The Assassins: A Redical Sect in Islam

by Bernard Lewis

  But Baybars, whose life-work was the liberation of the Muslim Near East from the double threat of the Christian Franks and the heathen Mongols, could not be expected to tolerate the continued independence of a dangerous pocket of heretics and murderers in the very heart of Syria. As early as 1260 his biographer reports him as assigning the Assassin lands in fief to one of his generals. In 1265 he ordered the collection of taxes and tolls from the ‘gifts’ brought for the Assassins from the various princes who paid them tribute. Among them the sources name ‘the Emperor, Alfonso, the Kings of the Franks and the Yemen’.16 The Assassins, weakened in Syria and disheartened by the fate of their Persian brothers, were in no position to resist. Meekly accepting this measure, they themselves paid tribute to Baybars, and soon it was he, in place of the fallen lord of Alamut, who appointed and dismissed them at will.

  In 1270 Baybars, dissatisfied with the attitude of the aged chief Najm al-Din, deposed him and appointed in his place his more compliant son-in-law Sarim al-Din Mubarak, Assassin governor of Ulayqa. The new chief, who held his office as representative of Baybars, was excluded from Masyaf, which came under the direct rule of Baybars. But Sarim al-Din, by a trick, won possession of Masyaf. Baybars dislodged him and sent him as a prisoner to Cairo where he died, probably poisoned, and the now chastened Najm al-Din was re-appointed, conjointly with his son Shams al-Din, in return for an annual tribute. They are both named in an inscription in the mosque of Qadmus, of about this date.

  In February or March 1271 Baybars arrested two Assassins who, allegedly, had been sent to murder him. They had gone, it was said, on an embassy from Ulayqa to Bohemond VI of Tripoli, and he had arranged for them to assassinate the Sultan. Shams al-Din was arrested and charged with intelligence with the Franks, but released after his father Najm al-Din had come to plead his innocence. The two would-be murderers were set free; the two Ismaili leaders, under pressure, agreed to surrender their castles and live at Baybars’ court. Najm al-Din accompanied Baybars, and died in Cairo early in 1274. Shams al-Din was allowed to go to Kahf ‘to settle its affairs’. Once there, he began to organize resistance, but in vain. In May and June 1271 Bay-bars’ lieutenants seized Ulayqa and Rusafa and in October Shams al-Din, realizing his cause was hopeless, surrendered to Baybars. At first he was well received. Later, learning of a plot to assassinate some of his emirs, Baybars deported Shams al-Din and his party to Egypt. The blockade of the castles continued. Khawabi fell in the same year, and the remaining castles were all occupied by 1273.

  With the submission of the Assassins to Baybars, their skilled services seem to have been, for a short time, at his disposal. As early as April 1271 Baybars is reported as threatening the Count of Tripoli with assassination. The attempt on Prince Edward of England in 1272 and perhaps also the murder of Philip of Montfort in Tyre in 1270 were instigated by him. Some later chroniclers also speak of the employment of Assassins, by Mamluk Sultans, to remove troublesome opponents, and the fourteenth century Moorish traveller Ibn Battuta even gives a description of the arrangements. ‘When the Sultan wishes to send one of them to kill an enemy, he pays them the price of his blood. If the murderer escapes after performing his task, the money is his; if he is caught, his children get it. They use poisoned knives to strike down their appointed victims. Sometimes their plots fail, and they themselves are killed.’17

  Such stories are probably the offspring of legend and suspicion, of no more significance than the tales that were being told further west, of murders arranged for the princes of Europe, at a price, by the Old Man of the Mountain. After the thirteenth century, there are no further authenticated murders by Syrian Assassins acting for the sect. Henceforth Ismailism stagnated as a minor heresy in Persia and Syria, with little or no political importance. In the fourteenth century a split occurred in the line of Nizari Imams. The Syrian and Persian Ismailis followed different claimants, and from that date onwards ceased to maintain contact with one another.

