The Assassins (5 page)

In the first century of Islamic expansion there were many tensions that gave rise to grievances, many grievances and aspirations that found expression in sectarian dissent and revolt. The spread of Islam by conversion brought into the Islamic community large numbers of new believers, who carried with them, from their Christian, Jewish and Iranian backgrounds, religious concepts and attitudes unknown to the early Arab Muslims. These new converts, though Muslims, were not Arabs, still less aristocrats; the inferior social and economic status assigned to them by the dominant Arab aristocracy created a sense of injustice, and made them willing recruits to movements that questioned the legitimacy of the existing order. Nor were the Arab conquerors themselves immune to these discontents. Pious Arabs deplored the worldliness of the Caliphs and the ruling groups; nomadic Arabs resented the encroachments of authority - and many others, who suffered from the sharper economic and social differences that came with conquest and riches, began to share the griefs and hopes of the new converts. Many of these had traditions of political and religious legitimism - the Jewish and Christian belief in the sanctity and ultimate triumph of the royal house of David, through the anointed Messiah, the Zoroastrian expectation of a Saoshyans, a saviour who would arise at the end of time from the holy seed of Zoroaster. Once converted to Islam, they were readily attracted by the claims of the house of the Prophet, which seemed to offer an end to the inequities of the existing order and the fulfilment of the promise of Islam.

In the transformation of the Shia from a party to a sect, two events are of special significance, both of them arising from unsuccessful attempts by Shiite claimants to overthrow the Umayyad Caliphate. The first, in the year 68o, was led by Husayn, the son of Ali and his wife Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet. On the tenth day of the month of Muharram, at a place called Karbala in Iraq, Husayn, his family, and his followers encountered an Umayyad force and were ruthlessly put to death. Some seventy died in the massacre; only a sick boy, Ali ibn Husayn, who was left lying in a tent, survived. This dramatic martyrdom of the kin of the Prophet, and the wave of anguish and penitence that followed it, infused a new religious fervour in the Shia, now inspired by the potent themes of suffering, passion and expiation.

A second turning point came at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century. In 685, one Mukhtar, an Arab of Kufa, led a revolt in the name of a son of Ali known as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya, who was, he said, the Imam, the true and rightful head of the Muslims. Mukhtar was defeated and killed in 687, but his movement survived. When Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya himself died in about 700, there were some who said that the Imamate had passed to his son. Others claimed that he was not really dead, but had gone into hiding in the mountains of Radwa, near Mecca; from there, in God's good time, he would return and triumph over his enemies. Such a messianic Imam is called the Mahdi, the rightly-guided one.

These events set the pattern for a long series of religious revolutionary movements. There are two central figures in such a movement: the Imam, who is sometimes also the Mahdi, the rightful leader who comes to destroy tyranny and establish justice, and the dd'i, the summoner, who preaches - and often also devises - his message, enlists his disciples, and finally, it may be, leads them to victory or martyrdom. In the middle of the eighth century one of these movements even won a transitory success, bringing about the overthrow of the Umayyads and their replacement by the Abbasids, another branch of the family to which both the Prophet and Ali had belonged - but in the hour of their triumph the Abbasid Caliphs renounced the sect and dais that had brought them to power, and chose the path of stability and continuity in religion and politics. The resulting frustration of revolutionary hopes gave rise to new and fierce discontents, and a new wave of extremist and messianic movements.

In early times both the doctrines and organizations of the Shia were subject to frequent variation. Numerous pretenders appeared, claiming, with varying plausibility, to be members or agents of the house of the Prophet and, after enriching the mythical description of the awaited redeemer with some new detail, disappeared from human eyes. Their programmes varied from moderate, more or less dynastic opposition to extreme religious heterodoxy, far removed from the commonly accepted teachings of Islam. A recurring feature is the cult of holy men - Imams and dais - who were believed to possess miraculous powers, and whose doctrines reflect mystical and illuminationist ideas derived from Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and various Iranian and Judaeo- Christian heresies. Among the beliefs attributed to them are those of reincarnation, the deification of the Imams and sometimes even of the dais, and libertinism - the abandonment of all law and restraint. In some areas - as for example among the peasants and nomads in parts of Persia and Syria - distinctive local religions emerged, resulting from the interaction of Shiite teachings and earlier local cults and creeds.

