World Famous Cults and Fanatics (7 page)

And it was at this point, in 1092, a mere two years after moving to Alamut, that Hasan made the great decision that may well have been his crucial mistake.
He recognized that open war with the
Turks was out of the question; his armies were too small.
But his followers were fanatics who would give their lives for their cause.
Why not use them to strike down his chief enemies, one by one?
In 1092, the “assassins” claimed their first, and perhaps their most eminent victim, Nizam Al-Mulk, the Vizier of the Turkish Sultan.

Until recent years, it was accepted that Nizam Al-Mulk had been a fellow student of Hasan’s.
The story told by Von Hammer – who repeats it from earlier Persian chroniclers – is
that Hasan, Nizam Al-Mulk and the poet Omar Khayyam were fellow students, and Hasan suggested to the other two that if any of them should achieve eminence, he should share it with the other two.
They all agreed.
After some years, Nizam became the Vizier of the Turkish Sultan Alp Arslan, one of the great military geniuses of the period.
When Alp Arslan died (1073) and his young son, Malik
Shah, came to the throne, Nizam became the most powerful man in the land.
At this point, his old school fellows presented themselves and reminded him of their agreement.
Omar, being a poet and
mathematician (one of the greatest of the Middle Ages), asked only for a quiet place to study; so Nizam gave him a pension and sent him back to his home town of Naishapur.
Hasan wanted power, so
Nizam found him a position at court.
What happened then is not quite clear, except that Nizam realized that his old schoolfellow was supplanting him in the royal favour, and took steps to bring
about his downfall.
Hasan left Malik’s court vowing vengeance; and that, says Von Hammer, is why Nizam became the first victim of the Assassins.

By 1092, Nizam Al-Mulk was Hasan’s chief enemy, the greatest single danger to the Assassins.
Hasan asked for a volunteer to kill the Vizier.
A man called Bu Tahir Arrani stepped forward.
He disguised himself as a Suli – a holy man – and during the feast of Ramadan, in October 1092, was allowed to approach the litter of Nizam as he was carried out of his audience tent.
He drove a knife into Nizam’s breast, and was himself immediately killed by Nizam’s guards.
When he heard that the assassination had been successful, Hasan remarked: “The killing
of this devil is the beginning of bliss.”
He meant it literally; his followers accepted that to die like Bu Tahir Arrani was an immediate passport to Paradise.

It may be that this murder showed Hasan where his real power lay.
He could capture a fortress by preaching, cunning and bribery.
He could destroy an enemy by sending out a single assassin.
It
looked like the ideal formula for guerrilla warfare.

Where he made his mistake was in failing to grasp the ultimate consequences of such a method: that if his men destroyed their enemies like scorpions or cobras, they would arouse the same
loathing and detestation as scorpions or cobras.
And that sooner or later, the horror they inspired would cancel all their gains.
It was this that eventually frustrated Hasan’s plans for
conquest.

But that lay far in the future.
For the moment, Hasan’s method was triumphantly successful.
Not long after Nizam’s death, the Sultan Malik also died – of a stomach complaint,
apparently.
One of Nizam’s sons, Fakhri, was killed in Naishapur; he had been accosted by a beggar who said: “The true Moslems are no more and there are none left to take the hand of
the afflicted.”
As Fahri reached for alms, he was stabbed to the heart.
Nizam’s other son, Ahmed, laid siege to the castle of Alamut; the inhabitants suffered severe hardships, but
again it proved impregnable.
Ahmed was later stabbed by an assassin, but he recovered.

The candidates for assassination were always carefully chosen.
Hasan played his game like a master chess player.
The death of Malik Shah brought on a struggle for power at court; the new Sultan,
Berkyaruq, had to defend his throne against his half-brothers.
Hasan lent his support to Berkyaruq, and assassinated a number of Berkyaruq’s enemies.
Berkyaruq’s officers formed an
uneasy liaison with the Assassins.
So when Berkyaruq finally put down the rebellion, Hasan was allowed to operate in peace for a few years.

But he continued to practise the arts of infiltration and intimidation; Ismailis joined Berkyaruq’s army, and made converts.
When officers opposed them, they were silenced with the threat
of assassination.
A point came where no one in authority dared to go out without armour under his robes.
Leaders of rival religious sects were murdered.
One opponent was stabbed in the mosque as he
knelt at prayers, even though a bodyguard was standing directly behind him.
Eventually – in 1101 – Berkyaruq lost his temper and decided it was time to destroy the Ismailis.
He combined
with his half-brother Sanjar to attack the stronghold at Quhistan; the armies laid waste the countryside, destroying the crops, and would have captured the main stronghold (Tabas) if the Ismailis
had not bribed the enemy general to go away – a typically oriental touch.
Sanjar made other attempts to subjugate the Ismailis; but eventually came to tolerate them.
The historian Juvanyi
tells a story to explain this.
Hasan managed to bribe one of Sanjar’s guards to stick a dagger into the ground near his head, when Sanjar lay in a drunken sleep.
Shortly thereafter, Sanjar
received a message from Hasan that said: “That dagger could just as easily have been stuck in your heart.”
Sanjar saw the wisdom of tolerating the Ismailis.

