam al-Buldān,” trans. Wadie Jwaideh 
(Leiden: Brill, 1959), 14.

5.  Zayde Antrim, Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 2012), 3.

6.  For discussion of Yāqūt’s broader aims and approaches in this context of geography as textual performance, 
see Antrim, Routes and Realms, 145–46.

7.  For recent examples of work in this field, see, for instance, Neil Price, “Ibn Fadlan and the Rituals of the 
Rus: Vikings on the Volga?,” in Shepard and Treadwell, Muslims on the Volga, 177–97; Declan Taggart, “Bonding 
over a Death: Signalling in the Funeral Episode of Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala,” Early Medieval Europe 30, no. 3 (2022): 
437–60; Marianne Moen and Matthew J. Walsh, “Agents of Death: Reassessing Social Agency and Gendered 
Narratives of Human Sacrifice in the Viking Age,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31, no. 4 (2021): 597–611.



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 “Out of Love for You”  •  439

a field that we might imperfectly abbreviate as Viking-Arabic studies, however, researchers 
have tended to focus primarily on reports of female sacrificial victims, reflecting their 
prevalence in the most high-profile and accessibly translated sources on Rūs funerary 
sacrifice. 

On the basis of the written evidence, women do appear more likely than men to have 
been killed during the funerals of important Rūs men, and this is in itself an important area 
for analysis.8 However, Arabic reports of these rituals indicate that sacrifice was not entirely 
gender-specific or, perhaps, that it varied according to individual gender and emotional 
preferences. Focusing, then, on discussions of male funerary sacrifice and the emotional 
caveats attached to the practice, I explore the emotional possibilities of these discussions 
of the Rūs. I begin with the funerary accounts themselves and then consider the uses and 
application of ḥubb (love) in relation to the Rūs, arguing that reading for emotion—both 
within the text and in our own responses to this source material—offers helpful depth to the 
study of gender and power in Rūs funerary sacrifice. In particular, reading for emotion helps 
call attention to the sacrifice of enslaved men and to the reported emotional connections 
between enslavers and those they enslaved.

The study of an ʿAbbāsid or Islamicate history of emotion is still, to use Julia Bray’s 
phrasing, embryonic.9 Although love has fared better than other emotions in this field,10 
theoretical ideas about emotion generally remain relatively Eurocentric.11 Work has also 
been undertaken on other emotions, such as grief and jealousy, as well as specifically on 
slavery and emotion.12 This scholarship offers useful reflections on various emotions, and 

8.  Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991), 118.
9.  Julia Bray, “Yaʿqūb b. al-Rabīʿ Read by al-Mutanabbī and al-Mubarrad: A Contribution to an Abbasid 

History of Emotions,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 1–34, at 3.
10.  Bray, “Yaʿqūb b. al-Rabīʿ,” 3; see, for instance, Lois Anita Giffen, Theory of Profane Love among the 

Arabs: The Development of the Genre (London: University of London Press, 1971); William C. Chittick, “Divine 
and Human Love in Islam,” in Divine Love: Perspectives from the World’s Religious Traditions, ed. Jeff Levin 
and Stephen G. Post, 163–200 (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2010); William C. Chittick, Divine Love: 
Islamic Literature and the Path to God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Joseph E. B. Lumbard, “From 
Ḥubb to ʿIshq: The Development of Love in Early Sufism,” Journal of Islamic Studies 18, no. 3 (2007): 345–85; A. Z. 
Obiedat, “The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic: Understanding the Subconscious Meaning Preserved in 
the Ḥubb Synonyms and Antonyms through Their Etymologies,” in The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures: 
The Culture of Love and Languishing, ed. Alireza Korangy, Hanadi Al-Samman, and Michael Beard, 300–323 
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2017); James E. Montgomery, “For the Love of a Christian Boy: A Song by Abū Nuwās,” 
Journal of Arabic Literature 27, no. 2 (1996): 115–24; Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Love of Boys in Arabic Poetry of 
the Early Ottoman Period, 1500–1800,” Middle Eastern Literatures 8, no. 1 (2005): 3–22; Abdallah Cheikh-Moussa, 
“La négation d’Éros ou le ʿišq d’après deux épîtres d’al-Ǧâḥiẓ,” Studia Islamica, no. 72 (1990): 71–119; Franklin 
Lewis, “Sexual Occidentation: The Politics of Conversion, Christian-Love and Boy-Love in ʿ Attār,” Iranian Studies 
42, no. 5 (2009): 693–723; Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World and God in the Stories of Farīd 
al-Dīn ʿ Aṭṭār, ed. Bernd Radtke, trans. John O’Kane (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Gadi Algazi, Rina Drory, and Marie-Pierre 
Gaviano, “L’amour à la cour des Abbassides: Un code de compétence sociale,” Annales 55, no. 6 (2000): 1255–82; 
Emil L. Fackenheim, “A Treatise on Love by Ibn Sina,” Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 208–28.

11.  A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250: Cry of the Turtledove 
(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 37; Bray, “Yaʿqūb b. al-Rabīʿ,” 2.

12.  Pernilla Myrne, “Discussing Ghayra in Abbasid Literature: Jealousy as a Manly Virtue or Sign of Mutual 



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also on power dynamics,13 but it does not tend to incorporate geographical writing or 
the notion of applying emotion to other cultures. In considering the emotions of another 
culture, then, I attend to my own emotional readings on the Rūs as I work to explore the 
breadth and relative consistency of the rendering of ḥubb in geographical and eyewitness 
discussions of the Rūs. Through this exploration, I seek to develop a fresh reading of the 
gendered nature of Rūs funerary sacrifice along emotional lines.

Emotional Approaches to Arabic Writing on Rūs Funerary Sacrifice

Funerary sacrifice is arguably the centerpiece of Arabic geographical writings on the Rūs 
for many of the researchers working with this vast and not entirely homogeneous body of 
sources. The eyewitness account of Ibn Faḍlān and a host of geographical writings by the 
likes of Ibn Rusta, al-Masʿūdī, al-Iṣṭakhrī, Ibn Ḥawqal, and Miskawayh14 offer a variety of 
descriptions of funerary burnings, inhumations, and sacrifices that involve the killing of one 
or more individuals (typically enslaved, and often female) in association with the funerals of 
dead Rūs men. In a modern academic setting, however, these descriptions of ritual gendered 
violence and killing should make for uncomfortable reading, and it is therefore helpful to 
begin by making clear my own emotional approach to this material. Arabic writings on 
Rūs funerary sacrifice generally describe ritual practices involving assault on and murder 
of sacrificial victims who are generally enslaved and whose consent, if considered at all in 
these accounts, is often dubious at best. Although these accounts are not, by the standards 
of the geographers or the Rūs, descriptions of assault, I follow Rachel Schine’s argument 
for explicit acknowledgment. Discussing the marital rape of Fāṭima Dhāt al-Himma in Sīrat 
al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma, she writes: “[w]ithin a modern reading practice, I affirm that 
not calling Fāṭimah’s sexual violation a rape is to perpetuate the very rhetoric that has 
historically precluded the recognition of women as agentive, autonomous, and deserving 

Affection,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 46–65; Marion Holmes Katz, “Beyond Ḥalāl and Ḥarām: 
Ghayra (‘Jealousy’) as a Masculine Virtue in the Work of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya,” Cultural History 8, no. 2 (2019): 
202–25; James E. Montgomery, “Al-Mutanabbī and the Psychology of Grief,” Journal of the American Oriental 
Society 115, no. 2 (1995): 285–92; Karen Bauer, “The Emotions of Conversion and Kinship in the Qur’an and the 
Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq,” Cultural History 8, no. 2 (2019): 137–63; Karen Moukheiber, “Gendering Emotions: Ṭarab, 
Women and Musical Performance in Three Biographical Narratives from ‘The Book of Songs,’” Cultural History 
8, no. 2 (2019): 164–83; Ido Ben-Ami, “Wonder in Early Modern Ottoman Society: A Case Study in the History of 
Emotions,” History Compass 17, no. 7 (2019): e12578; Julia Bray, “Codes of Emotion in Ninth- and Tenth-Century 
Baghdad: Slave Concubines in Literature and Life-Writing,” Cultural History 8, no. 2 (2019): 184–201; Julia Bray, 
“Toward an Abbasid History of Emotions: The Case of Slavery,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, 
no. 1 (2017): 143–47.

