Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Read online

  Because of the divine perfection of the Koran, it cannot and indeed may not be translated from the original Arabic into any other language. Although for many centuries the vast majority of Muslims have been non-Arabs with little or no knowledge of Arabic, there are no authorized translations of the Koran into Persian, Turkish, Urdu or other Islamic languages, comparable with the Latin Vulgate or the King James Bible in English. Translation is expressly forbidden. There are of course versions in languages other than Arabic, which one might describe as translations, but they are presented as interpretations and commentaries, never as translations, and none of them has any authoritative status.

  By collecting and presenting early variants of the oldest surviving Koranic texts, Professor Jeffery was merely trying to do for Muslim scriptures what rabbis and priests had long been doing for the Bible—to provide a more accurate and intelligible text. In Muslim eyes he was impugning the divinity and eternity of their sacred scripture.

  A similar question arose from time to time when Western scholars, including some of the notorious Orientalists, pointed out that some of the biblical stories that reappear in the Koran were inaccurately cited, and assumed that the Prophet or his informants got it wrong. To this Muslims responded with what was, in their terms, well-grounded indignation. God does not get it wrong. His Prophet is not “misinformed.” If there are differences between biblical stories in the Bible and biblical stories in the Koran, it is because the Christians and the Jews proved unworthy custodians of the scriptures that had been given to them, and either lost or corrupted them.

  To Palestine, Syria and Turkey

  After the three months in Egypt, I spent a couple of weeks in what was then the British-mandated territory of Palestine. My parents came to join me in Egypt and we went together on our first visit to the Holy Land, where we spent about two weeks. We were able to go to Safed and Haifa but to our disappointment we were advised not to go to Jerusalem as this was deemed dangerous. My parents and I stayed in Tel Aviv at the Hotel Samuel, where I would return much later. From there I went on a tour of Syria and Lebanon. By that time I was already working on my thesis on the Isma‘ilis and thought it might be useful to visit the Isma‘ili villages in Syria. These villages were in the central part of the country, both east and west of the city of Hama. In Crusader times, they had been the bases of the dreaded Assassins from which they launched their attacks on chiefly Muslim but occasionally Crusader targets. The power of the Assassins ended in the thirteenth century, but some Isma‘ili communities remain to the present day. It was these Isma‘ili villages to which I went in the hope of being able to find additional material for use in my doctoral dissertation.

  My first book, The Origins of Isma‘ilism, had been published by the firm of Heffer in Cambridge in 1940. Looking back, I am not very proud of it. A Ph.D. thesis is normally written with an eye on the board of examiners, without much consideration of a wider readership. Even the best theses usually need editing and expansion before they are ready for publication in book form.

  But this was a different situation. War had broken out and I was about to leave the academic life for war service with an uncertain, even problematic, outcome. There was no way that I could undertake the necessary revision and editing of my thesis to prepare it for publication. The University of London publication fund, no doubt in recognition of this situation, offered me a grant to facilitate the publication of the thesis, and with this in hand, it was not difficult to find a publisher. This subsidized publication was an edition of five hundred copies. Unsurprisingly, in time of war, its immediate impact was minimal, and it was over ten years before this five-hundred-copy edition ran out of print. One thing however did give me some pleasure. The thesis was well received in the Arab world by Arab scholars and—to my utter astonishment—an Arabic translation was published in Iraq.

  After the war I learned that Jean Sauvaget, one of the great masters of my subject, had written some very kind words about The Origins. The fact that he was writing in wartime, in German-occupied France, about a book published in England, may have made him more indulgent than he might otherwise have been.

