The Assassins: A Redical Sect in Islam Read online

  Hammer’s book exercised considerable influence, and for about a century and a half was the main source of the popular Western image of the Assassins. Meanwhile scholarly research was progressing, especially in France, where much work was done in discovering, editing, translating and exploiting Arabic and Persian texts relating to the history of the Ismailis in Syria and Persia. Among the most important were the works of two Persian historians of the Mongol period, Juvayni and Rashid al-Din; both of them had access to Ismaili writings from Alamut, and, by using them, were able to provide the first connected account of the Ismaili principality in Northern Persia.

  An important step forward was made possible by the appearance of material of a new kind. The use of Muslim sources had added much to the knowledge derived from mediaeval European works – but even these were mainly Sunni; though far better informed than the Western chroniclers and travellers, they were if anything even more hostile to the doctrines and purposes of the Ismailis. Now, for the first time, information came to light which reflected directly the point of view of the Ismailis themselves. Already in the eighteenth century travellers had noted that there were still Ismailis in some villages in Central Syria. In 1810 Rousseau, the French consul-general in Aleppo, stimulated by Silvestre de Sacy, published a description of the Ismailis in Syria in his own day, with geographical, historical, and religious data.14 The sources are not given, but appear to be local and oral. Silvestre de Sacy himself provided some additional explanatory notes. Rousseau was the first European to draw on such local informants, bringing to Europe for the first time some scraps of information from the Ismailis themselves. In 1812 he published extracts from an Ismaili book obtained in Masyaf, one of the main Ismaili centres in Syria. Though it contains little historical information, it throws some light on the religious doctrines of the sect. Other texts from Syria also found their way to Paris, where some of them were later published. During the nineteenth century a number of European and American travellers visited the Ismaili villages in Syria, and reported briefly on the ruins and their inhabitants.

  Less information was available from Persia, where the remains of the great castle of Alamut still stand. In 1833, in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, a British officer called Colonel W. Monteith described a journey in which he had got as far as the entrance to the Alamut valley but did not actually reach or identify the castle. This was achieved by a brother officer, Lieutenant-Colonel [Sir] Justin Sheil, whose account appeared in the same journal in 1838. A third British officer, named Stewart, visited the castle a few years later, after which nearly a century passed before the exploration of Alamut was resumed.15

  But there were more than ruins to commemorate the past greatness of the Ismailis in Persia. In 1811, Consul Rousseau from Aleppo, in the course of a journey to Persia, enquired about Ismailis, and was surprised to learn that there were still many in the country who owed allegiance to an Imam of the line of Ismail. His name was Shah Khalilullah, and he resided in a village called Kehk, near Qumm, half-way between Tehran and Isfahan. ‘I may add,’says Rousseau, ‘that Shah Khalilullah is revered almost as a god by his followers, who attribute the gift of miracles to him, enrich him continually with what they bequeath, and often embellish him with the pompous title of Caliph. There are Ismailis as far away as India, and they can be seen regularly coming to Kehk from the banks of the Ganges and the Indus, to receive the blessings of their Imam, in return for the pious and magnificent offerings which they bring him.’16

  In 1825 an English traveller, J. B. Fraser, confirmed the survival of Ismailis in Persia, and their continued devotion to their chief, though they no longer practised murder at his behest: ‘even at this day the sheikh or head of the sect is most blindly revered by those who yet remain, though their zeal has lost the deep and terrific character which it once bore.’ There were followers of the sect in India too, who were ‘particularly devoted to their saint’. Their previous chief, Shah Khalilullah, had been murdered in Yazd some years earlier (in fact in 1817), by rebels against the governor of the city. ‘He was succeeded in his religious capacity by one of his sons, who meets with a similar respect from the sect.’17

  The next accession of information came from quite a different source. In December 1850, a somewhat unusual case of murder came before the criminal court in Bombay. Four men had been set upon and murdered, in broad daylight, as the result of a difference of opinion within the religious community to which they belonged. Nineteen men were tried, and four of them were sentenced to death and hanged. The victims and their attackers were both members of a local Muslim sect known as the Khojas – a community of some tens of thousands, mainly traders, in the Bombay Presidency and other parts of India.