The political programme of the sects was obvious: to overthrow the existing order and instal their chosen Imam. It is more difficult to identify any social or economic programme, though their activities were clearly related to social and economic discontents and aspirations. Some idea of these aspirations may be inferred from the messianic traditions that were current, showing what needs the Mahdi was expected to meet. Part of his task was, in the broad sense, Islamic - to restore the true Islam, and spread the faith to the ends of the earth. More specifically, he was to bring justice - to `fill the world with justice and equity as it is now filled with tyranny and oppression', to establish equality between the weak and the strong, and to bring peace and plenty.

At first, the leaders to whom the Shia gave their allegiance based their claims on kinship with the Prophet rather than on descent from him in the direct line, through his daughter Fatima; some of them, including a few of the most active, were not descendants of Fatima - some not even of Ali, but of other branches of the Prophet's clan. But after the victory and betrayal of the Abbasids, the Shia concentrated their hopes on the descendants of Ali and, among these, more particularly on those who sprang from his marriage with the Prophet's daughter. Increasing stress was laid on the importance of direct descent from the Prophet, and the idea gained ground that since the Prophet's death there had in fact been a single line of legitimate Imams, who alone were the rightful heads of the Islamic community. These were Ali, his sons Hasan and Husayn, and the descendants of Husayn through his son Ali Zayn al-Abidin, the solitary survivor of the tragedy at Karbala. Apart from Husayn, these Imams had in the main refrained from political activity. While other claimants spent themselves in vain attempts to overthrow the Caliphate by force, the legitimate Imams preferred to function as a sort of legal opposition to the Caliphs in power. They resided in Mecca or Medina, far from the main political centres, and, while maintaining their claims, did little to advance them. On the contrary, they sometimes gave recognition, and even help and advice to the Umayyad, and after them to the Abbasid rulers of the Empire. In the pious Shiite tradition, this attitude of the legitimate Imams is given a religious colouring; their passivity was an expression of their devoutness and otherworldliness, their acquiescence an application of the principle of Tagiyya.

The term Tagiyya, caution, precaution, denotes an Islamic doctrine of dispensation - the idea that, under compulsion or menace, a believer may be dispensed from fulfilling certain obligations of religion. The principle is variously defined and interpreted, and is by no means peculiar to the Shia; it was they, however, who were most frequently exposed to the dangers of persecution and repression, and by them therefore that the principle was most frequently invoked. It was used to justify the concealment of beliefs likely to arouse the hostility of the authorities or the populace; it was cited as an answer to the selfdestroying militancy that had led so many to their deaths in utterly hopeless rebellions.

The first half of the eighth century was a period of intensive activity among the extremist Shia. Countless sects and sub-sects appeared, especially among the mixed population of Southern Iraq and the coasts of the Persian Gulf. Their doctrines were variable and eclectic, and transition was easy and frequent from one sect or leader to another. The Muslim sources name many religious preachers, some of them men of humble origin, who led revolts and were put to death, and attribute to some of them doctrines which were later characteristic of the Ismailis. One group practised strangling with cords as a religious duty - an obvious parallel to Indian Thuggee, and a foreshadowing of the `assassinations' of later centuries. Even among those who were moderate in doctrine, there were militant groups who tried to seize power by force, and suffered defeat and destruction at the hands of the Umayyad and then of the Abbasid armies.

By the second half of the eighth century the early extremist and militant movements had, for the most part, failed, and had either disappeared or dwindled into insignificance. It was the legitimate Imams - moderate, pliant, yet resolute - who preserved and enriched the Shiite faith and prepared the way for a new and greater effort to win control of the world of Islam.

Despite these early failures, and despite the discouragement of the Imams themselves, extremist and militant elements continued to appear, even in the immediate entourage of the legitimate Imams. The decisive split between extremists and moderates occurred after the death in 765 of Ja'far al-Sadiq, the sixth Imam after Ali. Ja`far's eldest son was Ismail. For reasons which are not quite clear, and probably because of his association with extremist elements, Ismail was disinherited, and a large part of the Shia recognized his younger brother Musa al-Kazim as seventh Imam. The line of Musa continued until the twelfth Imam, who disappeared in about 873, and is still the `awaited Imam' or Mahdi of the great majority of the Shia at the present day. The followers of the twelve Imams, known as the Ithna `ashari or Twelver Shia, represent the more moderate branch of the sect. Their differences from the main body of Sunni Islam are limited to a certain number of points of doctrine, which in recent years have become ever less significant. Since the sixteenth century, Twelver Shi'ism has been the official religion of Iran.