  In the sixteenth century, after the Ottoman conquest of Syria, the first surveys of land and population prepared for the new masters duly record the qilā‘ al-da‘wa – castles of the mission – a group of villages west of Hama, including such old and famous centres as Qadmus and Kahf, and inhabited by followers of a peculiar sect. They are distinguished only by the fact that they pay a special tax.18 They do not reappear on the pages of history until the early nineteenth century, when they are reported in normal conflict with their rulers, their neighbours and one another. From the mid-century they settled down as a peaceful rural population, with their centre at Salamiyya, a new settlement reclaimed by them from the desert. At the present time they number some 50,000, of whom some, but not all, have accepted the Aga Khan as their Imam.

  6

  Means and Ends

  The Ismaili Assassins did not invent assassination; they merely lent it their name. Murder as such is as old as the human race; its antiquity is strikingly symbolized in the fourth chapter of Genesis, where the first murderer and the first victim appear as brothers, the children of the first man and woman. Political murder comes with the emergence of political authority – when power is vested in an individual, and the removal of that individual is seen as a quick and simple method of effecting political change. Usually the motive for such murders is personal, factional or dynastic – the replacement of an individual, a party or a family by another in the possession of power. Such murders are commonplace in autocratic kingdoms and empires, in both East and West.

  Sometimes the murder is conceived – by others as well as the murderer – as a duty, and is justified by ideological arguments. The victim is a tyrant or a usurper; to kill him is a virtue, not a crime. Such ideological justification may be expressed in political or religious terms – in many societies there is little difference between the two. In ancient Athens two friends, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, conspired to kill the tyrant Hippias. They succeeded only in killing his brother and co-ruler, and were both put to death. After the fall of Hippias, they became public heroes in Athens, celebrated in statuary and song; their descendants enjoyed privileges and exemptions. This idealization of tyrannicide became part of the political ethos of Greece and Rome, and found expression in such famous murders as those of Philip II of Macedon, Tiberius Gracchus and Julius Caesar. The same ideal appears among the Jews, in such figures as Ehud and Jehu, and, most dramatically, in the story of the beautiful Judith, who made her way to the tent of the oppressor Holofernes, and cut off his head as he slept. The book of Judith was written during the period of Hellenistic domination, and survives only in a Greek version; the Jews, followed by the Protestants, reject it as apocryphal. It is, however, included in the canon of the Roman Catholic Church, and has inspired many Christian painters and sculptors. Though Judith has no place in Jewish religious tradition, the ideal of pious murder which she represents survived to inspire the famous Sicarii, or dagger-men – a group of zealots who appeared about the time of the fall of Jerusalem, and devoutly destroyed those who opposed or hindered them.

  Regicide – both practical and idealistic – was familiar from the very beginnings of Islamic political history. Of the four Righteous Caliphs who followed the Prophet in the headship of the Islamic community, three were murdered. The second Caliph, Umar, was stabbed by a Christian slave with a private grievance; learning this, the Caliph on his deathbed thanked God that he had not been murdered by one of the faithful. Even this consolation was denied to his successors Uthman and Ali, who were both struck down by Muslim Arabs – the first by a group of angry mutineers, the second by a religious fanatic. In both murders, the perpetrators saw themselves as tyrannicides, freeing the community from an unrighteous ruler – and both found others to agree with them.

  The issues crystallized in the course of the Muslim civil war that followed Uthman’s death. Mu‘awiya, the governor of Syria and kinsman of the murdered Caliph, demanded the punishment of the regicides. Ali, who had succeeded as Caliph, was unable or unwilling to comply, and his supporte
rs, to justify his inaction, claimed that no crime had been committed. Uthman had been an oppressor; his death was an execution, not a murder.1 The same argument was used by the extremist sect of the Kharijites to justify the murder of Ali himself a few years later.

