The Assassins: A Redical Sect in Islam

by Bernard Lewis

  Even in Aleppo, despite the debacle of 1113, the Assassins were able to retain some foothold. In 1119 their enemy Ibn Badi‘ was expelled from the city, and fled to Mardin; the Assassins were waiting for him at the Euphrates crossing, and killed him together with his two sons. In the following year they demanded a castle from the ruler who, unwilling to cede it and afraid to refuse, resorted to the subterfuge of having it hastily demolished and then pretending to have ordered this just previously. The officer who conducted the demolition was assassinated a few years later. The end of Ismaili influence in Aleppo came in 1124, when the new ruler of the city arrested the local agent of the chief da‘i and expelled his followers, who sold their property and departed.

  It was a local agent, not the chief da‘i himself, who by this time headed the Ismailis in Aleppo. After the execution of Abu Tahir, his successor, Bahram, transferred the main activities of the sect to the South, and was soon playing an active part in the affairs of Damascus. Like his predecessors, Bahram was a Persian, the nephew of al-Asadabadi, who had been executed in Baghdad in 1101. For a while ‘he lived in extreme concealment and secrecy, and continually disguised himself, so that he moved from city to city and castle to castle without anyone being aware of his identity’.3 He almost certainly had a hand in the murder of Bursuqi, the governor of Mosul, in the cathedral mosque of that city on 26 November 1126. Some at least of the eight assassins who, disguised as ascetics, fell upon him and stabbed him were Syrians. The Aleppine historian Kamal al-Din Ibn al-Adim tells a curious story. ‘All those who attacked him were killed except for one youth, who came from Kafr Nasih, in the district of Azaz [north of Aleppo] and escaped unhurt. He had an aged mother, and when she heard that Bursuqi was killed and that those who attacked him were killed, knowing that her son was one of them, she rejoiced, and anointed her eyelids with kohl, and was full of joy; then after a few days her son returned unharmed, and she was grieved, and tore her hair and blackened her face.’4

  From the same year, 1126, come the first definite reports of co-operation between the Assassins and the Turkish ruler of Damascus, Tughtigin. In January, according to the Damascene chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi, Ismaili bands from Horns and elsewhere, ‘noted for courage and gallantry’, joined the troops of Tughtigin in an unsuccessful attack on the Crusaders. Towards the end of the year Bahram appeared openly in Damascus, with a letter of recommendation from Il-Ghazi, the new ruler of Aleppo. He was well received in Damascus, and with official protection soon acquired a position of power. His first demand, in accordance with the accepted strategy of the sect, was for a castle; Tughtigin ceded him the fortress of Banyas, on the border with the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. But that was not all. Even in Damascus itself the Assassins were given a building, variously described as a ‘palace’ and a ‘mission-house’, which served them as headquarters. The Damascus chronicler puts the main blame for those events on the vizier al-Mazdagani, who, though not himself an Ismaili, was a willing accomplice in their plans and the evil influence behind the throne. Tughtigin, according to this view, disapproved of the Assassins, but tolerated them for tactical reasons, until the time came to strike a decisive blow against them. Other historians, while recognizing the role of the vizier, place the blame squarely on the ruler, and ascribe his action in large measure to the influence of Il-Ghazi, with whom Bahram had established friendly relations while still in Aleppo.

  In Banyas, Bahram rebuilt and fortified the castle, and embarked on a course of military and propagandist action in the surrounding country. In all directions,’ says Ibn al-Qalanisi, ‘he dispatched his missionaries, who enticed a great multitude of the ignorant folk of the provinces and foolish peasantry from the villages and the rabble and scum. . . .’5 From Banyas, Bahram and his followers raided extensively, and may have captured some other places. But they soon came to grief. The Wadi al-Taym, in the region of Hasbayya, was inhabited by a mixed population of Druzes, Nusayris, and other heretics, who seemed to offer a favourable terrain for Assassin expansion. Baraq ibn Jandal, one of the chiefs of the area, was captured and put to death by treachery, and shortly afterwards Bahram and his forces set out to occupy the Wadi. There they encountered vigorous resistance from Dahhak ibn Jandal, the dead man’s brother and sworn avenger. In a sharp engagement the Assassins were defeated and Bahram himself was killed.

