The article is devoted to the political circumstances that influenced certain decisions regarding the first two editions of the travel report of the Arab traveler Ibn Faḍlān from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars (921–922). The now-famous text of the voyage account, known as the Mashhad manuscript, was discovered in 1923 by a Turkish orientalist of Bashkir origin, Ahmed Zeki Velidi Togan (1890–1970) and formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Vienna in 1935. Due to various problems, the German translation (in book form) was only published in print in 1939. The same year saw the publication of a Russian translation of the voyage description by a Soviet Arabist – Andrei P. Kovalevskiy (1895–1969). Both scholars conflicted with the USSR authorities: Togan had fought with the Soviet Army in 1920–1923, while Kovalevskiy was sentenced to five years in the gulag in 1938 on (as it later turned out) a wrongful charge of counterrevolutionary activity. These circumstances unexpectedly influenced the scholarly study of Ibn Faḍlān’s medieval work, incorporating it into the USSR’s domestic and foreign policy at the time.
The article is devoted to Aḥmad al-Kardūdī, a Moroccan official in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his state and diplomatic activities, with particular emphasis on the account he wrote for Sultan Al-Ḥasan I (ruled 1873–1894) from the 1885 expedition to Spain, which had been published for the first time in 1963 under the title At-Tuḥfa as-saniyya li-al-Ḥaḍra al- Ḥasaniyya bi-al-Mamlaka al-Iṣbanyūliyya [Shining Gift for His Majesty Al- Ḥasan about the Kingdom of Spain]. This report often is included into Arab travel literature. It is not only a report on the tasks that the ruler set before the diplomatic mission of which Al-Kardūdī was a member, but also an image of the social and political consciousness of Moroccan elites associated with power of the West in times of active attempt at reforms undertaken by the ruler. Unfortunately, these attempts had little effect. The delegation was received in audience by Regent Maria Krystyna, also visited the capital of Spain and the most important Andalusian cities, but the author himself, probably on the orders of the Sultan, was also very interested in the military achievements of the Spaniards. The Gift, written in rhyming and rhythmic prose, can be treated as a literary work (although the author probably did not intend to), and simultaneously an example of an original, official, court document in the shape of a diplomatic report addressed to the ruler.
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