  By the time I returned to academic life at the end of 1945, my interests had turned to other, quite different subjects, and I was content to leave the origins of Isma‘ilism where they were. My return to Isma‘ili studies came in the early 1950s when I was approached by Professor John L. LaMonte, a distinguished American medievalist, who asked me to contribute a chapter on the Assassins to a multivolume syndicated history of the Crusades which he and some colleagues were planning to edit and publish. I readily accepted and produced a chapter entitled “The Isma‘ilites and the Assassins” which appeared in Volume I of A History of the Crusades, published in Philadelphia in 1955. After my chapter was published I did some short studies on various aspects of the topic, e.g., the Arabic and other sources for the history of the Syrian Assassins, the curious tale of the relations between Saladin and the Assassins, and an edition and translation of a short, unpublished Arabic biography of one of the Assassin leaders.

  All these were, of course, concerned with the Assassins in Syria. But their history could not be fully understood in isolation from the headquarters of the Assassin order in Iran. I therefore decided to devote a book to the Assassins, dealing with their place in European folklore and scholarship, their origins in the Middle East, their activities in both Iran and Syria, including their dealings with the Crusaders, and a concluding chapter which I called “Means and Ends,” dealing with the terrorist tactics of the Assassins and the revolutionary strategy of their leadership. The book was published in London in 1967, years before a wave of Muslim terrorists gave the book a new relevance, even urgency.

  The subsequent bibliographical history of this book is curious. The edition in English was reprinted several times and a French translation appeared in Paris in 1982. Three independent translations into Arabic were made, only one of them authorized. A Persian translation was published twice, both times without authorization, in Tehran, once under the monarchy and again under the republic, with the addition of two other studies on related topics. Translations in Japanese, Spanish, Turkish, Italian and German followed in rapid succession.

  The changing nature of interest in the topic is best indicated by the titles used by the translators. The original English text was simply entitled The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam. In the French edition, the first foreign version, this became The Assassins, Terrorism and Politics in Medieval Islam; in Italian, The Assassins: A Radical Islamic Sect, the First Terrorists in History; in German, The Assassins; On the Tradition of Religious Murder in Radical Islam.

  The purpose of all this was clear—to suggest a parallel between the movements and actions described in this book and those that are convulsing the Middle East and threatening much of the world at the present time.

  The story of the Assassins, who appeared in Iran and spread to the Syrian and Lebanese mountains and flourished from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, can be instructive. They do not represent the mainstream Islamic tradition or consensus; they were a heresy within a heresy—an extremist offshoot of the Shi‘a movement, itself a deviation from mainstream Sunni Islam. Their practices and beliefs were rejected by mainstream Sunni and Shi‘a alike, and were eventually abandoned even by that small minority which retained their distinctive beliefs. There is a misapprehension, common in the West since medieval times, that the anger and weapons of the Assassins were directed against the Crusaders. This is not true. There were relatively few Crusaders among their victims, and even these were usually marked down as the result of some internal Muslim calculation. The vast majority of their victims were Muslims, because their attack was directed not against the outsider, but against the dominant elites and dominant ideas of Islam.

  The chosen victims of the medieval Assassins were the rulers of Islam, monarchs, ministers, generals, and major religious functionaries. The weapon used was almost always the same, the dagger
, wielded by the appointed Assassin in person. It is noteworthy that they made virtually no use of such safer weapons as were available to them at the time—the bow, the crossbow, or poison. They chose the most difficult and inaccessible targets and the most dangerous mode of attack. The Assassin himself, having struck down his assigned victim, made no attempt to escape, nor was any made to rescue him. On the contrary, to have survived a mission was seen as a disgrace. In this respect, the Assassins were indeed the forerunners of the suicide bombers of today. Both are in marked contrast to the combination of indiscriminate murder by remote control and blackmail by kidnapping that have become the marks of modern terrorist practice.

  Islam, like Christianity or Judaism, is an ethical religion, and murder and blackmail have no place in its beliefs or practices. Nevertheless, then as now, there are groups who practice murder in the name of their religion, and a study of this medieval sect of Assassins may therefore serve a useful purpose—not as a guide to Islamic attitudes on assassination, but as an example of how certain groups gave a radical and violent turn to the basic Islamic association between religion and politics, and tried to use it for the accomplishment of their own purposes. Of all the lessons to be learnt from the Assassins, perhaps the most important is their final and total failure.