13.  Bray, for instance, acknowledges the difficult textual balance between romanticized stories of master-
slave relations and renderings of the horrific treatment of these slaves. Bray, “Toward an Abbasid History of 
Emotions,” 144.

14.  The geographers named here are a selection of high-profile fourth/tenth-century examples; for a 
more comprehensive overview of Arabic and Persian geographical works that treat Rūs funerary sacrifice, see 
Tonicha M. Upham, “Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources: The Transmission of Geographical and Historical Ideas 
on the North in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish between the Third and Eleventh Centuries AH/Ninth and 
Seventeenth Centuries AD” (PhD diss., University of Aarhus, 2023), 192–95.



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of having their experiences of physical and psychological violation acknowledged.”15 By 
explicitly recognizing the realities of a ritual structured around violence against an enslaved 
woman, including by attaching labels that medieval observers and writers would not have 
employed concerning the sexual abuse of enslaved people, I not only make clear my own 
horror at what is being described but also emphasize that certain aspects of these accounts 
must be treated with care.

It is for similar reasons—for the sake of acknowledging and emphasizing the enslaved 
status of those discussed in this source material—that I frequently leave the terms jāriya 
and ghulām untranslated in this article. Best rendered in the context of this source material 
as “enslaved woman or girl” and “enslaved man or boy,” respectively,16 the nuances of these 
terms have allowed translations that downplay the inequalities rendered in these accounts, 
leaving scholars reading these texts in translation to understand the described figures as 
“maidens” and “servants.”17 Being emphatic about the types of sacrificial victims discussed 
in this article and offering clarity as to how their identities were understood by those 
writing about them should make what follows a more lucid exploration of the emotional 
connections and ideas applied to these accounts of Rūs funerary sacrifice.

Moreover, that this is an emotional analysis of sacrificial accounts dealing with readings 
of queerness in Rūs funerary sacrifice intensifies the need for careful labeling of what 
geographers and eyewitnesses are describing. In what follows I discuss instances in which 
ḥubb is presented as an emotional concept between enslaver and enslaved, and I use 
these instances as a means of introducing ideas of homoerotic or homosexual love into 
discussions of Rūs funerary rituals. To do so without a proper acknowledgment of the brutal 
circumstances that occasioned these accounts would be irresponsible. The sources analyzed 
in this article and the observations they make on Rūs love between enslavers and enslaved 
should be considered in an ʿAbbāsid cultural context. As Bray notes, heavily romanticized 

15.  Rachel Schine, “Conceiving the Pre-modern Black-Arab Hero: On the Gendered Production of Racial 
Difference in Sīrat al-Amīrah Dhāt al-Himmah,” Journal of Arabic Literature 48, no. 3 (2017): 298–326, at 300 n. 5.

16.  On readings of jāriya and ghulām as indicative of slavery and associated translational issues, see, for 
instance, Lamia Balafrej, “Instrumental Jawārī: On Gender, Slavery, and Technology in Medieval Arabic Sources,” 
Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023): 96–126, at 96–97; Shawkat M. Toorawa and Ibn al-Sāʿī, “Note on the Translation,” 
in Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad, by Ibn al-Sāʿī, ed. Julia Bray, trans. Shawkat M. 
Toorawa, xxxii–xxxviii (New York: New York University Press, 2017), xxxvi; Julia Bray, “Men, Women and Slaves 
in Abbasid Society,” in Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, ed. Leslie Brubakker and 
Julia M. H. Smith, 121–46 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 136–37; Pernilla Myrne, “Slaves for 
Pleasure in Arabic Sex and Slave Purchase Manuals from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries,” Journal of Global 
Slavery 4 (2019): 196–225, especially 206 n. 42 on choices in translation; Pernilla Myrne, “A Jariya’s Prospects 
in Abbasid Baghdad,” in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. Matthew 
S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain, 52–74 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 66 n. 1; Jelle Bruning, “Slave 
Trade Dynamics in Abbasid Egypt: The Papyrological Evidence,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of 
the Orient 63 (2020): 682–742; Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in 
Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 13; Upham, “Rūs Gender in 
Islamicate Sources,” 198–201, 226–30. 

17.  For further discussion, see Tonicha M. Upham, “Rus Women in Islamicate Geography? Approaching a 
Study of Gender,” in The Making of the Eastern Vikings: Rus’ and Varangians in the Middle Ages, ed. Sverrir 
Jakobsson, Thorir Jonsson Hraundal, and Daria Segal, 21–34 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), 29–31.



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forms of ʿAbbāsid enslaver-enslaved love frequently testify to the “brutal, consumerist, and 
callous” nature of romantic and sexual relationships with enslaved people.18 Introducing an 
emotional reading of a troubling topic should not sanitize or dilute our horror.

As I argue in this article, such emotional approaches, which allow space for academic 
reactions of revulsion and horror, prime us to read not just for the reported emotions of the 
Rūs, as I do here, but more broadly for the emotions of geographers and informants. This 
article therefore stands in conversation with and continues growing recognition of the grim 
nature of this source material. Writing about Ibn Faḍlān’s funerary account, which was long 
characterized by scholars as descriptive of an “orgy,”19 Thorir Jonsson Hraundal reflects: 
“There is certainly an alarming discordance between these interpretations and the actual 
description of the slave girl’s death as it appears in Ibn Fadlan’s text. How [various scholars] 
have been able to construe the depiction of multiple rapes and brutal strangulation as an 
illustration of a happy or peaceful occasion is intriguing.”20

The epigraph to this article is a reflection by James Montgomery on the difficulty of 
mapping emotions in the Arabo-Islamic past. In particular, he asks whether emotions 
might be organized on a “polarity of pleasantness vs unpleasantness.”21 This is, perhaps, an 
instructive means of reckoning with what follows. In dealing with what is, on the surface, 
a pleasant emotion (love), the unpleasant ramifications (slavery, assault, violence), held in 
focus by our own emotional readings as scholars, must be considered in tandem.

“Who will die with him?” Selecting Sacrificial Victims

I provide here treatments of three accounts of Rūs sacrifice that allow for the possibility 
of the ritual killing of men or boys. I offer no all-encompassing verdict on the prevalence 
of this practice in the extant geographical material; my readings of these sources are 
necessarily influenced by editorial choices made in the compilation of sources on the Rūs 
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of relying only on sources available 
in accessible translations, however, I draw on a slightly wider array of material than is 
commonly used in the study of Arabic writing on the Rūs. The three exemplars I analyze 
are not strictly geographical in tenor, though their observations became part of a wider 
geographical corpus (for instance, through their reuse by the authors of geographical 
encyclopedias). These texts do not describe a generalized practice, as is often the case 
with geographers offering broad descriptions of Rūs funerary norms. Instead, they discuss 
variations on a ritual that was either directly observed by or practiced in close proximity to 
Arabophone observers.

18.  Bray, “Toward an Abbasid History of Emotions,” 144.
19.  See Upham, “Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources,” 198–201.
20.  Thorir Jonsson Hraundal, “The Rus in Arabic Sources: Cultural Contacts and Identity” (PhD diss., 

University of Bergen, 2013), 114.
21.  Montgomery, “Convention as Cognition,” 171.



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Among these exemplars, the earliest and most widely studied treatment of Rūs sacrifice 
is the Risāla of Ibn Faḍlān, who participated in a caliphal mission dispatched from Baghdad 
to the Bulghārs of the Volga River. In his epistle, Ibn Faḍlān presents a detailed eyewitness 
account of a Rūs funeral ceremony that he happened to observe for which a female 
sacrificial victim was sought from among the enslaved women—the jawārī—of the deceased. 
Although he does not appear to have been present for this part of the ceremony,22 Ibn 
Faḍlān sketches the process of procuring a volunteer, as it were, for this ritual. In this 
instance, only jawārī were considered as potential sacrificial victims, but he indicates that 
male enslaved “volunteers” were also possible:

When the chieftain dies, the members of his household ask his jawārī and ghilmān, 
“Who will die with him?” One answers, “I will.” At this point the words become binding. 
There is no turning back. It is not even an option. It is usually the jawārī who offer.

