by Tamim Ansary
Meanwhile, with the empire decaying and the social fabric fraying, barbarians began to penetrate the northern borders, much as the Germans had done in Europe when they crossed the Rhine River into Roman territory. Rude Turks came trickling south in ever growing numbers: tough warriors, newly converted to Islam and brutal in their simplistic fanaticism. Accustomed to plunder as a way of life, they ruined cities and laid waste to crops. The highways grew unsafe, small-time banditry became rife, trade declined, poverty spread. Turkish mamluks fought bitterly with Turkish nomads—it was Turks in power everywhere. This is part of why anxiety permeated the empire in Ghazali’s day.
A light did shine at the edges, however, under a Persian dynasty called the Samanids. Their kingdom radiated from cities on either side of the Oxus River, which now forms the northern border of Afghanistan. Here, in the great urban centers of Balkh and Bokhara, the literary culture of ancient Persia revived, and Persian began to compete with Arabic as the language of learning.
But the Samanids, too, had mamluks, and one of their mamluk generals decided he would rather give orders than take them. Goodbye, Samanids; hello, Ghaznavids. The new rulers were called Ghaznavids because they moved their capital to the city of Ghazni, southeast of Kabul. The Ghaznavid dynasty peaked with a long-lived conqueror named Mahmud, a Charlemagne of the Islamic East. By the time this man was done, his empire sprawled from the Caspian to the Indus. Just as Charlemagne saw himself as a “most Christian emperor,” Mahmud considered himself a most Muslim monarch. He appointed himself coruler of the Muslim world, giving himself the brand new title of sultan, which means something like “sword arm.” As he saw it, the Arab khalifa was still the spiritual father of the Islamic community, but he, Mahmud, was the equally important military leader, the Enforcer. From his day until the twentieth century, there was always at least one sultan in the Muslim world.
Sultan Mahmud was bright enough to staff his imperial service with educated Persians who could read and write. He announced handsome rewards for men of learning, offers that attracted some nine hundred poets, historians, theologians, philosophers, and other literati to his court, which added to his prestige.
One of these literati was the poet Firdausi, who was writing Shahnama (The Book of Kings), an epic history of the Persian nation from the beginning of time to the birth of Islam, all in rhyming couplets. In the Middle World he has a stature comparable to Dante. Mahmud extravagantly promised this man one piece of gold for each couplet of his finished epic. He was shocked when Firdausi finally presented him with the longest poem ever penned by a single man: The Book of Kings has over sixty thousand couplets. “Did I say gold?” the sultan frowned. “I meant to say silver. One piece of silver for each couplet.”
The offended Firdausi went off in a huff and offered his poem to another king. According to legend, Sultan Mahmud later regretted his penny-pinching and sent servants with trunk loads of gold to coax the poet back, but they were knocking on the front door of the poet’s house while his corpse was being carried out the back for burial.2
The Book of Kings represents all of history as a struggle between the descendants of two legendary brothers, Iran and Turan, who (it is often thought) represent the Persians and the Turks, respectively: Iran is the good guy, and Turan the bad guy. Not surprisingly, The Book of Kings is now the national epic of Iran, and I wonder if it was actually the cost of the book that gave the sultan pause: maybe he didn’t like seeing Turks presented as the bad guys of history.
Firdausi also heaped scorn on the Arabs and devoted a long passage at the end to detailing their primitive savagery as compared to the civilized grace of the Persians at the time Islam was born. His book was just one more sign of the decline of Arab power and the rising prestige of Persian culture within Islam. In fact, his attitude about Arabs was not unique. As another poet of the era wrote, Sultan Mahmud was not only first in patronage of the arts; he also prided himself on the number of Hindu temples he sacked and how thoroughly he sacked them and what quantities of loot he snatched away from infidel fingers. He hauled his plunder home to ornament his capital and pay the nine-hundred-plus literati living at his court. His invasions of India and his slaughter of Hindus made him, he felt, a hero of Islam.
