The Assassins: A Redical Sect in Islam

by Bernard Lewis

Both were found. The reformed Ismaili religion, with its memories of passion and martyrdom, its promise of divine and human fulfilment, was a cause that gave dignity and courage to those that embraced it, and inspired a devotion unsurpassed in human history. It was the loyalty of the Assassins, who risked and even courted death for their Master, that first attracted the attention of Europe, and made their name a by-word for faith and self-sacrifice before it became a synonym for murderer.

  There was cool planning, as well as fanatical zeal, in the work of the Assassins. Several principles are discernible. The seizure of castles – some of them the former lairs of robber-chieftains – provided them with safe bases; the rule of secrecy – adapted from the old doctrine of taqiyya – helped both security and solidarity. The work of the terrorists was supported by both religious and political action. Ismaili missionaries found or gained sympathizers among the rural and urban population; Ismaili envoys called on highly-placed Muslims, whose fears or ambitions might make them temporary allies of the cause.

  Such alliances raise an important general issue concerning the Assassins. Of several score murders recorded in Iran and Syria, a fair number are said by one or another source to have been instigated by third parties, often with an offer of money or other inducements. Sometimes the story is based on an alleged confession by the actual murderers, when caught and put to the question.

  Clearly the Assassins, the devoted servants of a religious cause, were not mere cut-throats with daggers for hire. They had their own political objective, the establishment of the true Imamate, and neither they nor their leaders are likely to have been the tools of other men’s ambitions. Yet the persistent and widespread stories of complicity, involving such names as Berkyaruq and Sanjar in the East, Saladin and Richard Coeur de Lion in the West, require some explanation.

  Some of these stories were current because they were true. In many periods and places, there have been ambitious men who were willing to enlist the aid of violent extremists; they may not have shared or even liked their beliefs, but they thought they could use them, in the hope, usually misplaced, that they would be able to abandon these dangerous allies when they had served their purpose. Such was Ridwan of Aleppo, a Seljuq prince who did not scruple to switch from a Sunni to a Fatimid allegiance, and then to welcome the Assassins to his city, as a support against his kinsmen and his overlord. Such too were the scheming viziers in Isfahan and Damascus, who tried to use the power and terror of the Assassins for their own advancement. Sometimes the motive was terror rather than ambition – as for example with the pathetically frightened vizier of the Khorazmshah Jalal al-Din, described by Nasawi (see above, p. 85). Soldiers and sultans, as well as viziers, could be terrified into compliance, and several of the most dramatic stories that are told of Assassin skill and daring seem to have as their purpose to justify some tacit understanding between a pious Sunni monarch and the Ismaili revolutionaries.

  The motives of men like Sanjar and Saladin are somewhat more complex. Both made their accommodations with the Assassins; neither is likely to have been swayed purely by personal fear or personal ambition. Both were engaged on great tasks – Sanjar on the restoration of the Seljuq Sultanate and the defence of Islam against heathen invaders from the East, Saladin on the renewal of Sunni unity and the ejection of Christian invaders from the West. Both must have realized the truth – that after their own deaths their kingdoms would crumble and their plans come to nothing. They may well have felt that a temporary concession to what was ultimately a less dangerous enemy was justified, in order to secure their personal safety, and with it the chance to complete their great work for the restoration and defence of Islam.

  For the Assassins themselves, the calculation was much simpler. Their purpose was to disrupt and destroy the Sunni order; if some Sunni leaders could be tempted or terrorized into helping them, so much the better. Even in the days of their early fury, the Assassin leaders never disdained the help of others when it was forthcoming; later, when they became in effect territorial rulers, they fitted their policies with skill and ease into the complex mosaic of alliances and rivalries of the Muslim world.