  The incident arose from a dispute that had been going on for more than twenty years. It had begun in 1827, when a group of Khojas had refused to make the customary payments to the head of their sect, who resided in Persia. This was the son of Shah Khalilullah, who had succeeded his murdered father in 1817. In 1818 the Shah of Persia had appointed him governor of Mehellat and Qumm, and had given him the title of Aga Khan. It is by this title that he and his descendants are usually known.

  Confronted with this sudden refusal by a group of his followers in India to pay their religious dues, the Aga Khan sent a special envoy from Persia to Bombay, to bring them back into the fold. With the envoy went the Aga Khan’s grandmother, who ‘herself appears to have harangued the Bombay Khojas’ in an effort to regain their allegiance. Most of the Khojas remained faithful to their chief, but a small group persisted in their opposition, maintaining that they owed no obedience to the Aga Khan and denying that the Khojas were in any way connected with him. The resulting conflicts aroused strong feelings in the community and culminated in the murders of 1850.

  In the meantime the Aga Khan himself had left Persia, where he had led an unsuccessful rising against the Shah, and after a short stay in Afghanistan he had taken refuge in India. His services to the British in Afghanistan and Sind gave him some claim to British gratitude. After staying first in Sind and then in Calcutta, he finally settled in Bombay, where he established himself as effective head of the Khoja community. There were still, however, some dissidents who opposed him, and who sought to use the machinery of the law to defeat his claims. After some preliminary actions, in April 1866 a group of seceders filed information and a bill in the High Court of Bombay, asking for an injunction restraining the Aga Khan ‘from interfering in the management of the trust property and affairs of the Khoja community’.

  The case was tried by the Chief Justice, Sir Joseph Arnould. The hearing lasted for 25 days, and involved almost the whole of the Bombay bar. Both sides brought elaborately argued and extensively documented cases, and the enquiries of the court ranged far and deep, in history and genealogy, theology and law. Among numerous witnesses, the Aga Khan himself testified before the court, and adduced evidence of his descent. On 12 November 1866 Sir Joseph Arnould delivered judgement. The Khojas of Bombay, he found, were part of the larger Khoja community of India, whose religion was that of the Ismaili wing of the Shi‘a; they were ‘a sect of people whose ancestors were Hindu in origin; which was converted to and has throughout abided in the faith of the Shia Imamee Ismailis; which has always been and still is bound by ties of spiritual allegiance to the hereditary Imams of the Ismailis’. They had been converted some four hundred years previously by an Ismaili missionary from Persia, and had remained subject to the spiritual authority of the line of Ismaili Imams, the latest of whom was the Aga Khan. These Imams were descended from the Lords of Alamut, and, through them, claimed descent from the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt and, ultimately, from the Prophet Muhammad. Their followers, in mediaeval times, had become famous under the name of the Assassins.

  The Arnould judgement, supported by a wealth of historical evidence and argument, thus legally established the status of the Khojas as a community of Ismailis, of the Ismailis as heirs of the Assassins, and of the Aga Khan as spiritual
head of the Ismailis and heir of the Imams of Alamut. Detailed information about the community was provided for the first time in the Gaetteer of the Bombay Presidency in 1899.18

