The Assassins (20 page)

An interesting indication of how far the Assassins had become a recognized and even an accepted part of the Syrian political scene is given by Ibn Wasil, himself a native of central Syria. In the year 1240 the qadi of Sinjar, Badr al-Din, incurred the wrath of the new Sultan. Fleeing through Syria, he sought and received asylum from the Assassins. Their chief at that time was a Persian called Taj al-Din, who had come from Alamut. Ibn Wasil does not hesitate to add that he knew him personally and was on terms of friendship with him. The same Taj al-Din is named in a Masyaf inscription dated Dhu'l Qa'da 646 (February or March 1249).

Only one group of events remains to be recorded before the political extinction of the Assassins in Syria - their dealings with St Louis. The story of an Assassin plot against St Louis while he was still a youth in France can, like all the other stories of Assassin activities in Europe, be dismissed as without foundation. But the account by Joinville, the biographer of St Louis, of the king's dealings with the Assassins after his arrival in Palestine is of a different order, and bears every mark of authenticity. Emissaries of the Assassins came to the king in Acre, and asked him to pay tribute to their chief, `as the Emperor of Germany, the King of Hungary, the Sultan of Babylon [Egypt], and the others do every year, because they know well they can only live as long as it may please him.', 5 Alternatively, if the King did not wish to pay tribute, they would be satisfied with the remission of the tribute which they themselves paid to the Hospitallers and the Templars. This tribute was paid, explains Joinville, because these two orders feared nothing from the Assassins, since, if one master was killed, he would at once be replaced by another as good and the Assassin chief did not wish to waste his men where nothing could be gained. In the event, the tribute to the orders continued, and the King and the chief da'i exchanged gifts. It was on this occasion that the Arabic-speaking friar Yves the Breton met and talked with the Assassin chief.

The end of the power of the Assassins came under the double assault of the Mongols and of the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Baybars. In Syria, as one would expect, the Assassins joined with the other Muslims in repelling the Mongol threat, and sought to win the good graces of Baybars by sending him embassies and gifts. Baybars at first showed no open hostility to them, and, in granting a truce to the Hospitallers in 1266, stipulated that they renounce the tribute they were receiving from various Muslim cities and districts, including the Assassin castles, whose tribute is given by an Egyptian source as i,zoo dinars and a hundred mudd of wheat and barley. The Assassins prudently sent emissaries to Baybars offering him the tribute which they had formerly paid to the Franks, to be used in the holy war.

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 I26o 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 I27o 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 Baybars' 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 12'73.

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 gild` 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.' 8 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 fo,ooo, of whom some, but not all, have accepted the Aga Khan as their Imam.

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 supporters, to justify his inaction, claimed that no crime had been committed. Uthman had been an oppressor; his death was an execution, not a murder., 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 Shia 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 fellowtribesman Mughira b. Said. 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 Shia. The parallel they offer to both the antinomianism and the weapon-cult of the later Ismailis is striking.