  All this does not mean that their services were for sale, or that every story of complicity, even those supported by confessions, was true. The leaders might make secret arrangements, but it is unlikely that they would inform the actual murderer of the details. What is much more probable is that the Assassin setting out on a mission was given what in modern parlance would be called a ‘cover story’, implicating the likeliest character on the scene. This would have the additional advantage of sowing mistrust and suspicion in the opposing camp. The murders of the Caliph al-Mustarshid and the Crusader Conrad of Montferrat are good examples of this. The suspicion thrown on Sanjar in Persia and on Richard among the Crusaders must have served a useful purpose in confusing the issues and creating discord. In addition, we cannot be sure that every murder ascribed to or even claimed by the Assassins was in fact committed by them. Murder, for private or public reasons, was at least normally common, and the Assassins themselves must have provided ‘cover’ for a number of unideological assassinations in which they had no part.

  The Assassins chose their victims with care. Some Sunni authors have suggested that they waged indiscriminate war against the whole Muslim community. It is well-known and established,’ says Hamdullah Mustawfi, ‘that the Batinis [i.e. the Ismailis], may they get their just deserts, neglect no moment in injuring the Muslims in whatever way they can, and believe that they will receive rich reward and bounteous recompense for this. To commit no murder and to subdue no victim they regard as a great sin.’8 Hamdullah, writing in about 1330, presents a later view, contaminated by the myths and legends that were already current. The contemporary sources in both Persia and Syria suggest that the Ismaili terror was directed against specific persons, for specific purposes, and that apart from a few, quite exceptional outbreaks of mob violence, their relations with their Sunni neighbours were fairly normal. This seems to be true both of the Ismaili minorities in the towns, and of the Ismaili territorial rulers, in their dealings with their Sunni colleagues.

  The victims of the Assassins belong to two main groups; the first of princes, officers and ministers, the second of qadis and other religious dignitaries. An intermediate group between the two, the city prefects, also received occasional attention. With few exceptions, the victims were Sunni Muslims. The Assassins did not normally attack Twelver or other Shi‘ites, nor did they turn their daggers against native Christians or Jews. There are few attacks even on the Crusaders in Syria, and most of them seem to follow Sinan’s accord with Saladin and Hasan’s alliance with the Caliph.

  The enemy, for the Ismailis, was the Sunni establishment – political and military, bureaucratic and religious. Their murders were designed to frighten, to weaken, and ultimately to overthrow it. Some were simply acts of vengeance and warning, such as the killing, in their own mosques, of Sunni divines who had spoken or acted against them. Other victims were chosen for more immediate and more specific reasons – such as the commanders of armies attacking the Ismailis, or the occupants of strongholds that they wished to acquire. Tactical and propagandist motives combine in the murder of major figures, such as the great vizier Nizam al-Mulk, two Caliphs, and the attempts on Saladin.

  It is much more difficult to determine the nature of Ismaili support. Much of it must have come from the countryside. The Ismailis had their main bases in castles; they were most successful when they could rely on the population of the surrounding villages for support and also for recruitment. In both Persia and Syria the Ismaili emissaries tried to establish themselves in areas where there were old traditions of religious deviation. Such traditions are remarkably persistent, and have survived, in some of these areas, to the present day. Some of the religious writings of the New Preaching, in contrast with the sophisticated urban intellectualism of Fatimid theology, show many of the magical qualities associated with peasant religion.

  Ism
aili support could be most effectively mobilized and directed in rural and mountain areas. It was not, however, limited to such areas. Clearly, the Ismailis also had their followers in the towns, where they gave discreet help when needed to the men from the castles proceeding on their missions. Sometimes, as in Isfahan and Damascus, they were strong enough to come out into the open in the struggle for power.

  It has usually been assumed that the urban supporters of Ismailism were drawn from the lower orders of society – the artisans, and below them the floating, restless rabble. This assumption is based on the occasional references to Ismaili activists of such social origin, and to the general lack of evidence on Ismaili sympathies among the better-off classes, even those that were at some disadvantage in the Seljuq Sunni order. There are many signs of shi‘ite sympathies among the merchants and literati, for example – but they seem to have preferred the passive dissent of the Twelvers to the radical subversion of the Ismailis.

