World Famous Cults and Fanatics (6 page)

A hundred thousand Jews died in this seventeenth-century holocaust.
Thousands of others fled the country, and many went to Turkey, where there were already wealthy Jewish communities.

When Sabbatai Zevi heard about these massacres he was appalled.
Overwhelmed by a desperate desire to do something for his people, he suddenly became convinced he was the Messiah who would lead
them back to the Holy Land.
And he began his mission by doing something that horrified his orthodox fellow Jews – he stood up in the synagogue and pronounced the name of Jehovah (or Jahweh),
which Jews regard as too sacred to speak.
(Instead they called it Adonai.)

Like all messiahs, he soon collected a small band of followers who believed every word he said.
His fellow orthodox Jews found this menacing, and banished him when he was twenty-five.
In the
Turkish town of Salonika (now Thessaloniki, and a part of Greece) he gained even more converts.
But even his followers were often puzzled by his strange behaviour.
On one occasion he went around
carrying a basket of fish, explaining that it represented the Age of Pisces, when Jews would be released from bondage.
And on another occasion he shocked the rabbis by inviting them to a feast,
then taking a Scroll of the Law in his arms as if it were a woman, and carrying it to a marriage canopy that he had set up; this symbolic marriage of the Messiah and the Law shocked the orthodox so
much that he was expelled from Salonika.

At the age of thirty-six, surrounded by disciples (who supported him in style) he moved to Jerusalem.
There he was seen by a young man who was to become his John the Baptist or St Paul, the son
of a Jewish scholar named Nathan Ashkenazi, who was deeply impressed when he saw Sabbatai in the street, but was too young and shy to approach him.
It was at this time that Sabbatai found himself a
bride, a Polish girl named Sarah, who had escaped the pogrom, become a courtesan (or high-class tart), and developed a strange conviction that she was destined to be the bride of the Messiah.
The
story has it that Sabbatai heard about the beautiful courtesan and sent twelve of his disciples to Leghorn, in Italy, to bring her to him.
They were married in March 1664.

In the following year, Sabbatai finally met Nathan, who was now twenty-two (Sabbatai was nearly forty), and allowed himself to be convinced that it was time to announce to the whole world
– and not merely to his disciples – that he was the Messiah.

The news spread throughout Palestine.
But when Sabbatai rode seven times around the city of Jerusalem, then went to present himself to the rabbis as their new master, he met with violent
hostility, and another order of banishment.
Sabbatai now decided to return to the city of his birth, Smyrna.
Meanwhile, his St Paul was writing letters to Jewish communities all over Europe
announcing that the Messiah had come.
These letters were read aloud in synagogues, and thousands of Jews were suddenly filled with hope that the Day of Judgement had at last arrived.
In Amsterdam,
another Jewish centre, crowds danced in the streets.
In London, Samuel Pepys recorded that Jews were placing ten to one bets that Sabbatai would soon be acknowledged as the King of the World.

Not all Jews shared this enthusiasm; the orthodox were appalled, for the doctrines preached by Sabbatai were horribly similar to those preached by the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
“The
forbidden” was now allowed, which included incest and promiscuity.
The Sabbataians (as they were called) shocked their neighbours by walking around naked at a time when nakedness was regarded
as a sin.
In the Jewish religion, as in Mohammedanism, women were kept strictly apart.
Sabbatai told them they were men’s equals and should mix freely with their fellow worshippers.
Divorce
or infidelity was no reason for a woman to be excluded from full participation in religious rites.
Was not the Messiah himself married to a woman who admitted to having been a whore?

Not that Sabbatai’s followers were inclined to sexual self-indulgence.
They took pride in mortifying the flesh, scourging and starving themselves, rolling naked in the snow, even burying
themselves in the earth so only their heads stuck out.
It was a frenzy of religious ecstasy, all based on the belief that the Millennium was about to arrive.

Now Sabbatai made the mistake that was to dismay all his followers and bring an abrupt end to his career.
He decided to go to Constantinople, the Turkish capital, a journey of fourteen days by
sea.
When the news reached Constantinople, it caused the same wild scenes of rejoicing that had been seen in other European capitals.
There was a general feeling that the Day of Judgement was at
hand, and that Sabbatai’s arrival would finally restore the Jews to the glory they had enjoyed under King David.