  Bahram was succeeded in the command of Banyas by another Persian, Isma‘il, who carried on his policies and activities. The vizier al-Mazdagani continued his support. But soon the end came. The death of Tughtigin in 1128 was followed by an anti-Ismaili reaction similar to that which had followed the death of Ridwan in Aleppo. Here too the initiative came from the prefect of the city, Mufarrij ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Sufi, a zealous opponent of the sectaries and an enemy of the vizier. Spurred on by the prefect, as well as by the military governor Yusuf ibn Firuz, Buri, the son and heir of Tughtigin, prepared the blow. On Wednesday, 4 September 1129, he struck. The vizier was murdered by his orders at the levée, and his head cut off and publicly exposed. As the news spread, the town militia and the mob turned on the Assassins, killing and pillaging. ‘By the next morning the quarters and streets of the city were cleared of the Batinites [= Ismailis] and the dogs were yelping and quarrelling over their limbs and corpses.’6 The number of Assassins killed in this outbreak is put at 6,000 by one chronicler, 10,000 by another and 20,000 by a third. In Banyas, Isma‘il, realizing that his position was untenable, surrendered the fortress to the Franks and fled to the Frankish territories. He died at the beginning of 1130. The oft-repeated story of a plot by the vizier and the Assassins to surrender Damascus to the Franks rests on a single not very reliable source, and may be dismissed as an invention of hostile gossip.

  Buri and his coadjutors took elaborate precautions to protect themselves against the vengeance of the Assassins, wearing armour and surrounding themselves with heavily armed guards; but without avail. The Syrian mission seems to have been temporarily disorganized, and it was from the centre of the sect in Alamutthat the blow was struck. On 7 May 1131, two Persians, who, disguised as Turkish soldiers, had entered the service of Buri, struck him down. They are named in the roll of honour of Alamut.7 The assassins were at once hacked to pieces by the guards, but Buri himself died of his wounds in the following year. Despite this successful coup the Assassins never recovered their position in Damascus, and indeed, in so rigidly orthodox a city, can have had but little hope of doing so.

  During this period the Assassins were fighting another enemy besides the Turks. In their eyes, the Fatimid Caliph who still reigned in Cairo was a usurper; it was a sacred duty to oust him and establish the Imamate of the line of Nizar. During the first half of the twelfth century more than one pro-Nizari revolt broke out and was suppressed in Egypt, and the government in Cairo devoted much attention to countering Nizari propaganda among their subjects. The caliph al-Amir issued a special rescript defending the claims of his own line to the succession and refuting the Nizari case. In an interesting appendix to this document the story is told how, when the Fatimid emissary read it to the Assassins of Damascus, it caused an uproar and so impressed one of them that he forwarded it to his chief, who added a refutation in the blank space at the end. The Nizari read this refutation to a meeting of Fatimid supporters in Damascus. The Cairo emissary asked the caliph’s aid in answering it, and received a further statement of the Musta‘lian arguments. These events may be connected with the murder by an Assassin in Damascus in 1120 of a man alleged to have been spying on the Assassins for the Fatimid government.

  The Assassins also used stronger and more characteristic arguments against their Fatimid rivals. In 1121 al-Afdal, the Commander of the Armies in Egypt, and the man primarily responsible for the dispossession of Nizar, was murdered by three Assassins from Aleppo; in 1130 the Caliph al-Amir himself was struck down by ten Assassins in Cairo. His hatred of the Nizaris was well-known, and it is related that after the death of Bahram, the latter’s head, hands, and ring were taken by a native of
the Wadi al-Taym to Cairo, where the bearer received rewards and a robe of honour.

  Little is known of Assassin relations with the Franks in this period. Stories in later Muslim sources of Ismaili collaboration with the enemy are probably a reflection of the mentality of a later age, when the holy war for Islam filled the minds of most Near Eastern Muslims. At this time, the most that can be said is that the Assassins shared the general indifference of Muslim Syria to religious divisions. No Frankish victims to the daggers of the fida‘is are known, but on at least two occasions Assassin forces came into conflict with the crusading armies. On the other hand, Assassin refugees from both Aleppo and Banyas sought refuge in Frankish lands. The surrender of Banyas to Frankish rather than Muslim rulers, when it had to be abandoned, was in all probability merely a matter of geography.