Nevertheless, Hasan’s dreams began to collapse within a few years of his greatest triumphs.
In 1094, the Fatimid Caliph – spiritual head of the Ismailis – died in Cairo.
Nizar
– Hasan’s patron – should have replaced him.
Instead, the Vizier, Al-Afdal, put Nizar’s younger brother on the throne.
There was a war, and Nizar was killed.
Hasan remained
faithful to Nizar (in fact, his sect called themselves the Nizam); he refused to acknowledge the new Sultan.
So he was now isolated from his own co-religionists.
After Berkyaruq turned against him,
it was all the Assassins could do to hold on to their territories.
At eighty-seven, he was getting tired; he could not afford to defy the whole Arab world forever.
But before the Caliph and the Old
Man of the Mountain could make peace, the new Vizier discovered a plot by the Assassins to murder the Caliph.
In all probability, there was never such a plot.
Nizar and his children were dead;
Hasan had no motive for wanting to kill the man who was now offering him peace and cooperation.
But the Vizier was a Twelver (not an Ismaili); he had good reason for wanting to prevent the
reconciliation.
And Hasan’s reputation was such that any mud would stick.
The Caliph took the “plot” so seriously that he ordered that all the citizens of Cairo should be
registered, and that all strangers should be carefully watched.
Many “agents of Hasan” were arrested and executed, including the tutor of the Caliph’s children.

And so the last hope vanished.
And in May 1144, Hasan bin Sabbah, one of the most remarkable religious leaders of all time, died in his castle of Alamut, at the age of ninety.
He appointed one
of his generals to succeed him, demonstrating thereby that he had learned from Mahomet’s chief mistake.

This was by no means the end of the Assassins.
After initial difficulties, the Syrian branch took root, and it was the stories of the Syrian mission, carried back to Europe by Crusaders, that
introduced the word “assassin” into the European languages.
The event that caused this notoriety was the murder of the Christian Knight Conrad of Montferrat in 1192; Conrad was stabbed
by two Assassins – agents of the Syrian Old Man of the Mountain, Sinan – who were disguised as monks.
(King Richard the Lion Heart of England is supposed to have been behind the murder;
one of his protéges quickly married the widow, and became “King of Jerusalem” in his place.) After this, Assassins began to figure in every chronicle of the Third Crusade, and
the legend captured the imagination of Europe.
They were masters of disguise, adepts in treachery and murder.
Their Old Man was a magician who surveyed the world from his castle like some evil
spider, watching for victims.
They were without religion and without morality (one early chronicler says they ate pork – against the Moslem law – and practised incest with their mothers
and sisters).
They were so fanatically devoted to their master that he often demonstrated their obedience to visitors by making them leap out of high windows.
Their arts of persuasion were so
subtle that no ruler could be sure of the loyalty of his own servants .
.
.
A typical story illustrates this.
Saladin – the Sultan of Egypt and the great enemy of the Crusaders – sent a
threatening message to Sinan, the Syrian Old Man.
The Assassin chief sent back a messenger, whose mission was to deliver a message in private.
Aware of the danger, Saladin had him thoroughly
searched, then dismissed the assembly, all except for two guards.
The messenger turned to the guards and asked: “If I were to order you, in the name of my Master, to kill the Sultan, would
you do it?”
They nodded and drew their swords.
Whereupon the messenger, having made his point, bowed and took his leave – taking the two guards with him.
Saladin decided to establish
friendly relations with the Assassins.

But by the time Marco Polo saw the castle of Alamut in 1273, the power of the Assassins was at an end.
In Persia they had been slaughtered by the Mongols; in Syria, ruthlessly suppressed by
Baybars, Sultan of Egypt.
Some of the survivors remained in the area of Alamut – where they may be found to this day.
Others scattered to distant countries, induding India .
.
.

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The Thugs

By
AD
1300, the Assassins had ceased to exist in the Middle East, at least as a political force.
In 1825, the English traveller I.
B.
Fraser remarked
that although the Ismailis no longer committed murder, they were still fanatically devoted to their chief.
Fraser also commented that there were Ismailis in India too.
This raises a fascinating
question: whether the Assassins of the Middle East formed a liaison with their Indian counterparts, the Thugs.
When William Sleeman was investigating the Thugs in the nineteenth century, he was
puzzled why, although they were Moslems, they worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali.
One captured Thug explained that Kali was identical with Fatima, the murdered daughter of the Prophet .
.
.

The Thugs (pronounced “tug”) came to the attention of Europe after the British annexation of India in the late eighteenth century.
At first, the conquerors noted simply that the
roads of India seemed to be infested with bands of robbers who strangled their victims.
In 1816, a doctor named Robert Sherwood, stationed in Madras, induced some of these robbers to talk to him
about their religion.
His article “On the Murderers Called Phansigars” appeared in
Asiatic Researches
in 1820, and caused some excitement.
Sherwood alleged that the phansigars or
Thugs (phansi means a noose; thug means cheat) committed murders as a religious duty, and that their aim was the actual killing, rather than the robbery that accompanied it.

The bizarre story caught the imagination of the English, and the word “thug” soon passed into the language.
The Thugs, according to Sherwood, lived quietly in their native villages
for most of the year, fulfilling their duties as citizens and fathers in a manner that aroused no suspicion.
But in the month of pilgrimage (usually November-December) they took to the roads and
slaughtered travellers – always taking care to be at least a hundred miles from home.