Arabs were eating crickets in the wasteland, living on the brink, While in Mashad, even dogs had ice water to drink.3
Mahmud’s son Masud built himself a winter capital on the banks of the Helmand River, about a mile downriver from my own boyhood town of Lashkargah. The ruins of the city are still there. Growing up, I often wondered if Masud might have hunted deer on the same wooded island in the middle of the river where my buddies and I used to roam, woods that in my day teemed with jungle cats, jackals, and wild boar.
Masud himself was a formidable specimen of a man. Too heavy for most horses, he customarily rode an elephant, of which he had a whole battalion penned up in the marshy canebrakes along the Helmand River. Make no mistake, however, his great girth was all muscle. He went into battle with a sword only he could swing and a battleaxe so huge, no one else could even lift it. Even the great Sultan Mahmud reputedly feared his boy.
When the father died, Masud happened to be in Baghdad. The courtiers proclaimed his brother the new king. Masud came rushing back, gathering up an army along the way, dethroned his brother lickety-split, and put out both his eyes to make sure he would never try anything like that again. Then he took over the Ghaznavid Empire and, like his father, welded art and war into a potent cultural combination of grandeur and gold and savagery. At that point, it must have seemed like Ghaznavid dominion would last forever.
Yet four times during Masud’s reign, rugged Oghuz Turks from the north stormed across the Oxus River to attack Ghaznavid realms. Led by a family called the Seljuks, they made their way into Khorasan (eastern Iran, western Afghanistan). Four times Sultan Masud sallied forth to meet them on the field of battle. Three times he beat them back, but in the fourth battle, his forces got hammered. In 1040 he lost Lashkargah and his western strongholds to those Seljuks. I’ve described the dread demeanor of the frightening Masud; now imagine what kind of men it must have taken to beat him. Masud retreated to the city his father had built and lived out his reign, but the glory days of the Ghaznavids were done. The Seljuk era had begun.
The Seljuks moved west, nibbling away at the empire based in Baghdad. These chieftains couldn’t read or write and saw no point in learning. A strong swordsman could command enough gold to hire a hundred tallow-faced clerks to read and write for him. They sacked cities and exacted tribute, but preferred to live in tents, which they furnished as gloriously as was possible for a people constantly on the move. (In time, they also funded the construction of wonderful architecture in their major cities.) Once they crossed the border, they dropped their ancient shamanistic religion and converted to Islam, but it was a rough-and-ready Islam that didn’t concern itself with doctrines or ethical ideas very much: it was more a rah-rah locker-room ideology that marked off Us Guys from Them Guys.
In 1053 CE, a young Seljuk prince was sent to govern the province of Khorasan. His name was Alp Arslan, which means “heroic lion”—a nickname his troops gave him. Alp Arslan took along his Persian secretary, soon to be known as Nizam al-Mulk, which means “order of the realm.” Alp Arslan stood out in any crowd, not only because he stood well over six feet tall, but because he had grown his moustache so long he could sling the two strands of it over his shoulders to hang down behind his back, and when he rode his white horse at top speed, the braids streamed behind him like whip-shaped banners.
His Persian adviser managed to set Khorasan in order and get the economy humming, which gave his sponsor such prestige that when the old Seljuk chieftain died and the usual fighting broke out among brothers, sons, and nephews, Alp Arslan quickly emerged triumphant, thanks in part to the crafty Nizam al-Mulk’s advice. After crowning himself sultan, Alp Arslan began poring over maps to see what else he might conquer.
He extended Seljuk power into
the Caucasus region and then kept moving west, finally leading his armies into Asia Minor, most of which was ruled by Constantinople, the fortress capital of an empire the Muslims were still calling Rome.
In 1071, on the outskirts of a town called Manzikert, Alp Arslan met the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes in battle and smashed his hundred-thousand-man army. He took the emperor himself prisoner, sending a shock rippling through the Western world. Then he did the unthinkable; he released the emperor and sent him home to Constantinople with gifts and admonishments never to make trouble again, a courtesy that only underscored Seljuk might and added to the Christian emperor’s humiliation. The battle of Manzikert was one of history’s truly seminal battles. At the time, it seemed like the greatest victory these Seljuks could ever achieve. In fact, it may have been their biggest mistake, but no one would realize this for another twenty-six years.