  Inevitably, many of the leaders and teachers of the Ismailis were educated townsmen. Hasan-i Sabbah was from Rayy, and received a scribal education; Ibn Attash was a physician, as was the first emissary of Alamut in Syria. Sinan was a schoolmaster, and, according to his own statement, the son of a family of notables in Basra. Yet the New Preaching never seems to have had the seductive intellectual appeal that had tempted poets, philosophers and theologians in earlier times. From the ninth to the eleventh centuries Ismailism, in its various forms, had been a major intellectual force in Islam, a serious contender for the minds as well as the hearts of the believers, and had even gained the sympathy of such a towering intellect as the philosopher and scientist Avicenna (980-1037). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries this is palpably no longer true. After Nasir-i Khusraw, who died some time after 1087, there is no major intellectual figure in Ismaili theology, and even his followers were limited to peasants and mountaineers in remote places. Under Hasan-i Sabbah and his successors, the Ismailis pose terrible political, military and social problems to Sunni Islam, but they no longer offer an intellectual challenge. More and more, their religion acquires the magical and emotional qualities, the redemptionist and millenarian hopes, associated with the cults of the dispossessed, the disprivileged and the unstable. Ismaili theology had ceased to be, and did not again become, a serious alternative to the new orthodoxy that was dominating the intellectual life of the Muslim cities – though Ismaili spiritual concepts and attitudes continued, in a disguised and indirect form, to influence Persian and Turkish mysticism and poetry, and elements of Ismailism may be discerned in such later outbreaks of revolutionary messianism as the dervish revolt in fifteenth-century Turkey and the Babi upheaval in ninteenth-century Persia.

  There is one more question that the modern historian is impelled to ask – what does it mean? In religious terms, the New Preaching of the Ismailis can be seen as a resurgence of certain millenarian and antinomian trends, which are recurrent in Islam and which have parallels – and perhaps antecedents – in other religious traditions. But when modern man ceased to accord first place to religion in his own concerns, he also ceased to believe that other men, in other times, could ever truly have done so, and so he began to re-examine the great religious movements of the past in search of interests and motives acceptable to modern minds.

  The first great theory on the ‘real’ significance of Muslim heresy was launched by the Count de Gobineau, the father of modern racialism. For him, Shi‘ism represented a reaction of the Indo-European Persians against Arab domination – against the constricting Semitism of Arab Islam. To nineteenth-century Europe, obsessed with the problems of national conflict and national freedom, such an explanation seemed reasonable and indeed obvious. The Shi‘a stood for Persia, fighting first against Arab and later against Turkish domination. The Assassins represented a form of militant, nationalist extremism, like the terrorist secret societies of nineteenth-century Italy and Macedonia.

  The advance of scholarship on the one hand, and changes in European circumstances on the other, led in the twentieth century to some modifications in this theory of racial or national conflict. Increased knowledge showed that Shi‘ism in general, and Ismailism in particular, were by no means exclusively Persian. The sect had begun in Iraq; the Fatimid caliphate had achieved its major successes in Arabia, in North Africa and in Egypt – and even the reformed Ismailism of Hasan-i Sabbah, though launched in Persia and by Persians, had won an extensive following in Arab Syria and had even percolated among the Turcoman tribes that had migrated into the Middle East from Central Asia. And in any case, nationality was no longer regarded as a sufficient base for great historical movements.

  In a séries of studies the first of which appeared in 1911, a Russian scholar, V. V. Barthold, offered another explanation. In his view, the real meaning of the Assassin movement was a war of the castles against the cities – a last, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the rural Iranian aristocracy to resist the new, urban social order of Islam. Pre-Islamic Persia had been a knightly society, to which the city had come as an Islamic innovation. Like the barons – and robber-barons – of mediaeval Europe, the Persian land-owning knights, with the support of the village population, waged war from their castles against this alien and encroaching new order. The Assassins were a weapon in this war.