The Sultan, the young Mehmet IV, was understandably alarmed.
Enemies of Sabbatai informed his Grand Vizier, Ahmed Koprulu, that the Messiah was a charlatan who wanted the Sultan’s throne.
If Sabbatai had heard about this, he might have felt complimented.
The people of Constantinople were prepared to welcome him as the people of Jerusalem had welcomed Jesus Christ, and the secular
authorities thought he wanted to become king.
History was repeating itself.
His reply, of course, would be: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

But the parallel with Jesus should also have warned him that he would soon be under arrest.
In fact, the boat had only just docked – after a painful journey of thirty-six days – when
Mehmet’s soldiers came on board and carried him off to jail.

He was luckier than his messianic predecessor.
Wealthy followers greased enough palms to make sure he was not put to death.
Instead, he was installed in the castle of Abydos, in Gallipoli, and
allowed to continue to live in style, with a succession of distinguished visitors.
Unfortunately, one of these was a paranoid old man named Nehemiah ha-Kolen, a Polish scholar who wanted to argue
with Sabbatai about the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical system.
He was determined to prove Sabbatai an impostor, or at least, compel him to acknowledge himself, Nehemiah, as an equal.
Sabbatai stood
up for himself, and probably allowed Nehemiah to see that he regarded him as a bilious and envious old neurotic.
Nehemiah hastened away to denounce him to the Sultan as a revolutionary who had
admitted that he hoped to usurp the throne.
In September 1666, Sabbatai was brought before Sultan Mehmet, and ordered to convert to Islam or die on the spot.
Faced with his supreme opportunity for
martyrdom, Sabbatai behaved as unpredictably as ever.
He promptly removed his Jewish skullcap and accepted a turban instead.
He also accepted a new name: Azis Mehmet Effendi.
His wife converted
too, becoming known as Fatima Radini.
The Sultan then granted him a comfortable sinecure as keeper of the palace gates, which carried a generous pension.

Sabbatai, it seemed, had simply abandoned his conviction that he was sent to save the world.
He chose comfort – even though he secretly continued to practise Judaism.
In public he was a
good Mohammedan.
But his followers knew better: they realized that this was another of his inexplicable actions.

Unfortunately, he was still subject to these extraordinary swings of mood, in one of which he divorced Sarah – although he took her back again as soon as he was normal.
And he also
continued to preach sexual freedom.
In due course, these views caused the Sultan embarrassment, and six years after his conversion, Sabbatai was arrested again.
This time he was banished to a
remote village in Albania, Dulcigno, where he lived on for another four years.
Sarah predeceased him in 1674, and he married again.
He still had manic moods in which he declared he was the Messiah,
but no one paid any attention.

Oddly enough, his “John the Baptist”, Nathan Ashkenazi, continued to love and revere him as the Messiah, as did thousands of followers, who regarded his conversion as yet another of
his strange god-like actions – rather like those of the Japanese Zen masters who suddenly kick a pupil downstairs.
Sabbatai was the only messiah known to history who was able to have it both
ways: to proclaim himself a charlatan, and still continue to retain the devotion of his followers.
He was the last of the great Jewish messiahs.

These are only a small cross-section of the messiahs who have appeared since the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
Readers who want a fuller account should read Jack Gratus’s
The False
Messiahs
or Norman Cohn’s
The Pursuit of the Millennium
, where they will find a wide array of amazing and colourful figures.
This chapter, unfortunately, has run out of space.

***

***

Chapter Three

Tales of Bloodshed

W
e have seen that religious fanatics are capable of ruthless cruelty.
But one notable figure of the thirteenth century could also be regarded as
the father of modern terrorism.
His name was Hasan bin Sabbah, and he is responsible for the modern word “assassin”.

The Assassins

I
n the year 1273, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo passed through the valley of Alamut, in Persia, and saw there the castle of the Old Man of the
Mountain, the head of the Persian branch of the sect of Ismailis, or Assassins.
By that time, the sect was two hundred years old, and was on the point of being destroyed by the Mongols, who had
invaded the Middle East under the leadership of Genghis Khan.

According to Marco Polo, the Old Man of the Mountain, whose name was Aloadin, had created a Garden of Paradise in a green valley behind the castle, and filled it with “pavilions and
palaces the most elegant that can be imagined”, fountains flowing with wine, milk and honey, beautiful
houris
who could sing and dance seductively.
The purpose of this Garden was to
give his followers a foretaste of Paradise, so that they might be eager to sacrifice their lives for their leader.
When the Old Man wanted an enemy murdered, he would ask for volunteers.
These men
would be drugged and carried into the secret garden – which, under normal circumstances, was strictly forbidden to all males.
They would awake to find themselves apparently in Paradise, with
wine, food and damsels at their disposal.
After a few days of this, they were again drugged and taken back to the Old Man’s fortress.
“So when the Old Man would have any prince slain,
he would say to such a youth: ‘Go thou and slay so-and-so; and when thou returnest, my angels shall bear thee to Paradise .
.
.’”