Alp Arslan died the following year in Khorasan, but his son Malik Shah stepped right into his shoes, and under the expert tutelage of Nizam al-Mulk proved himself nearly the equal of his father. It was he who conquered Syria and the Holy Lands for the Turks.
The partnership between the Persian vizier and the two Seljuk sultans served both sides well. The sultans devoted themselves to conquests, Nizam al-Mulk to organizing their conquests. There was much to organize because the sultans put diverse relatives in charge of various lands as they moved on, and the relatives regarded the territories given to them as their personal possessions. Fresh off the steppes, these Turks did not fully grasp the distinction between taxing and looting.
SELJUK EMPIRE: THE TURKS INVADE THE ISLAMIC WORLD
Nizam al-Mulk got the tax system straightened out and created a cadre of roving inspectors to make sure the tax collectors didn’t cheat. He used the Sultan’s war revenues to build roads and organized a police force to protect travelers, so that merchants might feel safe transporting goods. He also set up state-funded hostels spaced about a day’s journey apart for their convenience. This great vizier also built a network of schools and colleges called madrassas to teach future officials of his Islamic society a uniform doctrine. He ensured the uniformity of it by putting the curriculum in the hands of orthodox Sunni ulama.
These measures were all part of his struggle against the centripetal forces of his times. Nizam al-Mulk hoped to weave a stable Islamic community out of three ethnic strands. The Turks would keep order with their military strength, the Arabs would provide unity by contributing religious doctrine, and the Persians would contribute all the remaining arts of civilization—administration, philosophy, poetry, painting, architecture, science—to elevate and beautify the world. The new ruling class would thus consist of a Turkish sultan and his army, an Arab khalifa and the ulama, and a Persian bureaucracy staffed by artists and thinkers.
The stability this engendered would, he hoped, let farmers and merchants generate the wealth needed to . . . provide the taxes needed to . . . fund the armies needed to . . . keep the order needed to . . . let farmers and merchants keep generating wealth.
But Nizam al-Mulk had a sinister opponent working to unravel his fabric, a ruthless genius named Hassan Sabbah, founder of the Cult of the Assassins. I call them a cult because “sect” seems too mainstream. They were a branch that split away from a branch that split away from Shi’ism, itself a branch of Islam.
Shi’is believe in a central guiding religious figure called an imam, of whom there is always one in the world. As soon as the imam dies, his special grace passes into one of his sons, making him the imam. The trouble is that every time an imam passes away, disagreements can arise about which of his sons is the next imam. Each such disagreement can lead to a split that gives birth to a new branch of the sect.
Just such a disagreement had broken out about who was the fifth imam, spawning the Zaidi sect, also known as the Fivers. A more serious disagreement arose after the death of the sixth imam, giving rise to a sect called the Isma’ilis, who became the dominant branch of Shi’ism for a while, since the Fatimids who captured Egypt and set up a rival khalifate were Isma’ilis.
In the late eleventh century the Isma’ilis themselves branched into two. The minority was a revolutionary offshoot angered by the wealth and pomp of the now-mighty Fatimid khalifate and dedicated to leveling rich and poor, empowering the meek, and generally getting the Islamic project back on course. The leaders of this movement sent an operative named Hassan Sabbah to Persia to recruit adherents.
In Persia, Sabbah developed his own power base. He took control of a fortress called Alamut (“the eagle’s nest”), situated high in the Elburz mountains of northern Iran. No one could touch him there because the only approach to the fortress was a footpath too narrow to accommodate an army. How Sabbah conquered it, no one knows. Some legends say trickery was involved, some that he used supernatural means, some that he converted the staff of the fortress and then simply bought the place from its master for a small sum. Whatever the case, there at Alamut, Sabbah got busy organizing the Assassins.
Did his cult adopt this name because they were devoted to political murder? Quite the opposite: political murder is now called assassination because it was a tactic practiced by this cult. Centuries later, Marco Polo would claim that Sabbah’s agents smoked hashish in order to hop themselves up for murder and were thus called hashishin, from which derived the word assassin. I doubt this etymology, and I’ll tell you why.