  The resemblances between the medieval Assassins and their modern counterparts are indeed striking—the Syrian-Iranian connection, the calculated use of terror, the total dedication of the Assassin emissary to the point of self-immolation in the service of his cause and in the expectation of recompense in an eternity of bliss. But there are also significant differences, notably that the medieval Assassins limited their attacks to the targeted victim and always took care not to harm innocent bystanders. Those Assassins made no attempt to escape as it was considered an honor to do the deed and be caught. That tradition, alas, has disappeared.

  I was disappointed in what I could find on the Assassins, but in other respects the visit to Syria was interesting and indeed useful, augmenting my knowledge both of Arabic as a spoken language and of the way of life in the Syrian countryside.

  My only local contact was the head of a Danish archaeological mission, an acquaintance of my guru, Professor Gibb. I made myself known to him and he was helpful in various ways, one in particular. Syria, at that time, was under French mandate, and the traditional Anglo-French rivalry and mutual suspicion were still alive and well in the Levant. It seems that the local French political officer heard of my visit, but did not believe that a dissertation on the medieval Isma‘ilis was the reason for my presence. He suspected that I was a British secret agent engaged in nefarious anti-French activities. The fact that my travel was funded by the Royal Asiatic Society only served to confirm his suspicions. Fortunately, the head of the Danish archaeological mission was able to persuade him of my academic and scholarly bona fides. I managed to complete my stay there unmolested.

  During that time I went to visit the famous Crac des Chevaliers, a wonderful Crusader castle on a hill in the north of Syria. I was provided with a guide from the local village. At one point I needed to relieve myself, and asked my guide to direct me to the nearest toilet. He replied in bewilderment that they had no such thing. “Where do you go to relieve yourselves?” I asked. He replied by waving a hand over the fields. I was visibly unhappy with this and then he had an inspiration. He pointed to the castle and said, “The people who built this place were also ‘Franks’ and probably they built a WC. Let’s go and look.” (Franks was the general term for Europeans.) Indeed, he was right. The Crusaders had provided themselves with this basic amenity and I was most grateful that they had. (Or perhaps I should say, relieved that they had.)

  The very first time I set foot in Turkey, I came from Syria where I had been working on my thesis, and not, like most Western visitors, from the West. My academic training had been as a historian and an Orientalist, specializing in classical Islamic civilization. The fact that my approach was from the past and from the south, instead of the present and the West, gave me a different—and I would claim a better—understanding of the country, its culture, and its problems. Most judgments and evaluations are based on comparison and are inevitably shaped by the elements compared. Mine were markedly different from the usual.

  My First Job

  By 1938 I had been a postgraduate student for nearly two years and finally settled down to work seriously on my dissertation. At the same time I was studying, intermittently, for my law exams, in order to qualify for a “real profession.”

  In that year two things happened at about the same time to change the course of my life. First, in my legal studies the next subject was the law of real property and conveyancing, which, as anyone who has studied law knows, is monumentally tedious and boring. Second, the University of London offered me a position as an assistant lecturer, the lowest form of human life in English universities. Confronted with this choice I did not hesitate for one moment. By then I realized that I would never be a lawyer. I had enough law to help me understand a legal civilization, but not enough to turn me into a lawyer.

  In the English universities at that time the procedure for a Ph.D. examination was very different from the American system. In American universities the really important matter is getting your thesis approved by your supervisor; the supervisor recommends that it be submitted to a board of examiners and the rest is ceremonial. In British universities this was not the case. A Ph.D. thesis had to be submitted to a board of three examiners consisting of the supervisor, another professor from the same university and a professor from a different university. The board of examiners had three options—accept the thesis, in which case the candidate was awarded a Ph.D.; reject the thesis, in which case the candidate went away empty-handed; or, they could do what was known as “referring the thesis,” which meant “Go away, rewrite this, that and the other thing, resubmit it, and then, if we like it, we’ll give you a Ph.D.”