There is evidence that the story may have a foundation in fact.
Behind the remains of the castle, which still exists in the valley of Alamut, there is a green enclosed valley with a spring.
But
it is hardly large enough to have contained “pavilions and palaces”.

The Ismailis were a breakaway sect from the orthodox Moslems; they were the Mohammedan equivalent of Protestants.
After the death of the Prophet Mahomet in 632, his disciple Abu Bakr was chosen
to succeed him, thus becoming the first Caliph of Islam.
It is a pity that Mahomet, unlike Jesus, never made clear which of his disciples – or relatives – was to be the rock upon which
his church was to be built.
For other Moslems felt that the Prophet’s cousin Ali was a more suitable candidate: the result was a dissension that split the Moslem world for centuries.
The
Sunni – the orthodox Moslems – persecuted and slaughtered Ali’s followers, who were known as the Shi’a.
In 680, they almost succeeded in wiping out their rivals, when
seventy of them – including the Prophet’s daughter Fatima – were surprised and massacred.
But the killers overlooked a sick boy – the son of Fatima; so the rebel tradition
lived on.

All this murder and suffering produced powerful religious emotions among the Shi’a.
They set up their own Caliph – known as the Imam – and they looked forward to the coming of
a messiah (or Mahdi) who would lead them to final victory.
Strange sects proliferated, led by holy men who came out of the desert.
Some believed in reincarnation, others in total moral and sexual
freedom.
One sect believed in murder as a religious duty, strangling their victims with cords; these may be regarded as the true predecessors of the Assassins.

The Ismailis were a breakaway sect from the original breakaway sect.
When the sixth Imam died, his eldest son Ismail was passed over for some reason, and his younger brother Musa appointed.
The
Ismailis were Moslems who declared that Ismail was the true Imam: they were also known as Seveners, because they believed that Ismail was the seventh and last Imam.
The rest of the Shi’a
became known as the Twelvers, for they accepted Musa and his five successors as true Imams.
(The line came to an end after the twelfth.) The Twelvers became the respectable branch of the heretics,
differing from orthodox Sunni only on a few points of doctrine.
It was the Ismailis who became the true opposition, creating a brilliant and powerful organization with its own philosophy, ritual
and literature.
They were intellectuals and mystics and fanatics.
With such drive and idealism they were bound to come to power eventually.

Two Assassins being instructed by the “Old Man of the Mountains”

It was some time around the middle of the eleventh century that the greatest of the Ismaili leaders was born – Hasan bin Sabbah, a man who combined the religious fervour of Saint Augustine
with the political astuteness of Lenin.
He founded the Order of Assassins, and became the first Old Man of the Mountain.

By the time Hasan was born, the Ismailis had become one of the great political powers.
The Sunni Caliphs were decadent: the Ismailis set up their own Caliph and their own dynasty.
They called
themselves the Fatimids (descendants of Fatima, the Prophet’s murdered daughter).
They conquered the Nile valley, then spread slowly across Egypt, Syria, North Africa, parts of Arabia, even
Sicily.
By the end of the tenth century, it looked as if nothing could stop them becoming rulers of all the Moslem lands.
But at that point, a new force entered Middle Eastern politics – the
Seljuk Turks – who swept across the Moslem world like the ancient Romans.
And the Turks, as good Moslems, decided to lend their support to the Sunni Caliphs.
By the time Hasan bin Sabbah was
a young man, the Ismaili empire was already past its peak.

