Book of Destruction

by P Sachidanandan

  The other passengers were preparing for the night. Spreading their sheets, drawing the curtains, switching off the lights … but I was not fated to sleep that night. I returned to the magazine.

  As I began reading again there came another shock. The founder of the Assassins was called, of all names, Hasan Ibn al Sabbah! I had not failed to notice that the name of the fourth Imam in the order of the Sevener Ismailiyahs, Zainul Abidin, was shared by the Welcome Hotel owner, but I hadn’t given it much thought then. And now, this! Again names were playing hide-and-seek with me. The gallery of names was growing to a point beyond coincidence. As the length of the gallery increases, does it not step into the realm of conspiracy? The reason for my death-defying businessman friend dispatching this article, in a magazine through such a labyrinthine route, is becoming clearer. His body was never discovered from the blast site. The fantastic story he narrated has not ended. It hangs unfinished in the still air. With the divinity of the figure seven forming an aura around it.

  Hasan Ibn al Sabbah, who founded the sect in 1090, was a man of culture, a patron of poetry, profoundly interested in the latest advances of sciences, so said the professor, quoting from Amin Maalouf’s famous book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. He was also a classmate of the renowned poet, mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, as well as of the grand vizier of the Seljuk Sultanate, Nizam al Mulk, according to Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in his work, History of the Assassins. Though Amin Maalouf thought that this might be just a legend, von Hammer described an agreement the three classmates had made during their schooldays. The pact was that if any one of them came to occupy a powerful position in life he would share his fortune with the rest.

  At the time of Hasan’s birth, the Shia doctrine, to which he adhered, was dominant in Muslim Asia, including Syria and Persia. Persians were dictating orders to even the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. But by the time Hasan was a young man the situation had changed radically; the Seljuks, upholders of Sunni orthodoxy, took control of the entire region. Nizam al Mulk became the prime minister of the Seljuk Sultan. He remained partly faithful to their childhood pact and extended a position in the court to Omar Khayyam, who preferred to keep away from power and continued to live a modest life, pursuing his poetical and mathematical interests. Meanwhile, Hasan was wandering the world with fire in his soul, thirsting for revenge on the Seljuks. He was shaping into a contender for power and a killer. Towards 1071 he decided to settle in Egypt, the last bastion of the Shias. In Cairo he hobnobbed with a number of religious fundamentalists and began to make strategic plans to achieve his goals. He raised an army of dedicated men and captured the fortress of Alamut situated in an inaccessible region of the Elburz Mountains near the Caspian Sea. That was how Alamut became the headquarters of the sect of Assassins.

  It almost seemed as if Prof. Ameer Ali had become possessed as he described the growth of the sect. The words practically jumped with energy from the pages. It is but natural for a historian’s words to become charged when describing the fast and unprecedented growth of an individual, organization or faith. Even as a reader, I was carried away.

  The knowledge and experience Hasan gained through his activities taught him that laws and even religion served only as an armour for the powerful. What a militant organization needed was a single-minded focus on the goal where God and His laws and moral commandments could only become deterrents. While the operations were kept secret from the public, the theories and higher objectives were shielded from the operators themselves. This resulted in a dedicated group of suicide attackers who were always ready to blindly carry out the orders of their commanders. There were three concentric circles of organization. At the periphery were the religious missionaries who lived the pious life according to Islamic doctrines, abstaining from wine and the arts. Then there were the suicide attackers who were highly efficient mechanical automatons who rarely used their intelligence. At the centre was the leadership, detached from everything except the objectives of the sect, even Islam and God. The theories and stratagem were formulated in a code language not accessible to even the top grandmasters.