  The next twenty years are taken up with the third, and successful, attempt of the Assassins to secure fortress-bases in Syria, this time in the Jabal Bahra’, just to the south-west of the scene of their first endeavour in the Jabal al-Summaq. Their establishment followed an unsuccessful attempt by the Franks to win control of the area. In 1132-33 the Muslim lord of al-Kahf sold the mountain fortress of Qadmus, recovered from the Franks in the previous year, to the Assassins. A few years later his son ceded them al-Kahf itself in the course of a struggle with his cousins for the succession. In 1136-7 the Frankish garrison in Khariba was driven out by a group of Assassins, who succeeded in regaining control after being temporarily dislodged by the governor of Hama. Masyaf, the most important of the Assassin strongholds, was captured in 1140-1 from a governor appointed by the Banu Munqidh, who had purchased the castle in 1127-8. The other Assassin castles of Khawabi, Rusafa, Qulay’a, and Maniqa were all probably acquired about the same period, though little is known of the date or manner of their acquisition.

  During this period of quiet consolidation, the Assassins made little impression on the outside world, and in consequence little is heard of them in the chronicles. Very few of their names are known. The purchaser of Qadmus is named as Abu’l-Fath, the last chief da‘i before Sinan as Abu Muhammad. A Kurdish Assassin leader called Ali ibn Wafa’ co-operated with Raymond of Antioch in his campaign against Nur al-Din, and perished with him on the battlefield in Inab in 1149. Only two assassinations are recorded in these years. In 1149 Dahhak ibn Jandal, the chief of the Wadi al-Taym, suffered the vengeance of the Assassins for his successful resistance to Bahram in 1128. A year or two later they murdered Count Raymond 11 of Tripoli at the gates of that city – their first Frankish victim.

  Of the general policy of the Assassins in these years only the broadest outlines can be seen. To Zangi, the lord of Mosul, and his house they could feel only hostility. The rulers of Mosul had always been among the most powerful of the Turkish princes. Dominating the lines of communication between Syria and Persia, and in friendly relations with the Seljuqid rulers of the East, they offered a constant threat to the position of the Assassins, which was aggravated by their recurrent tendency to spread into Syria. Mawdud and Bursuqi had already been assassinated. The Zangids were more than once threatened. When they occupied Aleppo in 1128, the danger which they offered to the Ismailis became more direct. In 1148 Nur al-Din ibn Zangi abolished the Shi‘ite formulae used hitherto in the call to prayer in Aleppo. This step, which aroused intense but ineffectual resentment among the Ismailis and other Shi‘ites in the city, amounted to an open declaration of war against the heretics. In the circumstances it is not surprising to find an Assassin contingent fighting beside Raymond of Antioch, the only leader in Syria at the time who could offer effective resistance to the Zangids.

  Meanwhile the greatest of all the Assassin chiefs of Syria had taken command. Sinan ibn Salman ibn Muhammad, known as Rashid al-Din, was a native of Aqr al-Sudan, a village near Basra, on the road to Wasit. He is variously described as an alchemist, a schoolmaster, and, on his own authority, as the son of one of the leading citizens of Basra. A contemporary Syrian writer describes a visit to Sinan and a conversation with him, in the course of which Sinan described his early career, his training, and the circumstances of his mission to Syria. ‘I was brought up in Basra and my father was one of its notables. This doctrine entered into my heart. Then something occurred between me and my brothers which obliged me to leave them, and I went forth without provision or a mount. I made my way until I reached Alamut and entered it. Its ruler was Kiya Muhammad, and he had two sons called Hasan and Husayn. He put me in school with them and gave me exactly the same treatment as he gave them, in those things that are needful for the support, education, and clothing of children. I remained there until Kiya Muhammad died, and was succeeded by his son Hasan. He ordered me to go to Syria. I set forth as I had set forth from Basra, and only rarely did I approach any town. He had given me orders and letters. I entered Mosul and halted at the mosque of the carpenters and stayed the night there, and then I went on, not entering any town, until I reached Raqqa. I had a letter to one of our companions there. I delivered it to him, and he gave me provisions and hired me a mount as far as Aleppo. There I met another companion and delivered him another letter, and he too hired me a mount and sent me on to Kahf. My orders were to stay in this fortress, and I stayed there until Shaykh Abu Muhammad, the head of the Mission, died in the mountain. He was succeeded by Khwaja Ali b. Mas‘ud, without appointment [from Alamut] but with the agreement of some of the company. Then the chief Abu Mansur, the nephew of Shaykh Abu Muhammad, and the chief Fahd conspired and sent someone to stab him to death as he was leaving his bath. The leadership remained consultative among them, and the murderers were arrested and imprisoned. Then the command came from Alamut to execute the murderer and release the chief Fahd. With it came a message, and an order to read it out to the company.’8 The main points of this narrative are confirmed by other sources, and amplified by the legendary biography of Sinan, which gives his period of waiting at Kahf as seven years. Sinan, clearly, was a protégé of Hasan ala dhikrihi-’l-salam, and the year when he revealed himself to the faithful in Syria was 1162, the year of Hasan’s accession in Alamut. The story of the disputed succession may be a reflection of the disagreement between Hasan and his father.

