Fiction
Elements of Ibn Fadlan's account are used in the novel Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton (adapted to film in The 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas as Ibn Fadlan), in which the Arab ambassador is taken even further north and is involved in adventures inspired by the Old English epic Beowulf.
A major Arabic TV series, The Roof of the World or Saqf al-Alam, (Arabic: سقف العالم), was produced in 2007 charting Ibn Fadlan's journey from a contemporary perspective. The 30 one-hour episodes tackle the relations between Islam and Europe at two moments: the time of Ibn Fadlan and the present. The motivation for the series was the 2005 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark.
Read more about this topic: Ahmad Ibn Fadlan
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“A fiction about soft or easy deaths ... is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)