There was a sea battle
between two fleets belonging to the rival trading ports of Genoa and
Venice. It ended in the humiliating
defeat of the Venetians and the capture of their fleet. Among the captured sailors was a man named
Marco Polo, who was thrown into jail in Genoa.
There he found himself sharing a cell with a Pisan called
Rusticiano. Rusticiano was a writer of
romances, and when Marco Polo began telling him stories of his extraordinary
travels in China—the land of the great Kublie Khan—Rusticiano begged him to
write it down. So Marco[1]
sent for his travel notebooks and with the aid of Risticiano, wrote an account
of his adventures. He took the manuscript with him when he left prison, and, in
spite of the fact that printing had not yet been invented, and books had to be
copied by hand, it was soon being read from end to end of Italy.
Regrettably, no one believed Marco’s tales of
his travels; his contemporaries assumed it was a novel. Marco was called
sarcastically ‘Marco Millions’,
because his book mentioned such vast distances and huge sums of money; the book
itself became known as The Million.
On his deathbed, Marco’s friends begged him to admit that the book was mostly
lies. ‘I have not told half of what I
saw,’ he said irritably. It was many centuries before scholars recognized that
Marco Polo was painstakingly a truthful
man.
One of Marco’s least credible
stories concerned a sinister being called ‘the Old Man of the Mountain’ (known
by the Arabs as Shaikh-ul-Jabal). This old man whose real name was Hasan bin Sabah, lived in Persia, and
was regarded by his people as a prophet. He inhabited a fortress, taken by
force and by treachery, the inaccessible castle of Alamut (“the Eagle’s Nest”)
at the head of a valley. He was rich enough to turn the valley into an enormous
and beautiful garden, full of pavilions and palaces, trees bearing every kind
of fruit and brooks flowing with wine and milk as well as water. The pavilions were inhabited by beautiful dancing
girl. It was, in fact, a very passable
imitation of the paradise promised by the prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
When the Old Man wanted
somebody killed, he would order one of his disciples, called feda’een, to carry out the
assassination, promising that his reward would be an eternity in paradise. And the man would unhesitatingly sacrifice
his life to carry out the order; for he was convinced that he had already
tasted paradise. The cunning old man had all his trainee assassins (called feda’een) drugged and carried into the
garden; when they woke up they found themselves surrounded by beautiful girls,
who plied them with food and wine and offered their favours. After a few days, the young feda’een was again
drugged and carried back to the castle.
He would not be impatient to sacrifice his life to regain paradise for
good.
The would be killers, says
Marco Polo, were called ‘Ashishin’ (Hashish taker). The castle really existed;
it was called Alamut, meaning Eagle’s Nest, and is perched on a rock in the
mountains of Mazendran, Iran. It was through Hasan bin Sabah that the word
‘assassin’ entered the European vocabulary.
It is derived from ‘hashishin’, for it was also widely believed that his
followers nerved themselves to kill, and be killed, by smoking hashish.
Hasan bin Sabah was born
about the year 1030, in the town of Rayy, near today’s Tehran; his family were
Shi’ite Muslims. Hasan was deeply
interested in religion, and became involved with a sect called the Ismailis who
had broken away from the main Shi’ites. He left his home town for preaching
Ismaili doctrines and made his way to Ismaili capital in Cairo. But court intrigues led to his expulsion from
the capital. He finally arrived back in
Persia in 1081. For the next nine years he travelled and preached, gaining an
increasing horde of followers. And in 1090 he came to the castle of Alamut and
decided that this was the fortress he was looking for.
Hasan ruled from Alamut like
a patriarch. His followers seldom saw him. The rule was strict. One of his sons
was caught drinking wine and executed. Hasan lived frugally, wrote books, and
plotted how to overthrow the Abbasids in Baghdad and their supporter, Sejuk
Turks. He proved to be as good a general as the prophet himself. His preachers, called da’ees won over the surrounding villages. His followers were
devoted, fanatically so, but they were few in number compared to the Seljuk
Turks. At last, he decided to strike down his enemies one by one, making use of
the total obedience of his disciples.
The Grand Vizier of Malik
Shah Seljuk was a man of fame and education, called Nizam al-Mulk, who had been
at school with Hasan bin Sabah as well as with the mathematician and poet, Omar
Khayyam. When Nizam became Vizier in 1073, the Arab chroniclers tell a story
that both Omar and Hasan came to him asking for jobs, and Hasan was given a
position at court; but his thirst for power soon became apparent, and Nizam
sacked him.
Twenty years later, Nizam was
Hasan’s most dangerous enemy. In October 1092, during Ramadan, Nizam had
finished giving audience to various suppliants and was carried out of the tent
towards the tent of his womenfolk. A man
in the garb of a Sufi, a holy man, came forward and was allowed to approach the
litter. He pulled a knife from his
clothes drove it into Nizam’s heart. A
few moments later, he was himself killed by Nizam’s guards. When Hasan heard the news, he chuckled, “The
killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss.”
Hasan’s assassins were the
first terrorists in the Muslim world. To their enemies, they were vicious
criminals trying to overthrow society; to their supporters and converts, they
were a small but highly trained army, overthrowing oppression by the only means
at their disposal. In the years that followed, the list of victims was along
one, and included anyone who had dared to speak openly against their doctrines
– princes, governors, generals and religious opponents. A point came where no
one in authority dared to go out without armour under his robes. One victim was
stabbed as he knelt in his prayer in the mosque surrounded by his bodyguards. A
chief opponent woke up from a drunken sleep to find a dagger driven into the
ground close to his head, and a note saying ‘That dagger could just as easily
been stuck in your heart.’
During the last thirty years
of his life, he watched his empire crumble. The assassinations continued – he
even extended his arm as far as Syria and Egypt – yet his situation remained
basically unchanged. Hasan died three
years later in 1124, at the age of ninety.
The sect continued in existence and established a base in Syria. But eventually they were stamped out – in
Persia by the Mongols, in Syria by the Sultan of Egypt, Baybars, the Seljuks.
Edited by:
ISRAR HASAN
FEB. 20, 2014
[1] Marco Polo, Italian born; from
1254 – 1324 C.E. was an Italian merchant traveller from Venice whose travels
are recorded in Livres des
merveilles du monde, a book which did much to introduce
Europeans to Central Asia and China.
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