  In August 1164 Hasan proclaimed the Resurrection in Alamut, and sent messengers carrying the tidings to the Ismailis in other parts. It fell to Sinan to inaugurate the new dispensation in Syria. There is a curious contrast between the recording of these events in Persia and in Syria. In Persia the coming of the Resurrection was faithfully recorded by the Ismailis – and seems to have passed unnoticed among contemporary Sunnis; in Syria on the other hand the Ismailis seem to have forgotten it – while the Sunni historians, with appropriate relish and horror, repeat the rumours that reached them of the end of the law. ‘I have heard,’ says a contemporary ‘that he [Sinan] allowed them to defile their mothers and sisters and daughters and released them from the fast of the month of Ramadan.’9

  While this and similar reports are no doubt exaggerated, it is clear that the end of the law was proclaimed in Syria, and led to some excesses, which were finally stopped by Sinan himself. ‘In the year 572 [1176-77],’ says Kamal al-Din, ‘the people of the Jabal al-Summaq gave way to iniquity and debauchery, and called themselves “the Pure”. Men and women mingled in drinking sessions, no man abstained from his sister or daughter, the women wore men’s clothes, and one of them declared that Sinan was his God.’10 The ruler of Aleppo sent an army against them, and they took to the mountains, where they fortified themselves. Sinan, after making an enquiry, disclaimed responsibility, and, persuading the Aleppines to withdraw, himself attacked and destroyed them. Other sources speak of similar groups of ecstatics in these years. It is probable that vague rumours and reports of these events underlie the later legend of the Assassins’ Gardens of Paradise.

  Once established, Sinan‘s first task was to consolidate his new realm. He rebuilt the fortresses of Rusafa and Khawabi, and rounded off his territory by capturing and refortifying Ulayqa. ‘He bu
ilt fortresses in Syria for the sect,’ says an Arabic chronicler. ‘Some were new and some were old ones which he had obtained by strategems and fortified and made inaccessible. Time spared him and kings took care not to attack his possessions for fear of the murderous attacks of his henchmen. He ruled in Syria for thirty odd years. Their Chief Missionary sent emissaries from Alamut a number of times to kill him, fearing his usurpation of the headship, and Sinan used to kill them. Some of them he deceived and dissuaded from carrying out their orders.’11 This has been taken to mean that Sinan, alone among the Syrian Assassin leaders, threw off the authority of Alamut and pursued an entirely independent policy. For this view there is some support in the doctrinal fragments bearing his name, preserved into modern times among the Syrian Ismailis. These make no reference to Alamut, to its chiefs, or to the Nizari Imams, but acclaim Sinan himself as supreme and divine leader.

  Our information about the policies of the Assassins under Sinan deals principally with a séries of specific events in which they were involved: the two attempts on the life of Saladin, followed by his inconclusive attack on Masyaf; a murder and a fire in Aleppo; and the murder of Conrad of Montferrat. Apart from this there are only vague accounts of threatening letters to Nur al-Din and Saladin, and a reference by a Jewish traveller from Spain, Benjamin of Tudela, to a state of war in 1167 between the Assassins and the country of Tripoli.

  The rise of Saladin as the architect of Muslim unity and orthodoxy and the champion of the holy war won him at first the position of chief enemy of the Assassins, and inevitably inclined them to look more favourably on the Zangids of Mosul and Aleppo, now his chief opponents. In letters written to the caliph in Baghdad in 1181–2, Saladin accuses the rulers of Mosul of being in league with the heretical Assassins and using their mediation with the unbelieving Franks. He speaks of their promising the Assassins castles, lands, and a house of propaganda in Aleppo, and of sending emissaries both to Sinan and to the Crusaders, and stresses his own role as defender of Islam against the threefold threat of Frankish unbelief, Assassin heresy, and Zangid treason. The author of the Ismaili biography of Sinan, himself affected by the holy war ideals of later times, depicts his hero as a collaborator of Saladin in the struggle against the Crusaders.