When the man I just mentioned died, they said to his jawārī, “Who will die with him?” 
One said, “I will.”23

 وإذا مــات الرئيــس قــال أهلــه جلواريــه وغلمانــه مــن منكــم ميــوت معــه فيقــول بعضهــم أان فــإذا قــال ذلــك فقــد
وجب ال يستوي له أن يرجع ولو أراد ذلك ما ُتُرََِك وأكثر من يفعل اجلواري

فلّما مات ذلك الرجل الذي قّدمت ذكره قالوا جلواريه من ميوت معه فقال أحدهّن أان
Alongside this allusion to the occasional sacrifice of men by Ibn Faḍlān’s itinerant Rūs 
merchants on the Volga River we can also consider conditional presentations of similar 
practices, found in accounts of the 332/943 Rūs raid on Bardhaʿa, in what is today the 
Republic of Azerbaijan but was then called Arrān in Arabic (Caucasian Albania).24 The 
yearlong raid and occupation of the city, documented in an array of chronicles and 
encyclopedias,25 occasioned discussion of Rūs funerary practices, because as the occupation 

22.  Ibn Faḍlān explains: “I arrived at the river where [the dead man’s] boat was moored on the day the 
chief and the female slave were set on fire.” Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān, “Mission to the Volga,” in Two Arabic Travel 
Books: Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga, by Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī and Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān, ed. 
Tim Mackintosh-Smith and James E. Montgomery, trans. James Montgomery, 163–297 (New York: New York 
University Press, 2014), 246-247.

23.  Ibn Faḍlān, “Mission to the Volga,” 246–47.
24.  See D. S. Margoliouth, “The Russian Seizure of Bardha’ah in 943 A.D.,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental 

and African Studies 1, no. 2 (1918): 82–95; Ture J. Arne, “Rus’ erövring av Berda’a år 943,” Fornvännen 27 (1932): 
211–19; A. B. Nuriev and Paul Wordsworth, “The Medieval City of Bardha‘a,” in From Albania to Arrān: The 
East Caucasus between the Ancient and Islamic Worlds (ca. 330 BCE–1000 BCE), ed. Robert Hoyland, 253–76 
(Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020).

25.  In addition to the chronicles discussed in this article, see, for example, Ibn al-Athīr’s al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh, 
al-ʿAynī’s ʿIqd al-jumān fī tārīkh ahl al-zamān, and brief comments on the raid and the city’s decline in Ibn 
Ḥawqal’s Kitāb Ṣūrat al-arḍ, al-Maqdisī’s Kitāb al-Badʾ wa-l-tārīkh, Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān, and the anonymous 
Persian Ḥudūd al-ʿālam: Alexander Seippel, Rerum Normannicarum fontes Arabici: E libris quum typis expressis 
tum manu scriptis collegit et sumptibus universitatis osloensis edidit (Oslo: A. W. Brøgger, 1896), 97–100, 112; 
Abū al-Qāsim b. Ḥawqal, Kitāb Ṣūrat al-Arḍ by Abū l-Qāsim Ibn Ḥawqal, ed. Michael Jan de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 
1873), 2:241; Abū al-Qāsim Ibn Ḥawqal, Ibn Ḥawqal’s Kitāb Ṣūrat al-Arḍ: Opus Geographicum, ed. J. H. Kramers 
(Leiden: Brill, 2014), 2:239; Muṭahhar b. Ṭāhir al-Maqdisī, Le livre de la création et de l’histoire de Moṭahhar 



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began to fail and the Rūs were attacked by dysentery, growing numbers of dead Rūs 
men were buried in the city, providing material for chroniclers. Significant among these 
discussions is a lengthy entry provided by the librarian and philosopher Miskawayh26 in 
his 372/982 Tajārib al-umam, a chronicle that makes extensive use of various eyewitness 
and written sources procured via his strong aristocratic networks.27 Toward the end of his 
account of the occupation, Miskawayh makes note of Rūs burial practices:

And when a man among them died, they buried him with his weapons, clothes, and 
tools, and with his wife or another of his women, and with his ghulām, if he loved him, 
according to their custom. When they finished what they were doing, the Muslims 
excavated the burial grounds and removed from them swords, which are sought after 
today for their sharpness and quality.28 

 فــكان إذا مــات الرجــل منهــم دفنــوا معــه سالحــُه وثيابــه وآلتــه وزوجتــه أو غريهــا مــن النســاء وغالمــه إن كان
 حيبــه علــى ســنة هلــم فاســتثار املســلمون بعــد زوال أمرهــم مقابرهــم فاســتخرجوا منهــا ســيوفاّ يتنافــس فيهــا إىل

اليوم ملضائها وجودهتا
These details are echoed in a similar notice in al-Hamadānī’s (d. 521/1127) Takmilat tārīkh 
al-Ṭabarī, a continuation of al-Ṭabarī’s Mukhtaṣar tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk wa-l-khulafāʾ 
that extends al-Ṭabarī’s chronicle as far as the year 487/1094. Al-Hamadānī’s text is one 
of several extensions of al-Ṭabarī’s work,29 and it is known from a single manuscript (BnF 
Arabe 1469), which was presented by Alexander Seippel in his “pioneering”30 compendium 
of Arabic sources on the Rūs. Al-Hamadānī’s slightly abbreviated account of Rūs burial 
practices mirrors Miskawayh’s fairly closely:

And when one among them died, he was dressed for the grave with his possessions and 
weapons, and his wife was buried with him, and his ghulām if he loved him. And when 
they left, the Muslims proceeded to excavate wealth from their graves.31

ben Ṭāhir el-Maqdisī, trans. Clément Huart (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1907), 4:62–63; Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Jacut’s 
Geographisches Wörterbuch, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1867), 2:834; Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam: 
“The Regions of the World”; A Persian Geography 372 A.H.–982 A.D., ed. and trans. Vladimir Minorsky (London: 
Luzac, 1937), 144; Harris Birkeland, Nordens historie i middelalderen etter arabiske kilder: Oversettelse til norsk 
av de arabiske kilder med innledning, forfatterbiografier, bibliografi og merknader (Oslo: Jacob Dybwad, 1954), 
48–49, 90–92, 130.

26.  M. Arkoun, “Miskawayh,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1954–
2009).

27.  See M. S. Khan, Studies in Miskawayh’s Contemporary History (340–369 A.H.) (Chicago: Center for Middle 
Eastern Studies, 1980).

28.  My translation. Aḥmad b. Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam wa-taʿāqub al-himam, ed. Sayyid Kasrawī Ḥasan, 
2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2018), 5:268.

29.  Muḥammad b. Isḥāq b. al-Nadīm, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, 
trans. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 1:565.

30.  James E. Montgomery, “Arabic Sources on the Vikings,” in The Viking World, ed. Stefan Brink and Neil 
Price, 550–61 (London: Routledge, 2008), 550.

31.  My translation. Seippel, Rerum Normannicarum fontes Arabici, 84.



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 “Out of Love for You”  •  445

 وكان الواحــد منهــم اذا مــات ُكفــن مبالــه وسالحــه وُدفنــت زوجتــه معــه وغالمــه ان كان حيبّــه واخــرج املســلمون
ا مضوا من قبورهم امواال

ّ
مل

Both Bardhaʿa accounts contain the caveat that male sacrifices occur only in kāna yuḥibbuhu, 
“if he loved him.” This imprecise phrase leaves it unclear whether it is the deceased or his 
ghulām who is the intended emotional actor. My own reading is that the text refers to the 
dead man’s love for the ghulām, on the basis that it is the deceased who is the cause for the 
rest of the ritual and thus his emotional state is likely more significant (or at least thought 
by the chroniclers to be more significant) in directing the funerary sacrifice. This reading 
is supported in part by similar emotional formulations with regard to female sacrifice, 
discussed below. That this emotional caveat is applied only to the sacrifice of male victims, 
however, and not to the plethora of women outlined by Miskawayh, in particular, suggests 
some form of significance to the sacrifice of male victims, or alternatively some sense on 
the part of the chroniclers that emotional resonance is worth emphasizing in these cases. 
It is perhaps an indicator that love for the female victims of these rituals was automatically 
assumed by chroniclers such as Miskawayh but was deemed worth highlighting in the more 
unusual cases of male sacrifice.

