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:
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“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)