  The Arnould judgement had also drawn attention to the existence of Ismaili communities in other parts of the world, some of which did not in fact recognize the Aga Khan as their chief. These communities were usually small minorities in remote and isolated places, difficult of access in every sense, and secretive to the point of death about their beliefs and their writings. Some of these writings, in manuscript, nevertheless found their way into the hands of scholars. At first these all came from Syria – the first area of Western interest in the Ismailis, in modern as in mediaeval times. Others followed, from widely separated regions. In 1903 an Italian merchant called Caprotti brought a collection of some sixty Arabic manuscripts from San‘a, in the Yemen – the first of several batches which were deposited in the Ambrosiana library in Milan. On inspection, they were found to include several works on Ismaili doctrine, coming from among the Ismaili population still living in parts of Southern Arabia. Some of them contained passages written in secret cyphers.19 At the other end of Europe, Russian scholars, who had already received some Ismaili manuscripts from Syria, discovered that they had Ismailis within the frontiers of their own Empire, and in 1902 Count Alexis Bobrinskoy published an account of the organization and distribution of the Ismailis in Russian Central Asia. At about the same time a colonial official called A. Polovtsev acquired a copy of an Ismaili religious book, written in Persian; it was deposited in the Asiatic Museum of the Imperial Russian Academy of the Sciences. Another copy followed, and between 1914 and 1918 the Museum acquired a collection of Ismaili manuscripts, brought from Shughnan, on the upper Oxus river, by the orientalists I. I. Zarubin and A. A. Semyonov. With these, and other subsequently acquired manuscripts, Russian scholars were able to examine the religious literature and beliefs of the Ismailis of the Pamir and of the adjoining Afghan districts of Badakhshan.20

  Since then, the progress of Ismaili studies has been rapid and remarkable. Many more Ismaili texts have become available, especially from the rich libraries of the sect in the Indian subcontinent, and much detailed research has been produced by scholars in many lands, including some who are themselves Ismailis. In one respect the recovery of the lost literature of the sect has been somewhat disappointing – in history. The books that have come to light are concerned almost exclusively with religion and related matters; works of an historical nature are both few in number and poor in content – perhaps inevitably in a minority community which possessed neither the territorial nor the institutional focus about which alone the mediaeval historian could conceive and write history. Only the principality of Alamut seems to have had its chronicles – and even these are preserved by Sunni, not Ismaili historians. But Ismaili literature, though poor in historical content, is by no means lacking in historical value. Its contribution to the narrative history of events is small – something on the Assassins of Persia, rather less on their brothers in Syria. It has however contributed immeasurably to the better understanding of the religious background of the movement, and has made possible a new appreciation of the beliefs and purposes, the religious and historical significance of the Ismailis in Islam, and of the Assassins as a branch of the Ismailis. The resulting picture of the Assassins differs radically both from the lurid rumours and fantasies brought back from the East by mediaeval travellers, and from the hostile and distorted image extracted by nineteenth-century orientalists from the manuscript writings of orthodox Muslim theologians and historians, whose main concern was to refute and condemn, not to understand or explain. The Assassins no longer appear as a gang of drugged dupes led by scheming impostors, as a conspiracy of nihilistic terrorists, or as a syndicate of professional murderers. They are no less interesting for that.

  2

  The Ismailis

  The first crisis in Islam came at the death of the Prophet in 632. Muhammad had never claimed to be more than a mortal man-distinguished above others because he was God’s messenger and the bearer of God’s word, but himself neither divine nor immortal. He had, however, left no clear instructions on who was to succeed him as leader of the Islamic community and ruler of the nascent Islamic state, and the Muslims had only the meagre political experience of pre-Islamic Arabia to guide them. After some arguments and a moment of dangerous tension, they agreed to appoint Abu Bakr, one of the earliest and most respected converts, as khalīfa, deputy, of the Prophet – thus creating, almost incidentally, the great historical institution of the Caliphate.

  From the first days of the Caliphate there was a group of people who felt that Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, had a stronger claim to his succession than Abu Bakr or the Caliphs who followed him. In part no doubt their support for Ali was due to the conviction that his personal qualities made him the best man for the job – in part perhaps also to a legitimist belief in the rights of the house of the Prophet. This group came to be known as the Shī‘atu ‘Alī, the party of Ali, and then simply as the Shī‘a. In the course of time it gave rise to the most important religious conflict in Islam.