Whether this is love directed toward the ghulām or love directed toward his enslaver, 
it is prudent to make note of the power dynamics on display in these generalized funerary 
scenarios. Emotions such as love are complicated by the inequalities entailed by the position 
occupied by ghilmān enslaved by the Rūs: given that one party was enslaved, care must be 
taken not to romanticize attachment for or on behalf of enslaved men who were, in a sense, 
quite literally loved to death. That the sacrifice of men required a certain degree of love, 
however, is clear from both chroniclers here.

Emotional Caveats

The sacrifice of Rūs men has received limited scholarly attention in recent years. James 
Montgomery offers archaeological parallels for the practice,32 and elsewhere brief 
discussions of the possibility of male sacrifice have accompanied adjacent developments 
in, for instance, emerging discussions about the agency of female sacrificial victims.33 In 
treating instances of potential male sacrifice individually here, I aim to draw attention to 
the practice of male funerary sacrifice to a greater extent than has previously been possible.

32.  James E. Montgomery, “Pyrrhic Scepticism and the Conquest of Disorder: Prolegomenon to the Study of 
Ibn Faḍlān,” in Problems in Arabic Literature, ed. Miklós Maróth, 43–89 (Piliscsaba: Avicenna Institute of Middle 
Eastern Studies, 2004), 59 n. 11.

33.  Moen and Walsh, “Agents of Death,” 602; Marianne Moen, “Women and Sacrifice: Roles and Connections,” 
in The Norse Sorceress: Mind and Materiality in the Viking World, ed. Leszek Gardeła, Sophie Bønding, and 
Peter Pentz, 161–69 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2023), 163; Upham, “Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources,” 229–39; 
Tonicha M. Upham, “Equal Rites: Parsing Rus’ Gender Values Through an Arabic Lens” (MA thesis, University of 
Iceland, 2019), 22–23; see also Csete Katona, Vikings of the Steppe: Scandinavians, Rus’, and the Turkic World (c. 
750–1050) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), 129.



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Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

These presentations of possible male sacrifice, from Ibn Faḍlān’s partial eyewitness 
account to the Bardhaʿa chronicle accounts, are more theoretical than are the reports 
of female sacrifice. Although the possibility of male sacrifice exists, it is tenuous enough 
that none of the above reporters is able to offer a concrete example of its occurrence. In 
each case, the writers emphasize that male funerary sacrifice is the exception rather than 
the norm; even when Ibn Faḍlān concedes that ghilmān may be canvassed for volunteers 
alongside jawārī, he emphasizes the greater prevalence of female victims. In none of these 
examples, moreover, does an eyewitness or geographer present male sacrificial victims as 
the only option available for the funerary arrangements of dead men.

Although ghilmān were, by these reckonings, the victims of funerary sacrifice only 
irregularly, opportunities for the sacrifice of men among the Rūs and their neighbors did 
exist. Ibn Rusta (fl. after 290/903) describes Rūs physicians or “medicine men,” aṭibbāʾ, 
as capable of compelling the nonfunerary killing of men, women, and horses as a form 
of offering (qurbān).34 Among the neighboring Ṣaqāliba, funerary rituals described by 
al-Masʿūdī (d. 345/965) and later geographers writing between the fifth/eleventh and 
eighth/fourteenth centuries involved the sacrifice of multiple members of the community, 
including other men.35 The killing of men in some form of ritual context, whether strictly 
sacrificial36 or in order to serve as posthumous attendants of some kind, is well attested 
within the geographical source material for the Rūs and adjacent areas.

That the Rūs sometimes killed men as funerary sacrifice, then, is not entirely surprising 
despite the restrictions applied to this practice by Ibn Faḍlān and the Bardhaʿa chroniclers. 
In an environment populated by free, wealthy men in need of funerals and by people 
enslaved by these men, the power dynamics alone were no doubt sufficient to occasion the 
killing of members of the latter group for ritual purposes. We might reach a somewhat more 
confident assessment of geographers’ and chroniclers’ implicit understandings of these 
sacrifices by considering descriptions of Rūs uses for boys.

Within discussions of female funerary sacrifice, scholars have sometimes argued that the 
victims fulfilled some form of posthumous marital role in Rūs funerals.37 This interpretation 

34.  Abū ʿAlī Aḥmad b. ʿUmar Ibn Rusta, Ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāq al-Nafīsa and Kitāb al-Buldān by al-Yaʿqūbī, 
ed. Michael Jan de Goeje, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1892), 146; Upham, “Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources,” 221–24; 
Thorir Jonsson Hraundal, “New Perspectives on Eastern Vikings/Rus in Arabic Sources,” Viking and Medieval 
Scandinavia 10 (2014): 65–97, at 89.

35.  Abū al-Ḥasan b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī al-Masʿūdī, Les prairies d’or: Texte et traduction, trans. Charles Adrien 
Barbier de Meynard and Abel Jean Baptiste Marie Michel Pavet de Courteille (Paris: Société Asiatique, 1971), 
3:63–64; Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbd Allāh al-Bakrī, Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-mamālik, ed. Jamal Tolba (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub 
al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 1:257; Upham, “Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources,” 194–95.

36.  Some scholars of ritual argue that reports of Rūs funerary killings do not, strictly speaking, depict sacrifice 
since the deaths do not appear to have occurred as a form of offering to a deity and are instead motivated by a 
perceived sense that the deceased requires attendants in the afterlife. See Moen and Walsh, “Agents of Death,” 
599–600.

37.  See, for instance, Jens Peter Schjødt, “Ibn Fadlan’s Account of a Rus Funeral: To What Degree Does It 
Reflect Nordic Myths?,” in Reflections on Old Norse Myths, ed. Pernille Hermann, Jens Peter Schjødt, and Rasmus 
Tranum Kristensen, 133–48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 138; Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval 
Scandinavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 71; Morten Lund Warmind, “Ibn Fadlan in the Context 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

 “Out of Love for You”  •  447

is facilitated by explicit comments to this effect by al-Masʿūdī, who presents funerary 
sacrifice as a form of posthumous marriage in the event that a man dies unmarried.38 Further 
support for this interpretation comes from Amīn Rāzī’s tenth/sixteenth-century Persian 
adaptation of Ibn Faḍlān and the marital tone he gives to Ibn Faḍlān’s funerary account in his 
Haft iqlīm.39 In extant writings in Arabic about Rūs funerary sacrifice, however, geographers 
generally do not appear to see posthumous marriage as the reason for the killing of women 
during Rūs funerals. That the women sacrificed as part of these funerary rituals might 
have been expected to fulfill some form of postmortem sexual purpose, though, might be 
understood from Ibn Faḍlān’s observations on Rūs jawārī, discussed below, and from the 
above references to wives and other women by Miskawayh and al-Hamadānī.

Unlike Ibn Faḍlān’s sacrificial jāriya, whose assault (and the emotional justifications 
for it) is discussed below, the male sacrificial victims discussed above are not presented in 
sexual terms. We can only speculate as to how, if at all, the funeral observed by Ibn Faḍlān 
might have differed had the important man’s death occasioned the solicitation and death of 
a sacrificial ghulām.40 In exploring whether the important aspect of the victim’s identity was 
their enslavement rather than their gender, Marianne Moen and Matthew J. Walsh further 
trouble academic reactions to such a divergent funerary tableau: “Would the ensuing rituals 
have looked the same or very different, and would the scholarly treatment of the text have 
been different, had it been a male slave at the end of the knife?”41

For an instance in which a sexual context is implied for those trafficked as ghilmān, we 
can look again to Miskawayh’s discussion of the Bardhaʿa occupation. In the comparatively 
early and detailed version of the occupation narrative presented by Miskawayh, the 
description of the Rūs retreat from the town at the end of the occupation is accompanied by 
a list of those trafficked by the departing occupiers: “They took the women and children, 
raped them,42 and enslaved them” (حــازوا النســاء والصبيــان ففجــروا هبــّن وهبــم واســتعبدهم).43 Miskawayh 
later specifies that it was women, boys, and girls (النســاء والصبــااي والصبيــان) who were trafficked 

of His Age,” in The Ship as Symbol in Prehistoric and Medieval Scandinavia: Papers from an International 
Research Seminar at the Danish National Museum, Copenhagen, 5th–7th May 1994, ed. Ole Crumlin-Pedersen 
and Birgitte Munch Thye, 131–37 (Copenhagen: Publications from the National Museum, 1995), 133; Władysław 
Duczko, Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe (Boston: Brill, 2004), 145–46.