Hasan was born an orthodox Moslem – or at least, a Twelver, which was almost the same thing.
His family lived in Rayy, near modern Teheran.
We know little about his early life except that
he became an avid student of every branch of learning.
A strong religious impulse led him to look beyond the sect into which he had been born.
He was impressed by the intellectual force and
mystical fervour of the heretical Ismailis.
It took him a long time to decide to join them – for the Ismailis were generally regarded as outcasts and cranks.
A serious illness decided him; in
1072 he took the oath of allegiance to the Fatimid Caliph.
Four years later he was forced to leave Rayy – no doubt for spreading Ismaili doctrines – and started to make his way towards
Cairo, a new city that had been built by the Ismailis as their capital.
The journey took two years.
In Cairo, he impressed the Caliph, and became a supporter of his eldest son Nizar.
He spent three
years in the Fatimid court; then his ardent revolutionary temperament got him into trouble – history does not go into detail – and he left Egypt and became a wandering missionary for
the Ismaili cause.
Legend has it that he was sentenced to death, but that just before his execution, one of the strongest towers in the city collapsed suddenly; this was seen as an omen, so he was
sent into exile instead.
Another story tells how the ship on which he sailed ran into a violent storm; while the other passengers flung themselves on their knees and prayed, Hasan stood perfectly
calm, explaining that he could not die until he had fulfilled his destiny.
When the storm suddenly ceased, Hasan got the credit, and made several converts.
“Thus,” says Von Hammer (a
thoroughly hostile chronicler), “to increase his credit, did he avail himself of accidents and natural occurrences, as if he possessed the command of both.”
Von Hammer seems to regard
Hasan as a kind of Rasputin figure, a trickster and a fraud who used religion to gain personal power (but then, he also describes the Ismaili religion as “mysteries of atheism and
immorality”).

Hasan bin Sabbah was a highly successful missionary, particularly among his own people of Daylam, a wild, independent race who loathed the Turks.
The Daylamis had been among the last to be
converted to Islam, and even now they tended to be rebellious and unorthodox.
Hasan saw their value.
Their country was an ideal stronghold.
And if Nizar failed to become the next Fatimid Caliph
– which seemed highly likely, in view of the intrigues at court – Hasan might well need a stronghold.

As the number of his converts increased, Hasan selected his fortress, the castle of Alamut (or Eagle’s Nest), perched high on a rock in the Elburz mountains, above a cultivated valley
about thirty miles long.

His method of acquiring the castle was typical of his methods.
First he sent “dais” – preachers – to the villages around the castle, and they made many converts.
Then the
dais got into the castle, and converted some of its garrison.
The castle’s owner, Alid – an orthodox Moslem – was not sure what to do about all this.
He seems to have been an
indecisive man.
At first he professed to be converted; then, one day, he persuaded the Ismailis to leave the castle, and slammed the gates.
But he allowed himself to be persuaded to let them in
again.
At this point, Hasan was smuggled into the castle in disguise.
One morning, Alid woke up to discover that his castle was no longer his own.
He was politely shown the door and (according to
one chronicler) given 3,000 gold dinars in compensation.

This was in 1090.
From that time on, until his death thirty-five years later, Hasan lived in his castle.
He studied, wrote books, brought up a family and planned conquests.
Most of his followers
never saw him.
The religious rule in the castle was strict; they ate sparingly, and wine was forbidden.
Hasan had one of his sons executed for drinking wine.
(Another was executed on suspicion
– false, as it later turned out – of having planned the murder of one of the dais.)

The Assassins’ Garden Palace

But if the aims were religious, the method was military.
The Ismailis wanted to supplant the Sunni Caliphs of Baghdad.
In order to do that, they first had to drive out the Turks who supported
them.
The Turks were the overlords of Persia.
So Hasan’s task was to extend his realm, village by village and castle by castle, until he could challenge the Turks directly.
Where castles
declined to be converted to the Ismaili faith, they were infiltrated or stormed.
In towns and villages, Ismaili converts rose up and took control.
Like T.
E.
Lawrence – in his own battle to
overthrow the Turks – Hasan’s great advantage was the hatred of the conquered people for their overlords.
When he had extended his control to all the area surrounding Alamut, he sent a
missionary to the mountainous country called Quhistan in the south-east, where various heretical sects were oppressed by the Turks.
There was a popular rising, the Turks were overthrown, and
Quhistan became the second great Ismaili stronghold.
Not long after, another area of mountain country in the south-west became an Ismaili stronghold when another of Hasan’s followers seized
two castles near Arrajan.
The Turks now became aware of their danger, and decided it was time to crush the Ismailis; two great expeditions were sent out, one against Alamut, the other against
Quhistan.
They soon discovered how well Hasan had chosen his fortresses.
Although there were a mere seventy defenders, the castle of Alamut was impregnable to direct attack; and the surrounding
villages made sure the defenders were not starved into submission by smuggling food up to them by night.
A surprise attack sent the Turkish armies flying.
The expedition against Quhistan fared no
better.