  To some extent, Islamic tradition gives recognition to the principle of justifiable revolt. While conceding autocratic powers to the sovereign, it lays down that the subject’s duty of obedience lapses where the command is sinful, and that ‘there must be no obedience to a creature against his Creator’. Since no procedure is laid down for testing the righteousness of a command, or for exercising the right to disobey one that is sinful, the only effective recourse for the conscientious subject is to rebel against the ruler, and try to overrule or depose him by force. A more expeditious procedure is to remove him by assassination. This principle was often invoked, especially by sectarian rebels, to justify their acts.

  In fact, after the death of Ali and accession of Mu‘awiya, the murder of rulers becomes rare, and when it occurs is usually dynastic rather than revolutionary in inspiration. On the contrary, the Shi‘a claimed that it was their Imams, and other members of the house of the Prophet, who were being murdered at the instigation of the Sunni Caliphs; their literature includes long lists of Alid martyrs, whose blood called for vengeance.

  In sending their emissaries to kill the unrighteous and their minions, the Ismailis could thus invoke an old Islamic tradition. It was a tradition which was never dominant, and had for long been dormant, but which had its place, especially within the circle of the dissident and extremist sects.

  The ancient ideal of tyrannicide, the religious obligation to rid the world of an unrighteous ruler, certainly contributed to the practice of assassination, as adopted and applied by the Ismailis. But there was more to it than that. The killing by the Assassin of his victim was not only an act of piety; it also had a ritual, almost a sacramental quality. It is significant that in all their murders, in both Persia and Syria, the Assassins always used a dagger; never poison,2 never missiles, though there must have been occasions when these would have been easier and safer. The Assassin is almost always caught, and usually indeed makes no attempt to escape; there is even a suggestion that to survive a mission was shameful. The words of a twelfth-century Western author are revealing: ‘When therefore any of them have chosen to die in this way . . . he himself [i.e. the Chief] hands them knives which are, so to speak, consecrated . . .’3

  Human sacrifice and ritual murder have no place in Islamic law, tradition or practice. Yet both are ancient and deep-rooted in human societies, and can reappear in unexpected places. Just as the forgotten dance-cults of antiquity, in defiance of the austere worship of Islam, reappear in the ecstatic ritual of the dancing dervishes, so do the ancient cults of death find new expressions in Islamic terms. In the early eighth century, the Muslim authors tell us, a man called Abu Mansur al-Ijli, of Kufa, claimed to be the Imam, and taught that the prescriptions of the law had a symbolic meaning, and need not be obeyed in their literal sense. Heaven and Hell had no separate existence, but were merely the pleasures and misfortunes of this world. His followers practised murder as a religious duty. Similar doctrines – and practices .– were ascribed to his contemporary and fellow-tribesman Mughira b. Sa‘id. Both groups were suppressed by the authorities. It is significant that they were restricted, according to their beliefs, to a single weapon in their murderous rites. One group strangled their victims with nooses; another clubbed them with wooden cudgels. Only with the coming of the Mahdi would they be permitted to use steel.4 Both groups belonged to the extreme fringe of the extremist Shi‘a. The parallel they offer to both the antinomianism and the weapon-cult of the later Ismailis is striking.

  As custodians of esoteric mysteries for the initiate, as purveyors of salvation through knowledge of the Imam, as bearers of a promise of messianic fulfilment, of release from the toils of the world and the yoke of the law, the Ismailis are part of a long tradition, that goes back to the beginnings of Islam and far beyond, and forward to our own day – a tradition of popular and emotional cults in sharp contrast with the learned and legal religion of the established order.

  There were many such sects and groups before the Ismailis, but theirs was the first to create an effective and enduring organization. It was a sign of the times. The earlier sodalities of the poor and powerless were scattered and insignificant, and rarely achieved the literary mention which alone could make them known to the historian. In the atomized and insecure society of the later Caliphate, men sought comfort and assurance in new and stronger forms of association; these became more numerous and more extensive, and reached from the lower to the middle and even the upper levels of the population – until finally the Caliph al-Nasir himself, by ceremonially joining one of them, tried to incorporate them in the apparatus of government.