38.  Al-Masʿūdī, Les prairies d’or (Paris: Société Asiatique, 1914), 2:9.
39.  Discussed by Price, “Ibn Fadlan and the Rituals of the Rus,” 189–91; Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī, Haft Iqlīm: The 

Geographical and Biographical Encyclopaedia of Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī, ed. S. B. Samadi (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 
1972), 5:26–30; H. M. Smyser, “Ibn Faḍlān’s Account of the Rūs with Some Commentary and Some Allusions to 
Beowulf,” in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. 
Bessinger and Robert P. Creed, 92–119 (New York: New York University Press, 1965).

40.  Upham, “Equal Rites,” 22–23.
41.  Moen and Walsh, “Agents of Death,” 602.
42.  In line with my stance on explicitly naming the unsavory aspects of this material, and since this anecdote 

discusses the enslaving and sexual exploitation of women and children, I find “rape” a more appropriate 
translation here than “fornicate” or the like.

43.  My translation. Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 5:266.



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out of Bardhaʿa.44 Al-Hamadānī, abbreviating the account slightly, refers to the children 
only collectively and limits himself to writing that the enslaved women and children were 
driven to the ships by the retreating Rūs.45 Later iterations of the occupation narrative are 
further abbreviated, often noting only that beautiful women were captured and enslaved at 
Bardhaʿa.46 In the earlier Bardhaʿa accounts that describe male funerary sacrifice, however, 
it is noteworthy that the enslaving of the boys who likely became sacrificial ghilmān is 
connected to circumstances that carry implications of sexual assault.

Of course, that ghilmān might be subject to sexual uses is entirely unsurprising in an 
ʿAbbāsid cultural context. None of the sources discussed here offers any explicit sexual 
commentary that might pertain to the experiences of the sacrificed ghilmān. Ibn Faḍlān 
does not discuss homosexuality among the Rūs, though he does discuss the views of the 
Ghuzziyya Turks on liwāṭ (sodomy) at an earlier point in his Risāla.47 But in the milieus in 
which many of these observers and geographers were writing, the sexual use of ghilmān 
was widespread. As Everett Rowson writes: 

Just as the notables, bureaucrats, poets, and indeed caliphs bought, sold, and traded 
slavegirls, and at the same time fell in love with them, made fools of themselves over 
them, and engaged in friendly and not-so-friendly rivalries in pursuit of them, so did 
some—or indeed many—of them with slaveboys. There was indeed a “traffic” in boys 
(by sale and gift) just as there was in women.48

That the initial compilers of this type of information on the Rūs—in this case, Ibn Faḍlān 
and Miskawayh, aided by later transmitters, geographers, and historians—operated in 
environments in which the sexual use of ghilmān, though illegal,49 was widespread is 
significant.50 Read against ʿAbbāsid evidence for the sexual abuse of ghilmān, we might 
wonder whether similar interpretations of the sexual role of a beloved ghulām sent to the 
grave with his enslaver might have come naturally to compiler and reader. Against this 
background, further elaboration and clarification of the role of these male sacrificial victims 
who occasionally appear alongside female victims might have been seen as superfluous.

44.  Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 5:268.
45.  Seippel, Rerum Normannicarum fontes Arabici, 84; Birkeland, Nordens historie i middelalderen, 67.
46.  Seippel, Rerum Normannicarum fontes Arabici, 97–100, 112; Alauddin Ismail Samarrai, “Arabic Sources 

on the Norse: English Translation and Notes Based on the Texts Edited by Alexander Seippel in Rerum 
Normannicarum Fontes Arabici” (MS thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1959), 132, 152; Upham, “Equal Rites,” 
36–37.

47.  Ibn Faḍlān, “Mission to the Volga,” 206–7.
48.  Everett K. Rowson, “The Traffic in Boys: Slavery and Homoerotic Liaisons in Elite ʿAbbāsid Society,” 

Middle Eastern Literatures 11, no. 2 (2008): 193–204, at 195.
49.  Some jurists differentiated between enslaver and enslaved in the context of liwāṭ; see Sara Omar, “From 

Semantics to Normative Law: Perceptions of Liwāt (Sodomy) and Sihāq (Tribadism) in Islamic Jurisprudence 
(8th–15th Century CE),” Islamic Law and Society 19, no. 3 (2012): 222–56, at 251–52.

50.  Rowson, “Traffic in Boys,” 198–99.



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 “Out of Love for You”  •  449

From here, it is helpful to consider the specific emotional caveat offered in the Bardhaʿa 
accounts: that the sacrifice of men occurred only in kāna yuḥibbuhu, if their enslaver 
loved them. As mentioned earlier, this caveat is exclusive to the male sacrificial victims 
in these Arabic accounts, and in a Rūs context a similar sense of emotionality is found 
only in the case of Ibn Rusta’s discussion of funerary killing, discussed below. It is worth 
noting that in these accounts, any potential male sacrificial victim does not appear as the 
single and exclusive victim. The report offered by Miskawayh and al-Hamadānī allows for a 
female sacrificial victim—in Miskawayh’s case, a choice between types of women perhaps 
intended to distinguish between free wives and enslaved women—and presents ghilmān as 
an optional extra rather than a clearcut alternative to a female sacrificial victim. Therefore, 
the understanding conveyed in the Bardhaʿa chronicles appears to be that deceased Rūs 
soldiers would not go to the grave accompanied only by a male slave they loved but rather 
would have him included in their burial assemblage alongside a woman of their choice.

The love depicted by the authors of the Bardhaʿa accounts and in the parallel emotional 
presentations I discuss below is not very complex semantically. Chroniclers and geographers 
express this emotion in a consistent manner, using the same terminology, without variation 
in intensity or merit. In light of the variety of meanings conveyed by the various Arabic 
terms for love, and in view of the impact of conflicting translations of maḥabba or ḥubb in 
sources on male sacrifice as “love”51 and “fondness,”52 it is worth considering the potential 
connotations of ḥ-b-b and how we might understand geographers’ and chroniclers’ views 
on the emotional resonance of Rūs sacrifice and its victims. 

Definitions and usage vary and depend on individual understandings of the rendering 
of different concepts and degrees of love. However, we see one form of love represented 
by ḥubb in a Qurʾānic context (for instance, in Q 3:31 and 20:39), in the sense of “measured 
affection” or love of God.53 It is one of two Qurʾānic terms for love and becomes particularly 
prevalent as a term for divine love in later literature.54 Referring primarily to a psychological 
rather than a physical state,55 ḥubb expresses the concept of love but is less intense or 
passionate than ʿishq, which is generally presented as passionate or even erotic outside of its 
Sufi applications.56 ʿIshq is, generally speaking, a more poetic conceptualization of love than 
ḥubb is.57 We find one example of its definition in al-Jāḥiẓ’s (d. 255/868–69) Risāla fī al-ʿishq 
wa-l-nisāʾ, which is frequently quoted in other Arabic lexicographical and philological 

51.  Samarrai, “Arabic Sources on the Norse,” 113.
52.  Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, trans. Paul 

Lunde and Caroline Stone (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 151.
53.  M. Arkoun, “ʿIs̲h̲ḳ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2009).
54.  Chittick, “Divine and Human Love,” 170–71. Within Sufism, ḥubb was eventually superseded by ʿishq as 

a designation for the love of God. See Arkoun, “ʿIs̲h̲ḳ”; Lumbard, “From Ḥubb to ʿIshq”; Chittick, “Divine and 
Human Love.”