Another group followed Ismail and his descendants, and are known as Ismailis (Isma`ilis). For long working in secret, they formed a sect which in cohesion and organization, in both intellectual and emotional appeal, far outstripped all its rivals. In place of the chaotic speculations and primitive superstitions of the earlier sects, a series of distinguished theologians elaborated a system of religious doctrine on a high philosophic level, and produced a literature which, after centuries of eclipse, is only now once again beginning to achieve recognition at its true worth. To the pious, the Ismailis offered respect for the Qur'an, for tradition and for law no less than that of the Sunnis. To the intellectual, they submitted a philosophical explanation of the universe, drawing on the sources of ancient and especially neoplatonic thought. To the spiritual, they brought a warm, personal, emotional faith, sustained by the example of the suffering of the Imams and the self-sacrifice of their followers - the experience of Passion, and the attainment of the Truth. To the discontented, finally, they offered the attraction of a well-organized, widespread and powerful opposition movement, which seemed to provide a real possibility of overthrowing the existing order, and establishing in its place a new and just society, headed by the Imam - the heir of the Prophet, the chosen of God, and the sole rightful leader of mankind.

The Imam is central to the Ismaili system - of doctrine and of organization, of loyalty and of action. After the creation of the world by the action of the universal mind on the universal soul, human history falls into a series of cycles, each begun by a `speaking' imam, or prophet, followed by a succession of `silent' imams. There were cycles of hidden and of manifest imams, corresponding to the periods of clandestinity and of success of the faith. The imams, in the current cycle the descendants of Ali and Fatima through Ismail, were divinely inspired and infallible - in a sense indeed themselves divine, since the Imam was the microcosm, the personification of the metaphysical soul of the universe. As such, he was the fountainhead of knowledge and authority - of the esoteric truths that were hidden from the uninformed, and of commands that required total and unquestioning obedience.

For the initiate, there was the drama and excitement of secret knowledge and secret action. The former was made known through the Taiwil al-Batin, esoteric interpretation, a characteristic doctrine of the sect which gave rise to the term Batini, by which it was sometimes known. Besides their literal and obvious meaning, the prescriptions of the Qur'an and the traditions had a second meaning, an allegoric and esoteric interpretation which was revealed by the Imam and taught to the initiates. Some branches of the sect go even further, and adopt an antinomian doctrine that is recurrent in extremist Muslim heresy and mysticism. The ultimate religious obligation is knowledge - gnosis - of the true Imam; the literal meaning of the law is abrogated for the faithful, and survives, if at all, as a punishment for the profane. A common theme of Ismaili religious writings is the search for the Truth - at first vain, then culminating in a moment of blinding illumination. The organization and activities of the sect, and the custodianship and propagation of its teachings, were in the hands of a hierarchy of dais, ranked under a chief da'i, who was the immediate helper of the Imam.

For the first century and a half after the death of Ismail, the Ismaili Imams remained hidden, and little is known about the activities or even the teachings of the dais. A new phase began in the second half of the ninth century, when the growing and manifest weakness of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad seemed to portend the break-up of the Islamic Empire and the disruption of Islamic society. In the provinces, local dynasties appeared - usually military, sometimes tribal in origin; for the most part they were short-lived, and in some areas extortionate and oppressive. Even in the capital, the Caliphs were losing their power, and becoming helpless puppets in the hands of their own soldiery. The foundations of confidence and assent in the Islamic universal polity were crumbling, and men began to look elsewhere for comfort and reassurance. In these uncertain times, the message of the Shia - that the Islamic community had taken the wrong path, and must be brought back to the right one - was heard with new attention. Both branches of the Shia, the Twelvers and the Ismailis, profited from these opportunities, and at first it seemed as if the Twelvers were about to triumph. Twelver Shiite dynasties appeared in several places, and in 946 a Shiite dynasty from Persia, the Buyids, inflicted the ultimate humiliation on Sunni Islam by capturing Baghdad and bringing the Caliph himself under Shiite control. By this time, however, the Twelver Shiites had no Imam, for the twelfth and last had disappeared some seventy years previously. The Buyids, confronted with a crucial choice, decided not to recognize any other Alid claimant, but to retain the Abbasids as titular Caliphs, under their own domination and patronage. By so doing, they still further discredited the already tarnished Sunni Caliphate; at the same time, they finally eliminated moderate Shi'ism as a serious alternative to it.