  At first, the Shi‘a was primarily a political faction – the supporters of a candidate for power, with no distinctive religious doctrines and no greater religious content than was inherent in the very nature of Islamic political authority. But soon important changes occurred both in the composition of its following and the nature of its teachings. To many Muslims it seemed that the Islamic community and state had taken a wrong turning; instead of the ideal society envisaged by the Prophet and his first, pious Companions, an Empire had come into being, ruled by a greedy and unscrupulous aristocracy; instead of justice and equality, there was inequality, privilege and domination. To many who saw events in this light, it seemed that a return to the kin of the Prophet might bring a restoration of the true, original message of Islam.

  In the year 656, after the murder by Muslim mutineers of the third Caliph Uthman, Ali finally became Caliph – but his reign was brief, and marred by dissension and civil war. When he in turn was murdered in 661, the Caliphate passed into the hands of his rival Mu‘awiya, whose family, the house of Umayya, retained it for nearly a century.

  The Shī‘a of Ali did not disappear with his death. Significant groups of Muslims continued to give their allegiance to the kin of the Prophet, in whom they saw the rightful leaders of the Muslim community. Increasingly, these claims, and the support which they evoked, acquired a religious, even a messianic character. The Muslim state, ideally conceived, is a religious polity, established and maintained under divine law. Its sovereignty derives from God; its sovereign, the Caliph, is entrusted with the duties of upholding Islam and of enabling Muslims to live the good Muslim life. In this society the distinction between secular and religious is unknown – in law, in jurisdiction, or in authority. Church and state are one and the same, with the Caliph as head. Where the basis of identity and cohesion in society, the bonds of loyalty and duty in the state, are all conceived and expressed in religious terms, the familiar Western distinction between religion and politics – between religious and political attitudes and activities – becomes irrelevant and unreal. Political dissatisfaction – itself perhaps socially determined – finds religious expression; religious dissent acquires political implications. When a group of Muslims offered more than purely local or personal opposition to the men in power – when they formulated a challenge to the existing order and formed an organization to change it, their challenge was a theology and their organization a sect. In the theocratically conceived Islamic order of the Caliphate, there was no other way for them to forge an instrument or formulate a doctrine going beyond their personal actions and their immediate aims.

  In the first century of Islamic expansion there were many tensions that gave rise to grievances, many grievances and aspirations that found expression in sectarian dissent and revolt. The spread of Islam by conversion brought into the Islamic
community large numbers of new believers, who carried with them, from their Christian, Jewish and Iranian backgrounds, religious concepts and attitudes unknown to the early Arab Muslims. These new converts, though Muslims, were not Arabs, still less aristocrats; the inferior social and economic status assigned to them by the dominant Arab aristocracy created a sense of injustice, and made them willing recruits to movements that questioned the legitimacy of the existing order. Nor were the Arab conquerors themselves immune to these discontents. Pious Arabs deplored the worldliness of the Caliphs and the ruling groups; nomadic Arabs resented the encroachments of authority – and many others, who suffered from the sharper economic and social differences that came with conquest and riches, began to share the griefs and hopes of the new converts. Many of these had traditions of political and religious legitimism – the Jewish and Christian belief in the sanctity and ultimate triumph of the royal house of David, through the anointed Messiah, the Zoroastrian expectation of a Saoshyans, a saviour who would arise at the end of time from the holy seed of Zoroaster. Once converted to Islam, they were readily attracted by the claims of the house of the Prophet, which seemed to offer an end to the inequities of the existing order and the fulfilment of the promise of Islam.

  In the transformation of the Shi‘a from a party to a sect, two events are of special significance, both of them arising from unsuccessful attempts by Shi‘ite claimants to overthrow the Umayyad Caliphate. The first, in the year 680, was led by Husayn, the son of Ali and his wife Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet. On the tenth day of the month of Muharram, at a place called Karbala in Iraq, Husayn, his family, and his followers encountered an Umayyad force and were ruthlessly put to death. Some seventy died in the massacre; only a sick boy, Ali ibn Husayn, who was left lying in a tent, survived. This dramatic martyrdom of the kin of the Prophet, and the wave of anguish and penitence that followed it, infused a new religious fervour in the Shi‘a, now inspired by the potent themes of suffering, passion and expiation.