55.  Obiedat, “Semantic Field of Love,” 309.
56. See, for instance, Julia Bray’s discussion of adab and ʿishq in Bray, “Yaʿqūb b. al-Rabīʿ,” 13; Lumbard, 

“From Ḥubb to ʿIshq,” 347; Chittick, “Divine and Human Love,” 171; Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic 
Contemplative Texts, 40.

57.  Obiedat, “Semantic Field of Love,” 309.



450  •  Tonicha Upham

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works on love: “ʿIshq is the name for what exceeds that which is called ḥubb and every 
ḥubb is not called ʿishq, for ʿishq is the name for what exceeds that degree.”58

A. Z. Obiedat’s semantic study of love in classical Arabic situates ḥubb relatively low on a 
scale of love that can be measured both in intensity and in positivity—that is, whether the 
intensity of love has progressed to an inappropriate, all-consuming level, on the assumption 
that the most extreme expressions of the concept of love connote bodily harm.59 Ḥubb, 
then, is not the most intense form of love at the semantic disposal of geographers and 
chroniclers, nor does it represent uncontrolled passion. It does, however, exceed basic 
affection.60 Although sometimes interchangeable with concepts such as ʿishq and walaʿ, 
rankings often characterized ḥubb as a less extreme form of love with a more general 
meaning than conveyed by some of the more intense terms.61

Looking to Miskawayh’s and al-Hamadānī’s conditional constructions surrounding ḥubb, 
we gain a sense of what this emotional application might have entailed. It is a significant 
emotion; it is not simply a form of tolerance but rather indicates something deeper. Obiedat 
explains the metaphorical usage of ḥubb as “a psychological state similar to a hidden seed 
that grows and proliferates.”62 We might, then, consider these chronicle representations 
of hypothetical Rūs-ghulām relationships, at their most intense, to involve a significant 
strength of feeling on the part of the enslaver (assuming that grammatical ownership of the 
emotion is ascribed to the deceased rather than to his ghulām). The emotion might have 
developed over a significant period of time and reflected a particularly special relationship 
in the eyes of the enslaver.

Emotional Parallels

Having interrogated the ḥubb mentioned by Miskawayh and al-Hamadānī in their chronicle 
accounts of male funerary sacrifice, it is worthwhile to consider other expressions of the 
same or similar emotions. The Risāla is an especially rich emotional source, as Ibn Faḍlān 
presents multiple instances of the expression of love by Rūs men. Writings on funerary 
sacrifice and suicide rituals among both the Rūs and the neighboring Ṣaqāliba in broader 
geographical works also offer opportunities for emotional readings. In these sources, we 
encounter a complex range of emotions, which allow us to set love alongside the emotions 
engendered in the observer, the reader, and the scholar at various points between the texts’ 
creation and their present study.

The most immediate parallel to the ḥubb associated with the sacrifice of ghilmān 
at Bardhaʿa is a similar construction, albeit without emotional condition, found in Ibn 
Rusta’s early fourth/tenth-century Kitāb al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa. In describing the inhumation 
of dead men, Ibn Rusta depicts the burial assemblage of the deceased and their emotional 
connections with the women sacrificed alongside them as follows:

58.  Giffen, Theory of Profane Love, 85; ʿAmr b. Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ, “Risāla fī al-ʿishq wa-l-nisāʾ,” in Rasāʾil al-Jāḥiẓ, 
ed. Ḥasan al-Sandūbī, 266–75 (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Tijāriyya, 1933), 266.

59.  Obiedat, “Semantic Field of Love,” 312.
60.  Obiedat, “Semantic Field of Love,” 310.
61.  Giffen, Theory of Profane Love, 96.
62.  Obiedat, “Semantic Field of Love,” 310.



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And when a man of rank among them dies, they dig for him a grave like a wide house 
and they place him in it with clothes on his body and the gold bracelets that he used to 
wear, and lots of food and pitchers of drink and goods, too. And they place with him in 
the grave his woman, whom he loved, while she is still alive, and they seal the door of 
the grave so that she dies there.63

 واذا مــات اجلليــل منهــم حفــروا لــه قربا مثــل بيــت واســع جعلــوه فيــه وأدخلــوا معــه ثيــاب بدنــه وســواره الــذى
 كان يلبســه مــن ذهــب وطعامــا كــثريا واابريــق شــراب ومــاال صامتــا ايضــا وجيعلــون معــه ىف الــقرب امرأُتــه اليت

كان حيُبها وهى بعُد حَية وُيَسَد عليها ابب القرب فتموت هناَك
Ibn Rusta’s account of the live burial of Rūs women serves as a striking emotional parallel to 
the conditional sacrifice of ghilmān at Bardhaʿa. In particular, it emphasizes the emotions 
of the deceased, leaving open the question whether a woman who was not sufficiently 
loved by the dead man would be subject to this ritual. This text offers a helpful support for 
reading the directionality of the conditional love reported at Bardhaʿa: if the emotions of 
the free, important dead man are prioritized here, a similar hierarchy seems likely in the 
case of the somewhat more ambiguous statement about conditional love between dead Rūs 
soldiers and their ghilmān. In his quiet comment on emotional significance, Ibn Rusta offers 
an understated reflection on his understanding of the emotional bonds governing Rūs death 
rituals and, by extension, relationships among the living. Although the status of the women 
in question is not made explicit, and neither is the women’s consent or own feelings, Ibn 
Rusta applies an emotional facet to what is otherwise a clinical description of a ritual that 
entailed women being buried alive.

Elsewhere, Ibn Rusta and other geographers working within the Jayhānī geographical 
tradition do attribute emotion to women in the context of the deaths of important men. 
Both Ibn Rusta and the fifth/eleventh-century geographer al-Bakrī in his Kitāb al-Masālik 
wa-l-mamālik reflect on the emotions of the women of the Ṣaqāliba following the deaths 
of men. In these instances, an equivalent notion of love—maḥabba—motivates funerary 
suicides:

Ibn Rusta: And if the dead man had three wives and one of them claims she loved him, 
she props two timbers near her dead and stands them up on the ground and then 
places another timber across the top of them. And she suspends from the middle of it 
a rope, the other end tied fast around her neck, while she is standing on a chair. When 
she has done this, the chair is taken from under her, and she is left hanging until she 
asphyxiates and dies. And when she is dead, she is cast on the fire and burned.64

 واذا كان للميّــت ثالث نســوة وزعمــت واحــدة منهــن اهنــا حمبَــة لــه عمــدت عنــد مّيتهــا اىل خشــبتني فاقامتهمــا
 يف وجــه االرض مث وضعــت خشــبة اخــرى معرتضــة علــى رأســهما وعَلقــت مــن وســطها حــبال ُشــَد احــد طرفيــه
 ىف عنقهــا وهــى قائمــة علــى كرســّى فــاذا فعلــت ذلــك ُأخــذ الكرســُى مــن حتتهــا فبقيــت معَلقــة حىّّت ختتنــق

ومتوت فاذا ماُتت أُلقيت ىف النار وُأحرقت
63.  My translation. Ibn Rusta, Ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāq al-Nafīsa, 146–47.
64.  My translation. Ibn Rusta, Ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāq al-Nafīsa, 143–44.



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Al-Bakrī: And the wives of the dead cut their hands and faces with knives. And if one 
of them claims she loved him, she suspends a rope, ascends to it on a chair, and ties it 
fast around her neck. Then the chair is pulled from under her, and she is left hanging, 
struggling until she dies. Then she is burned and is joined with her husband.65

ــٌة لــه َعَلقــت حــباًل َب  ونســاء املّيــت يقطعــن أيديهــن ووجوههــن ابلســكاكني وإذا زعمــت واحــدة منهــن أهنــا حمُِ
 وارُتقــت إليــه علــى كرســى فتشــتُد بــه ىف عنقهــا مث جُيْــَذُب الكرســى مــن حتتهــا فتبقــى معلقــة ُتضطــرب حىّت

متوت مث حترق وُتـُْلََحق بزوجها
These presentations of female emotion and action in a funerary setting suggest a fruitful 

line of inquiry as far as female agency in funerary rituals is concerned, with the potential 
to contribute to emerging discussions surrounding Ibn Faḍlān’s sacrificial jāriya.66 They 
also offer a form of contrast to the emotional caveats governing the sacrifice of men. In 
these cases, the emotions of those surviving the deceased appear to be understood by 
geographers as motivation for their action (funerary suicide), in contrast to the motivating 
role of the emotions of the deceased in the other funerary accounts discussed in this article. 