  All members, from the novices to the grandmaster, were ranked according to their level of knowledge, reliability and courage. Hasan’s favourite technique for sowing terror among his enemies was murder. Not only kings, common people too could be made a target. The operators were sent individually or in small groups on assignments to kill chosen persons. They generally disguised themselves as merchants or ascetics and moved about in the city, familiarizing themselves with the habits of their victims. Then, once their plan was ready, they struck. The more secret the preparations, the more public the execution had to be. That was why they preferred mosques, the favourite day being Friday, generally around noon, close to prayer time. The author here drew a comparison with the jihadi terrorists of our times. Also as a footnote he compared and contrasted Bhagat Singh and Nathuram Godse. ‘For Hasan, murder was not merely a means of disposing of an enemy, but was intended primarily as a twofold lesson for the public,’ wrote Prof. Ameer Ali, quoting Amin Maalouf, ‘first as a public punishment for the victim and the second, the heroic sacrifice of the executioner himself, known as fedayeen, or suicide commando, because he was almost always cut down on the spot.’

  Prof. Ameer Ali said that contemporaries observed with awe the serenity with which the members of the sect accepted their own death. Here again, in a footnote he touched upon the descriptions of Sleeman about how the thugs walked towards the gallows singing songs and dancing. Contemporaries of the Assassins believed that they were high on hashish at the time of their feats and named them ‘hashishin’, a word that became distorted into ‘assassin’ and was soon incorporated into many languages as a common noun to describe murderers who carried out premeditated, execution-style killings. Did Hasan encourage the adherents to drug themselves so they could numb the pain of death or even make it enjoyable? Or, more prosaically, was he trying to get them hooked on a narcotic in order to keep them dependent on him? Or was he simply urging them towards a state of euphoria so they would not falter during the moment of action? Or did he instead simply rely on their blind faith? Was that blind faith itself the narcotic that intoxicated them? Whatever the answer, there was no doubt that Hasan was a commander par excellence.

  Once, the story goes, in order to demonstrate the dedication and discipline of his followers before a messenger of Sultan Malak Shah, Hasan pointed his finger towards one of them and that man instantly stabbed himself and fell dead. According to another legend, Henry of Champagne was in the process of concluding a treaty with the grandmaster successor Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain, in the fortress of al-Kahf. The grandmaster, in order to prove his absolute authority to the Frankish visitor (the Arabs used to call the European crusaders Franks or Franjs which became Firangi, when it reached India), ordered two adherents to hurl themselves off the ramparts, which they did without a moment’s hesitation. Hasan did not spare anyone who disobeyed the orders even if they were his sons. Two of his sons met their death at his own hands.

  Hasan did not forgive his childhood companion Nizam al Mulk for serving the Sunni Seljuks. The Nizam was executed with a sword-stroke by Hasan’s followers in front of a crowd. Hasan soon expanded his killing operations to Syria where he won the trust of King Ridwan through the Assassins who were dispatched in the guise of astrologers and goldsmiths. As the Assassins gained in strength, the Imams and religious heads, feeling an imminent threat, united and began speaking out openly against them. The Assassins were declared non-believers and dangerous criminals. They convinced the public that the Assassins were Muslims only in appearance and were described as ‘Batinis’—those who adhere to a faith other than that to which they profess in public. This was the beginning of an open war between the Muslim religious organizations and the Assassins. The Assassins had begun killing highly placed persons such as the amirs of Islam in accordance with their secret pact with the Franks. When the pact between the cross-bearin
g Christian crusaders and the dagger-bearing Assassins came out in public, the mobs began tracking the latter down street by street and massacring them.

  Hasan, however, died a natural death. He was only twenty when he had shared the idyllic dreams of his classmates Omar Khayyam and Nizam al Mulk. But about half of the seventy years of his life were filled with plotting, assassinations and bloodshed. This man, who plunged his dagger relentlessly into kings, ministers, clerics and ordinary men in the street, died quietly, of old age, in his fortress, with not even a pinprick hurting him.

  Despite the death of Hasan in his Alamut retreat in 1124, there was a sharp recrudescence in the activity of the Assassins in the period that followed. They continued hunting down kings and men of stature and spreading fear among the public. But, bereft of objectives and ideals, they degenerated into indiscriminate murderers, spreading death and terror among king and commoner, Christian and Muslim. They were no longer pests; they had become a plague torturing the Arab world at a time when all its energies were needed to withstand the Frankish onslaught, according to Amin Maalouf.