  These associations were of many kinds. Some were primarily regional, based on cities or quarters, with civic, police or even military functions. Some, in a society where crafts often coincided with local, ethnic, or religious groups, may also have acquired an economic role. Often they appear as associations of youths or young men, with ranks and rites to mark the attainment of adolescence and of manhood. Most were religious brotherhoods, the followers of holy men and of the cults established by them. Common features were the adoption of beliefs and practices belonging to popular religion and mistrusted by orthodoxy; a close bond of loyalty to comrades and devotion to leaders; a system of initiation and of hierarchic grades, supported by elaborate symbols and ceremonials. Most of these groups, though vaguely dissident, were politically inactive. The Ismailis, with their militant tactics and revolutionary aims, were able to use this form of organization for a sustained attempt to overthrow and replace the existing order. At the same time, they gradually abandoned the philosophical refinements of their earlier doctrines, and adopted forms of religion that were closer to the beliefs current among the brotherhoods. In one respect, according to the Persian historians, the Ismailis adopted an almost monastic rule; the commandants of their castles, as long as they held office, had no women with them.

  In one respect the Assassins are without precedent – in the planned, systematic and long-term use of terror as a political weapon. The stranglers of Iraq had been small-scale and random practitioners, rather like the thugs of India, with whom they may be connected. Previous political murders, however dramatic, were the work of individuals or at best of small groups of plotters limited in both purpose and effect. In the skills of murder and conspiracy, the Assassins have countless predecessors; even in the refinement of murder as an art, a rite, and a duty, they have been anticipated or prefigured. But they may well be the first terrorists. ‘Brothers’, says an Ismaili poet, ‘when the time of triumph comes, with good fortune from both worlds as our companion, then by one single warrior on foot a king may be stricken with terror, though he own more than a hundred thousand horsemen.’5

  It was true. For centuries the Shi‘a had squandered their zeal and blood for their Imams, without avail. There had been countless risings, ranging from the self-immolation of small groups of ecstatics to carefully planned military operations. All but a few had failed, crushed by the armed forces of a state and an order that they were too weak to overthrow. Even the very few that succeeded brought no release for the pent-up emotion that they expressed. Instead, the victors, once invested with the panoply of authority and the custodianship of the Islamic community, turned against their own supporters and destroyed them.

  Hasan-i Sabbah knew that his preaching could not prevail against the entrenched orthodoxy of Sunni Islam – that his followers could not meet and defeat the armed might of the Seljuq state. Others before him had vented their frustration in unplanned violence, in hopeless insurrection, or in sullen passivity. Hasan found a new way, by which a small force, disciplined and devoted, could strike effectively against an overwhelmingly superior enemy. ‘Terrorism’, says a modern authority, ‘is carried on by a n
arrowly limited organization and is inspired by a sustained program of large-scale objectives in the name of which terror is practised.’6 This was the method that Hasan chose – the method, it may well be, that he invented.

  ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ says Joinville, speaking of a later Ismaili chief in Syria, ‘paid tribute to the Templars and the Hospitallers, because they feared nothing from the Assassins, since the Old Man could gain nothing if he caused the Master of the Temple or of the Hospital to be killed; for he knew very well that if he had one killed, another just as good would replace him, and for this reason he did not wish to lose Assassins where he could gain nothing (see above, p. 121).’7 The two orders of knighthood were integrated institutions, with an institutional structure, hierarchy and loyalty, which made them immune to attack by assassination; it was the absence of these qualities that made the atomized Islamic state, with centralized, autocratic power based on personal and transient loyalties, peculiarly vulnerable to it.

  Hasan-i Sabbah showed political genius in perceiving this weakness of the Islamic monarchies. He also displayed remarkable administrative and strategic gifts in exploiting it by terrorist attack.

  For such a campaign of sustained terror there were two obvious requirements – organization and ideology. There had to be an organization capable both of launching the attack and surviving the inevitable counter-blow; there had to be a system of belief – which in that time and place could only be a religion – to inspire and sustain the attackers to the point of death.