I do not suggest with this reading that Miskawayh compared notes with Ibn Rusta in 
preparing his chronicle account of the Bardhaʿa raid and sought to emulate the construction 
used by the latter in his discussions of funerary rituals among the Rūs and Saqāliba. Such 
a striking level of semantic consistency, however, could reflect correlating understandings 
of perceived emotional resonances in the funerary ritual across different treatments of 
funerary sacrifice by geographers and chroniclers.

Moving from precise parallels to the frequency with which ḥubb is employed in 
discussions of Rūs behavior, we return to Ibn Faḍlān. In the Risāla, the Rūs also express 
feelings of love elsewhere in the funerary process. Ibn Faḍlān describes the female sacrificial 
victim’s assault by the surviving Rūs men (to offer my own view on what is described here, 
in line with Schine’s stance on modern readings of this source material), as follows:

Meanwhile, the jāriya who had expressed her wish to die came and went, entering one 
yurt after another. The owner of the yurt would have intercourse with her67 and say, 
“Tell your master that I have done this out of love for you.”68

 واجلاريــة اليت ُتريــد ُتـُْقَتــل ذاهبــٌة وجائيــة ُتدخــل قّبــة قّبــة مــن قباهبــم فيجامعهــا صاحــب القّبــة ويقــول هلا قــويل
ملوالَك إمّّنا فعلت هذا من حمّبتك

65.  My translation. Al-Bakrī, Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-mamālik, 1:257. 
66.  Moen, “Women and Sacrifice,” 163; Moen and Walsh, “Agents of Death,” 601.
67.  Ibn Faḍlān’s approach to discussing sex tends to be very clinical, reflecting both the form of his writing 

and his own discomfort with the visibility of women and sex during his journey. On language, see Pernilla 
Myrne, Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature (London: I. B. 
Tauris, 2020), 9; Pernilla Myrne, “Organizing, Presenting, and Reading Sexual Knowledge: The Abbasid Context 
of Jawāmiʿ al-Ladhdha,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 7 (2020): 182–206, at 199.

68.  Ibn Faḍlān, “Mission to the Volga,” 248–49. 



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The grammatical gender of the object of love in the quote is unclear, but I follow James 
McKeithen in understanding it as referring to the deceased and not to the jāriya who is told 
to relay the message.69 Although this declaration has at times been read by modern scholars 
as an indicator that the jealousy of the deceased must be assuaged via a profession that the 
surviving men have engaged in sex out of love for him,70 a broader consideration of Ibn 
Faḍlān’s presentation of this form of love (and its associated activities) between free Rūs 
men allows a more expansive interpretation. We might view the imposition of emotional 
ideas in a geographical or ethnographic context, and particularly the ascription of a 
certain directionality to these emotional ideas, as a fresh lens for considering Ibn Faḍlān’s 
understanding of how Rūs men related to each other. In this case, for an observer on the 
sidelines, the reported love between the men undertaking this ritual, on the one hand, and 
the deceased, on the other, appears to serve as the impetus for this sexual activity. We might 
thus view the dead man as a greater motivator for these assaults than the jāriya herself, at 
least on the basis of Ibn Faḍlān’s testimony. Moreover, the view that the sexual activity 
reported during the funerary ritual was not a jealousy-inducing endeavor is arguably 
bolstered by Ibn Faḍlān’s comments elsewhere concerning the sexual licentiousness of 
Rūs in company with each other. He reports encountering them in shared houses, where 
they engage in sex with the women they are trafficking, and describes the king of the Rūs 
engaging in public sex.71 In a culture that appears, in Ibn Faḍlān’s wide-eyed account, to 
be oriented around public sexual activity,72 it seems somewhat incongruous to read this 
message of love from the dead man’s surviving peers as an apology for their sexual behavior 
and not as the primary motivation for it. Ibn Faḍlān observes, further, the love between the 
Rūs and their lord or deity, for love of whom the cremated remains of the funeral pyre are 
scattered to the wind within an hour of the ritual’s end.73 Across his funerary account, then, 
there are instances in which love is expressed between men—whether between the living 
and the deceased, or the living and their spiritual lord. 

69.  James E. McKeithen, “The Risalah of Ibn Fadlan: An Annotated Translation with Introduction” (PhD diss., 
Indiana University, 1979), 143 n. 474.

70.  Timothy Taylor, The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 179. 
This has alternatively been presented as “friendly obligation” on the basis of additional readings offered in 
Amīn Rāzī’s tenth/sixteenth-century Persian Haft iqlīm. Although dūstī may well be read as friendly rather 
than romantic love, it nonetheless conveys an idea of strong emotional connections between free Rūs men. 
Schjødt, “Ibn Fadlan’s Account,” 139–40; Amīn Aḥmad Rāzī, Haft Iqlīm, 5:29; William C. Chittick, “Love in Islamic 
Thought,” Religion Compass 8, no. 7 (2014): 229–38, at 232; Chittick, Divine Love, xxv–xxvi; Upham, “Rūs Gender 
in Islamicate Sources,” 234–35 n. 982.

71.  Ibn Faḍlān, “Mission to the Volga,” 242–43, 252–53.
72.  See Nizar Hermes on Ibn Faḍlān’s at times overactive and over appreciative gaze, and Ruth Mazo Karras 

on the possibility that Ibn Faḍlān’s interest in sex shaped his narrative emphases. Nizar Hermes, The [European] 
Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth–Twelfth Century AD (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 
2012), 95; Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia, 71.

73.  Ibn Faḍlān, “Mission to the Volga,” 252–53.



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Ibn Faḍlān’s account of the funerary ritual certainly conveys horror and terror. As the 
ritual approaches its zenith, he begins to withdraw from active observation and information 
gathering,74 and he describes both the screams of the jāriya as she is killed and the 
possibility that the jawārī standing on the sidelines might find this frightening enough to 
discourage them from pursuing a similar sacrificial fate. At the same time, however, he also 
quietly articulates complex and nuanced ideas about the love that he has been told Rūs men 
profess to each other or express in relation to their religious beliefs. The multiple emotional 
professions recorded by Ibn Faḍlān, taken alongside the Bardhaʿa accounts and the 
relevant Rūs and Ṣaqāliba material discussed above, make the Rūs an emotionally complex 
geographical and historical subject in these genres of writing. Through this reading of one 
emotion in a funerary and sacrificial context, we encounter a richness of emotion. Although 
love is discussed with great semantic consistency—observers, geographers, and chroniclers 
universally refer to it as ḥubb—this targeted study of it across multiple sources testifies 
to the quiet emotionality of this body of sources on the Rūs, in addition to constituting a 
helpful point of reference against which ideas about the ḥubb of the Bardhaʿa accounts can 
be read. This small catalog of sources drawing on similar emotional concepts, terminology, 
and situations offers a body of evidence for the reading of multiple impressions of Rūs ḥubb. 
That we find equivalent expressions of emotion in heterosexual sacrificial relationships 
and in homosocial and spiritual contexts provides useful context for approaching this 
material not only in working to interpret the relationship between (deceased) Rūs men and 
their ghilmān but also in considering translational choices and how emotionality might be 
obscured in these sources.

Emotional Reluctances

In discussing ḥubb above, I alluded to issues in translation that have affected engagements 
with the emotionality of these anecdotes. Whereas al-Hamadānī has not been translated 
or heavily discussed since he was translated into English in 1959,75 Miskawayh is a more 
prominent source in translation, featuring among the Arabic sources that supplement Ibn 
Faḍlān’s Risāla in Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone’s Penguin Classics translation.76 In this 
translation, Miskawayh’s emotional construction is rendered in a downplayed manner: “and 
his slave, if he happened to be fond of him.”77 Though not an unfitting reflection of the level 
of emotion conveyed by ḥubb, this muted relational expression might be seen as paralleling 
modern translational choices that downplay the unfreedom inherent in terms such as jāriya 
and ghulām. That such minimizing occurs in the context of a sacrificial relationship that 

74.  Tonicha M. Upham, “‘Here I Am, in This Far-off Land Where We Are Now’: Encountering and Observing 
Rūs Women in Ibn Faḍlān’s Risala,” in Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements in the 
Middle Ages, ed. Basil Arnould Price, Jane Bonsall, and Meagan Khoury, 115–38 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 
2023), 131–35.