  I was appointed assistant lecturer in the history of the Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London (I think Gibb arranged that) at the handsome salary of 250 pounds a year. My appointment was in the department of history. The head of the department at that time was a specialist in Indian history, Professor Dodwell; he welcomed me to the department for its first appointment in Middle Eastern history. When I went to see him to make myself known, he was looking at my file and he said, “I see you haven’t yet finished your Ph.D.” I said that I hoped to finish it during the coming months. So Professor Dodwell, my boss, said, “Well, in that case you won’t want to be bothered with too much teaching in your first year. Do you think you could manage to do one tutorial course?” I replied affirmatively and marveled at my good fortune. How extraordinary!

  The first course I taught was therefore a tutorial on the history of the Islamic Near and Middle East. It was taken by four students: one Egyptian, one Palestinian Arab, one Iraqi, and one Iranian—just the four. My father was mystified by this. “You are teaching Middle Eastern history?” “Yes.” In a puzzled voice he continued, “To whom?” So I described my first class to him and he said, “I don’t understand. Why on earth should the University of London pay you a salary to teach Arab history to Arabs?”

  There was a further question: why would Arabs want to come to England to study their own history? This was a question that would come up again sometime later.

  2.

  The War Years

  When in the spring of 1939 the Nazis took over the remaining part of Czechoslovakia, proving that the Munich policy had failed and that war was inevitable, various institutions and individuals began to make preparations for war. The Royal Institute of International Affairs, usually known by the name of the building it occupies, Chatham House, began a series of intensive training programs for its younger members, in which I participated. After war broke out, some of us were sent to the Foreign Office to make ourselves useful as aides and to learn something about the realities of inter
national relations. We were there for about a month, until the opening of the academic year in October. We then went back to our normal pursuits, though no longer in a very normal form.

  Much to my surprise I was put down as an expert on Turkey. At that time I had spent altogether about two and a half weeks in Turkey, a few days in Ankara and the rest in Istanbul. That was my only direct knowledge of the country. I had however some knowledge of Turkish, and had of course spent a lot of time studying Turkish history, though not much of it devoted to the recent past.

  I have just one vivid recollection of my month-long apprenticeship in the Foreign Office. One day the official to whom I was attached told me that he had an appointment with the Turkish ambassador and asked if I would like to come with him. I was delighted. This was my introduction to this level of international relations. To make it still better, the Turkish ambassador in London at that time was Tevfik Rüştü Aras, until recently the minister of foreign affairs and a close associate of Kemal Atatürk. The conversation, in which of course I was a listener not a participant, took place, rather to my surprise, in French. The Turkish ambassador to England and former minister of foreign affairs could not speak English; the Foreign Office expert who was sent to talk to him could not speak Turkish, and French was their only shared language. At that time, although French was still generally accepted as the international language of diplomacy, it was already on the way out. I cannot imagine such a conversation taking place in French now that English has become the lingua franca.

  The subject of their conversation was of course the war which had just begun, and more particularly the role of Turkey, which was in the process of negotiating a treaty of alliance with Great Britain and France. A joint Anglo-Turkish declaration had already been issued on May 12, 1939, which paved the way for the formal Anglo-Franco-Turkish Treaty of Alliance signed in October. But the outbreak of war on September 1 had significantly changed the situation. The ambassador made two points. “We Turks,” he said, “have a strong sense of history. We know that a partition of Poland is a threat to Turkey. But . . .” and he went on to explain why Turkey was not about to declare war on the Axis as expected in light of the Alliance with England and France. “It is not our policy,” he said, “to undertake commitments for the fulfillment of which we would be dependent on the help of others.” Later they invoked the second protocol to the treaty, stating, “The obligations undertaken by Turkey . . . cannot compel that country to take action having as its effect, or involving as its consequence, entry into armed conflict with the U.S.S.R.”