  Later Russian scholars revised and refined Barthold’s attempt at an economic explanation of Ismailism. The Ismailis were not against the towns as such, in which they had their own supporters, but against certain dominant elements in the towns – the rulers and the military and civil notables, the new feudal lords and the officially favoured divines. Moreover the Ismailis could not simply be equated with the old nobility. They did not inherit their castles, but seized them, and their support came not so much from those who still owned their estates, as from those who had lost them to new owners – to the tax-farmers, officials and officers who had received grants of land and revenues from the new rulers at the expense of the gentry and peasantry. One view sees Ismailism as a reactionary ideology, devised by the great feudal magnates to defend their privileges against the equalitarianism of Sunni Islam; another as a response, varied according to circumstances, to the needs of the different groups which had suffered from the imposition of the Seljuq new order, and thus embracing both the deposed old ruling class and the discontented populace of the cities; yet another simply as a ‘popular’ movement based on the artisans, the city poor, and the peasantry of mountain regions. According to this view, Hasan’s proclamation of the Resurrection was a victory of the ‘popular’ forces; his threats of punishment against those who still observed the Holy Law were directed against feudal elements in the Ismaili possessions, who were secretly faithful to Islamic orthodoxy and hostile to social equality.9

  Like the earlier attempts at an ethnic explanation, these theories of economic determination have enriched our knowledge of Ismailism, by directing research into new and profitable directions; like earlier theologies, they have suffered from excessive dogmatism, which has stressed some aspects and neglected others – in particular the sociology of religion, of leadership, and of association. It is obvious that some extension of our knowledge of Islam and its sects, some refinement of our methods of enquiry, are needed before we can decide how significant was the economic element in Ismailism, and what precisely it was. In the meantime both the experience of events and the advance of scholarship in our own time may suggest that it is not so easy to disentangle national from economic factors, or either from psychic and social determinants, and that the distinction, so important to our immediate predecessors, between the radical right and the radical left may sometimes prove illusory.

  No single, simple explanation can suffice to clarify the complex phenomenon of Ismailism, in the complex society of mediaeval Islam. The Ismaili religion evolved over a long period and a wide area, and meant different things at different times and places; the Ismaili states were territorial principalities, with their own internal differences and conflicts; the
social and economic order of the Islamic Empire, as of other mediaeval societies, was an intricate and changing pattern of different élites, estates, and classes, of social, ethnic and religious groups – and neither the religion nor the society in which it appeared has yet been adequately explored.

  Like other great historic creeds and movements, Ismailism drew on many sources, and served many needs. For some, it was a means of striking at a hated domination, whether to restore an old order or to create a new one; for others, the only way of achieving God’s purpose on earth. For different rulers, it was a device to secure and maintain local independence against alien interference, or a road to the Empire of the world; a passion and a fulfilment, that brought dignity and meaning to drab and bitter lives, or a gospel of release and destruction; a return to ancestral truths – and a promise of future illumination.

  Concerning the place of the Assassins in the history of Islam, four things may be said with reasonable assurance. The first is that their movement, whatever its driving force may have been, was regarded as a profound threat to the existing order, political, social and religious; the second is that they are no isolated phenomenon, but one of a long séries of messianic movements, at once popular and obscure, impelled by deep-rooted anxieties, and from time to time exploding in outbreaks of revolutionary violence; the third is that Hasan-i Sabbah and his followers succeeded in reshaping and redirecting the vague desires, wild beliefs and aimless rage of the discontented into an ideology and an organization which, in cohesion, discipline and purposive violence, have no parallel in earlier or in later times. The fourth, and perhaps ultimately the most significant point, is their final and total failure. They did not overthrow the existing order; they did not even succeed in holding a single city of any size. Even their castle domains became no more than petty principalities, which in time were overwhelmed by conquest, and their followers have become small and peaceful communities of peasants and merchants – one sectarian minority among many.