75.  Samarrai, “Arabic Sources on the Norse.”
76.  For discussion of this, see Rachel Schine, “Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom,” Al-ʿUṣūr 

al-Wusṭā 30 (2022): 339–46.
77.  Ibn Faḍlān, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, 151.



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might imply homosexuality—albeit within the framework of a power imbalance and lack of 
consent—further problematizes the elusive emotionality of Lunde and Stone’s translation.

Broadening the net for translations of emotion in order to encompass Ibn Rusta’s beloved 
Rūs women, Lunde and Stone employ a somewhat different emotional sidestep: they present 
the female sacrificial victims of Ibn Rusta’s geographical writing, who are loved in almost 
exactly the same manner as Miskawayh and al-Hamadānī’s ghilmān, as “favorite.”78 This 
translational choice, too, forgoes the potential of emotional analysis, but “favorite” arguably 
conveys a stronger attachment than does “fondness” in the case of Miskawayh’s sacrificed 
ghilmān. Favorite, moreover, implies a plethora of women not explicitly communicated by 
the text. Perhaps serving as a means of rendering ideas of sexual excess among the Rūs, this 
translation looks past emotional connection and possibility.

To move beyond the optics of translating these two similar constructions as fondness 
in what may be an indication of homoerotic feeling in Miskawayh and as a hint at the 
sexual enjoyment of multiple women in Ibn Rusta, the simple exclusion of basic emotional 
terminology from these accounts when making them accessible for those relying on 
translations has significant implications for our ability to access, contend with, and mediate 
emotional ideas in these geographical and historical works. Much focus rests on Ibn 
Faḍlān as an observer who comes across as either shocked and unnerved or as neutral and 
impassive, but what if we were to incorporate the emotions reported across the works of 
others writing on the Rūs? If we read more deliberately for these allowances of Rūs love 
and for the idea that love might be reason enough to bring about the death of one’s slave 
or woman (Ibn Rusta’s language does not explicitly specify freedom or unfreedom), how 
does our view of the relationship between geographer or chronicler and unwitting subject 
change? Do the comparatively bland (relative to Ibn Faḍlān’s eyewitness awe) statements 
of armchair geographers and historians take on additional vibrance when understood to 
describe, understatedly and intertextually, love in the far north?

Emotional Possibilities

Emotion is arguably central to reading Arabic writings on the Rūs. We saw at the beginning 
of this article that in the seventh/thirteenth century, Ibn Faḍlān’s eyewitness recordings 
induced wonder and astonishment in Yāqūt, alongside a healthy dose of disbelief. In the 
nineteenth century, as European orientalists and Scandinavian antiquarians began to work 
with and translate this material, prudish discomfort led to the expurgation of sexually 
explicit aspects of the Risāla, drastically reducing the visibility of women in this material.79 
Since then, we have moved from voyeuristic pleasure in the “orgy” depicted in the Risāla 
toward reactions of horror and disgust. As Neil Price writes with reference to the Viking 
world as a whole: 

78.  Ibn Rusta, Ibn Rusta’s Kitāb al-Aʿlāq al-Nafīsa, 147; Ibn Faḍlān, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, 127.
79.  Hilda Lockhart Lorimer, “A Scandinavian Cremation-Ceremony,” trans. Charis Waddy, Antiquity 8, no. 1 

(1934): 58–62, at 58; Upham, “Rūs Gender in Islamicate Sources,” 132–41.



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I always find it puzzling how anyone could possibly find the Vikings “heroic.” . . . We 
need only look again at Ibn Fadlan and consider what one really thinks of the lethal 
slavers and rapists he met, with their blood-drenched rituals on the Volga; and these 
seem to have been only merchants, not primarily a fighting group at all. Vikings of this 
kind were sometimes heroes in their own minds, and perhaps occasionally in the eyes 
of people they tried hard to impress—but not in mine.80

Perhaps this personal response is something that can and should be utilized. As scholars 
begin to move toward a sharper awareness of the gravity of what is being rendered (slavery, 
sexual assault, and violent killings), a possibility emerges for the harnessing of our own 
emotional reactions in reading and rereading these geographical texts on the north. A 
greater acknowledgment of our own emotional responses to these texts might lead to a 
greater sensitivity to and awareness of the place of emotion in the texts themselves and in 
the writing of these geographers.

If we read the Arabic sources on the Rūs emotionally—that is, if we account for our own 
emotions as contemporary readers while simultaneously looking for the encroachment of 
emotional readings and characterizations of the Rūs in the texts themselves—we might 
encounter an even richer body of sources and find ourselves on the receiving end of these 
geographical performances, experiencing a holistic as well as analytical relationship with 
this material. Certainly, these readings can highlight specific experiences in closer detail.

The epigraph to this article presented a challenge from James Montgomery as to what we 
can know, in emotional terms, about the Arabo-Islamic past and how we might interpret, 
schematize, and frame various ideas on emotion.81 The challenge applies doubly when 
we consider that the forms of love discussed here are the renderings of geographers 
and chroniclers writing about a people who, Ibn Faḍlān notwithstanding, they had not 
themselves directly encountered. These geographical understandings of emotion among 
the Rūs contribute to a generalized understanding of the Rūs as a people, but the emotions 
reach us via a complicated framework of dissemination. They pass from the Rūs, perhaps via 
one or more intermediary informants, to geographer or chronicler, to scribe, disseminator, 
or compiler, to modern scholar, often through at least one translator in the process. 
Although this process complicates what we can definitively know to be true about the Rūs 
themselves—that is, our ability to discern exactly how a Rūs man might have felt toward the 
boys he trafficked, and how this feeling influenced postmortem decisions on the sacrifice 
of ghilmān—an emotional reading brings with it the potential for a greater awareness 
of how these representations of the Rūs might be understood not only by ourselves as 
researchers but by the readers and audiences for whom they have been performed from 
the fourth/tenth century onward, perhaps leading to a shift in our approach to this source 
material. This manner of reading prioritizes the perception of emotions in the material, 
establishing this largely geographical corpus of sources as one that can be mined for the 
study of emotion.

80.  Neil Price, The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 
2019), 344.

81.  Montgomery, “Convention as Cognition,” 171.



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This research arose out of curiosity as to how “fond,” precisely, a dead Rūs man must 
have been of his ghulām in order to bring about the latter’s sacrifice. That emotion, 
clarified via discussion of ḥubb, remains subjective; there is no formula outlining precisely 
how geographers understood Rūs feelings about those they enslaved, or what forms of 
relationship these feelings might have entailed. However, emotional ideas offer a helpful 
pathway to reconsider this underdiscussed element of funerary sacrifice. Although 
infrequently addressed within the Arabic geographical and chronicle sources that discuss 
the Rūs, the emotion attached to the concept of male funerary sacrifice imbues this practice 
with a weight and a significance that facilitate a more thorough consideration of the 
sacrifice of men. By highlighting a different perspective on a fate otherwise considered the 
domain of women in writings on the Rūs, then, the study of emotion can broaden our view 
of gendered experiences and, in particular, the sacrificial treatment of enslaved men.

Acknowledgements

The initial research from which this article was developed was variously supported, 
supervised, discussed, and assessed by Agnes Arnórsdóttir, Richard Cole, Thorir Jonsson 
Hraundal, Nizar Hermes, Pernilla Myrne, and Pernille Hermann. I also received early support 
and feedback from the PhD community at the Department of History and Classical Studies, 
Aarhus University. My thanks go to Zayde Antrim and Alison Vacca for their patience and 
support as editors, and to the anonymous reviewers for their generous and generative 
comments.

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