Sabbah was the archetypal prototerrorist, using murder largely for its propaganda value. Since he lacked the resources and troops to fight battles or conquer cities, he sent individuals, or at most small groups, to assassinate carefully targeted figures chosen for the shock their death would spark. The Assassins plotted their killings for months or even years, sometimes contriving to make friends with the victim or enter his service and work their way up to a position of trust.
Where in this long process was the hashish smoking supposed to take place? It doesn’t add up. The Lebanese writer Amin Malouf suggests that actually the word assassin probably derives from the Persian word assas, which means “foundation.” Like most religious schismatics, Sabbah taught that the revelations had been corrupted and that he was taking his followers back to the foundation, the original. Of course, every schismatic has a different idea about what the founding revelation was. Sabbah’s doctrine strayed pretty far from anything most scholars recognize as Islam. For one thing, he taught that while Mohammed was indeed the messenger of Allah, Ali was an actual incarnation of Allah—as were the succeeding imams.
Sabbah further taught that the Qur’an had a surface or exterior meaning but many levels of esoteric or interior meanings. The surface meaning prescribed the rituals of religion, the outward show, the rules of conduct, the ethical and moral mandates; all of this was for the brutal masses who couldn’t aspire to deeper knowledge. The esoteric Qur’an—and every verse, every line, every letter had an esoteric meaning—provided a secret code that allowed cognoscenti to unlock the cryptogram of the created universe.
The Assassins were organized as the ultimate secret society. Out in the world, they gave no indication of their identity or their real beliefs. No one knew, therefore, how many Assassins there were or which of the people in the bazaar, or the mosque, or anywhere else was actually an Assassin. Recruits went through intensive indoctrination and training, but once accepted into the sect, each member had a rank reflecting his level of knowledge. Initiates moved from stage to stage as they presumably plumbed ever deeper levels of meaning in the Qur’an, until they reached the foundation upon which all was built, whereupon they were admitted to Sabbah’s innermost circle.
Although they crafted their plots in utmost secrecy, the Assassins killed with utmost publicity: their object was not really to remove this or that person from power but to make people throughout the civilized world believe that the Assassins could kill any person, anytime, anywhere. Sabbah wanted people to worry that anyone they knew—their best friend, their most trusted servant, even their spouse�
��might actually be an Assassin. In this way, he hoped to control the policies of men who, unlike himself, did hold territory, did possess resources, and did command troops.
The agents who did the murders for him were called Fedayeen, which means “sacrificers.” When they plotted a public assassination, they knew they would be caught and killed within moments of completing their deed, but they made no effort to evade this outcome. Indeed, dying was a key element of the ritual they were enacting: they were suicide knifers. By embracing death, they let the authorities know that not even the threat of execution could intimidate them.
The Assassins added to the anxiety of a world already in turmoil. Sunnis were struggling with Shi’i. The Abbasid khalifate in Baghdad was wrestling with the Fatimid khalifate in Cairo. Nearly a century of Turkish invasions had brutalized society. And now this cult of killers extending its secret tendrils throughout the Middle East injected society with a persistent underlying nightmare.
The Assassins announced themselves with a series of ever more spectacular assassinations. They killed Seljuk officials and well-known Sunni clerics. They killed two of the khalifas. As often as possible, they carried out their assassination in the biggest mosques during Friday prayer, when they could be sure of an audience.
Then in 1092 they murdered the recently retired Nizam al-Mulk himself. Scarcely a month later, they dispatched his master, Sultan Malik Shah, son of Alp Arslan. In the space of weeks, they had eliminated the two men most crucial to the shaky unity the empire enjoyed. These murders set off a debilitating power struggle among Seljuk sons, brothers, cousins, and relatives, as well as miscellaneous adventurers, a struggle that left the western portion of the empire in pieces. From Asia Minor to the Sinai, practically every city ended up in the hands of a different prince—Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Antioch, Tripoli, Edessa—each was a de facto sovereign state owing only nominal fealty to the sultan in Baghdad. Each petty prince huddled over his possession like a dog over a bone and eyed all the other princes with suspicion.