  With Sultan Muhammad laying siege to the fort of Alamut, and the Franks capturing Damascus, the power of the Assassins fell in Persia and Syria. Rashid al Din Sinan, known as the Old Man of the Mountain and commander of the Assassins in Syria, sent a message to Amalric announcing that he and his supporters were willing to convert to Christianity. The Templars, busy with their crusades for recovering the Holy Grail and the Sangreal Documents from beneath Solomon’s Temple, were not interested, but many Assassins were prepared to pay tribute to the Order of the Templars and live in peace.

  In 1257, the indomitable horsemen of the steppes, under the leadership of Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu, laid waste the whole of the Muslim world and brought an end to the Abbasid dynasty. Hulegu, like Hasan Ibn al Sabbah, had been interested in philosophy, science and literature before transforming, in the course of his campaigns, into his bloodthirsty and destructive self. Although strongly influenced by Christianity (his mother, favourite wife and several close collaborators were members of the Nestorian Church), he never renounced shamanism, the traditional religion of his people. In the territories he conquered and governed, notably Persia, he was generally tolerant of Muslims; but once he became mired in distrust and the lust for destruction, he embarked on a ruthless and total obliteration of some of the most prestigious and thriving metropolises of Islam. On their way to Baghdad, Hulegu’s army destroyed the Assassins’ sanctuary at Alamut and sacked its library, which was of inestimable value as far as the philosophy of destruction was concerned. Thanks to Hulegu, the knowledge about the theories and activities of this sect—which raised destruction to mystical heights and which remained unapproachable in its time—was irretrievably lost. The remaining Assassins were hunted down and slaughtered. The survivors, if any, scattered. The Ismailiyahs vanished from Persia and Syria. The newly drawn political maps made them irrelevant.

  Here the author again dipped into the history of the thugs in a footnote. He drew comparisons with the thugs who were also hunted down and destroyed during the nineteenth century by the British administration in India. He noted that the arrival of trains, roads and motor vehicles brought an end to the movement of traders’ caravans and, as a consequence, to thuggee itself.

  Prof. Ameer Ali pointed out the irony that centuries after the destruction of Alamut and the Assassin sect, the Ismailiyahs, now the followers of the Agha Khan, have survived as one of the most peaceable forms of Islam. Who will believe, he asked, that the well-known philanthropist of our times, the Agha Khan, is a direct successor of Hasan Ibn al Sabbah?

  Yet, Prof. Ali said in his concluding section that there are many who believe that the doctrines of the Assassins are still being passed down in secrecy in remote and unknown places. That the mountains of Kuhistan shelter them and that it is impossible for even the modern-day esoteric Islam to breach their secrecy. Memories of the invasions of Genghis Khan and the Tartars have turned into myths and now personify evil and horror in the European social psyche. The workings of the machinery of destruction keep the imagination alive and the masters of literature busy creating fantasies. Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the unending science fiction and horror movies of Hollywood are the result. The terrorism-infested history of modern times is proof that the seeds of the doctrine of destruction have ridden the winds and are now germinating in unexpected corners of the world. The fedayeen die but the practice of suicide attacks resurrects with renewed vigour, because the practice of destruction is not limited to the Vikings or the Templars or the thugs—it is an inseparable feature of human nature.

  Prof. Ali’s article ended there. There was no note about the author or even his contact information. I cannot deny that this descriptive article, devoid of any original analyses, gave me a lot to think about. I felt that the author, while remaining behind the curtain of anonymity, did manage to raise a few goosebumps here and there. His description of the secrecy with which the Assassins planned their acts and the insistence on the public nature of their executions, the modern-day transformation of the Ismailiyahs from assassins into messengers of peace, the lost books and repositories of their secrets, the parallels with the thugs and, above all, the tantalizing hint that the Assassins still exist … in fact, without really saying it, he gave the impression that they do not just continue to exist, but are active. My paranoid brain started wondering: wasn’t putting that idea into my mind the real purpose of this whole article? I suspected that there was a lot more that he wanted to say, but had left unsaid. For reasons only he knew. Specifically for me, what the article did was, link the names of Hasan Ibn al Sabbah and Zainul Abidin. And pull the name Ameer Ali out of a fictional account of thuggee and thread it into the present in the form of a disembodied voice speaking from the pages of this magazine. All for me. Was this article written for me, or am I becoming delusional? This magazine published and distributed just to carry this article and, of course, the letter to me. Now the job is done, there will be no more issues. Inside a train hurtling forward, piercing the depth of the night, under the light of a fifteen-watt bulb, in the midst of fellow sleeping passengers, I felt suffocated by my own imagination.

  The night had advanced considerably. The train was rocking to its own rhythmic jolts and swings. It was cold inside. The housekeeping staff must have gone to sleep without checking the air conditioner settings. I was shivering under the blankets. The other bomb in my bag, the unread letter, must have contributed to my restlessness. Securing the magazine and the letter safely in my bag, I decided to go to sleep. It can keep till tomorrow. I switched off my reading lamp.

  Needless to say, I got hardly any rest. Woke early. I went to the door to gaze at the horizon still untouched by first light. I took advantage of the unoccupied toilets, finished my morning ablutions and returned to my seat to find that the attendant had begun his rounds with the morning tea; I accepted a welcome steaming cup from him.

  ‘So you have finished reading Prof. Ali’s article then?’ Hasan began his letter. ‘I knew you would choose that first. But then, Ameer Ali too, like me, is not unknown to you. No, don’t try to tell me you have never met him. After all, seeing is not the only way of knowing a person. Who, among the large number of people who know Ameer Ali, has actually seen him? You cannot see a character, only know him. Just as you cannot see him, so too he can never die. Medows Taylor did not write his death in. So Ameer Ali will never die and will never be seen. Articles, letters … all very effective means of keeping the protagonist behind the screen. But whom am I instructing! You are, after all, a master at the art. Characters of fiction often appear more real than characters in real life. However, Ameer Ali is also a real thug. Medows Taylor might have created a name, but he did not create the character himself; he wrote from life, as far as the thugs were concerned.’

  What was all this humbug? The professor who wrote the article is a character from a nine
teenth-century novel? This man was trying to string unrelated events on a flimsy thread of names rather than real individuals. And he himself, a name attached to the same tenuous thread! Is he too just a name? It is a strange breakfast this man has prepared for me, I thought uneasily. And this, after a supper that still lay inside me, undigested. I shuddered at the thought that he himself might be on this train, perhaps even in the next compartment, keeping an eye on me. Once again, my co-passenger. Or, perhaps, he was actually within me, as a name. The thread might in fact be a garland of fear instead of real events. Like the venerated Ali sitting eternally on the throne among the clouds, here was Ameer Ali, invisible and beyond death. For all I know, Hasan could be envisioning Ameer Ali as a metaphor just like the great Ali. Perhaps Hasan too was a metaphor, speaking to me through this letter. But what about the magazine, the very real paper, ink, printing machines, street boys …

  ‘The destroyed are loyal to their destroyers,’ Hasan continued. ‘As a character is, to his or her creator. As for the thugs, Sleeman and Taylor who destroyed them are also their creators. They are the ones who immortalized them. Their code language, their rituals, beliefs, everything really, including their origin. Sleeman’s shot in the dark, that the thugs were the descendants of some vagrant tribes that wandered into India in the wake of the Turko-Afghan-Mongol invasions from Central Asia, although completely baseless, was swallowed whole by Ameer Ali. The professor of history could not see the falsity in it.

  ‘I always wonder how Ameer Ali manages the department of history at the university. He wrote to me just a couple of weeks ago. There was also a mention of you and your works in his letter. I quote, “This fellow dabbles in novels, history and even sometimes philosophy; he doesn’t seem to possess either a creative mind to write novels or the methodological training to handle history. Forget that, my question is, can one person be a Sleeman as well as a Taylor, a researcher and a fiction writer, as this chap seems to aspire to be?” Poor Ali. He, of course, does not know that Medows Taylor was also a good researcher. He was the first to discover the megalithic tombs in the Deccan. He opened a number of them and compiled an accurate description of their structure and contents; the three scholarly papers he published on the subject testify to his having developed a technique for excavation far in advance of his time. Among archaeologists in India, he was the first to grasp the true function of excavation as he actually drew and described sections of the ground with various strata clearly marked out.