The train attendant brought the dinner tray. How many dishes were there in it, I wondered. Seven? I smiled to myself as I climbed down from my berth. My co-passengers must’ve thought it was out embarrassment at my awkward climb down.
I didn’t count the items on the plate. I wanted to finish the meal quickly and get back to my reading. And when I picked up the magazine again, I faced another holy number — twelve.
After seven, the next holy figure is twelve, said Prof. Ameer Ali. The twelve zodiac signs, twelve constellations, months, bones, thus goes on the list of the Twelveans. The author described the journey of the trainee-assassins wherein the symbols and signs made them slaves to mechanical thinking on the one hand and deniers of principles on the other. They learnt not to be anxious or attached to anything, including their own lives.
When I reached this section, my mind again pulled me back. Can there actually exist such a state of mind? There could be several obvious arguments in support of evil, but how do you build a movement for only death and destruction, without a cause? I could feel Seshadri’s breath on the back of my neck. I had tried so hard to forget him. Then that mysterious book, which I figured was his Book of Destruction, surfaced, only to get smothered under the debris of Welcome Hotel. And now, this article …
The other passengers were preparing for the night. Spreading their sheets, drawing the curtains, switching off the lights … but I was not fated to sleep that night. I returned to the magazine.
As I began reading again there came another shock. The founder of the Assassins was called, of all names, Hasan Ibn al Sabbah! I had not failed to notice that the name of the fourth Imam in the order of the Sevener Ismailiyahs, Zainul Abidin, was shared by the Welcome Hotel owner, but I hadn’t given it much thought then. And now, this! Again names were playing hide-and-seek with me. The gallery of names was growing to a point beyond coincidence. As the length of the gallery increases, does it not step into the realm of conspiracy? The reason for my death-defying businessman friend dispatching this article, in a magazine through such a labyrinthine route, is becoming clearer. His body was never discovered from the blast site. The fantastic story he narrated has not ended. It hangs unfinished in the still air. With the divinity of the figure seven forming an aura around it.
Hasan Ibn al Sabbah, who founded the sect in 1090, was a man of culture, a patron of poetry, profoundly interested in the latest advances of sciences, so said the professor, quoting from Amin Maalouf’s famous book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. He was also a classmate of the renowned poet, mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, as well as of the grand vizier of the Seljuk Sultanate, Nizam al Mulk, according to Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in his work, History of the Assassins. Though Amin Maalouf thought that this might be just a legend, von Hammer described an agreement the three classmates had made during their schooldays. The pact was that if any one of them came to occupy a powerful position in life he would share his fortune with the rest.
At the time of Hasan’s birth, the Shia doctrine, to which he adhered, was dominant in Muslim Asia, including Syria and Persia. Persians were dictating orders to even the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. But by the time Hasan was a young man the situation had changed radically; the Seljuks, upholders of Sunni orthodoxy, took control of the entire region. Nizam al Mulk became the prime minister of the Seljuk Sultan. He remained partly faithful to their childhood pact and extended a position in the court to Omar Khayyam, who preferred to keep away from power and continued to live a modest life, pursuing his poetical and mathematical interests. Meanwhile, Hasan was wandering the world with fire in his soul, thirsting for revenge on the Seljuks. He was shaping into a contender for power and a killer. Towards 1071 he decided to settle in Egypt, the last bastion of the Shias. In Cairo he hobnobbed with a number of religious fundamentalists and began to make strategic plans to achieve his goals. He raised an army of dedicated men and captured the fortress of Alamut situated in an inaccessible region of the Elburz Mountains near the Caspian Sea. That was how Alamut became the headquarters of the sect of Assassins.
It almost seemed as if Prof. Ameer Ali had become possessed as he described the growth of the sect. The words practically jumped with energy from the pages. It is but natural for a historian’s words to become charged when describing the fast and unprecedented growth of an individual, organization or faith. Even as a reader, I was carried away.
The knowledge and experience Hasan gained through his activities taught him that laws and even religion served only as an armour for the powerful. What a militant organization needed was a single-minded focus on the goal where God and His laws and moral commandments could only become deterrents. While the operations were kept secret from the public, the theories and higher objectives were shielded from the operators themselves. This resulted in a dedicated group of suicide attackers who were always ready to blindly carry out the orders of their commanders. There were three concentric circles of organization. At the periphery were the religious missionaries who lived the pious life according to Islamic doctrines, abstaining from wine and the arts. Then there were the suicide attackers who were highly efficient mechanical automatons who rarely used their intelligence. At the centre was the leadership, detached from everything except the objectives of the sect, even Islam and God. The theories and stratagem were formulated in a code language not accessible to even the top grandmasters.
All members, from the novices to the grandmaster, were ranked according to their level of knowledge, reliability and courage. Hasan’s favourite technique for sowing terror among his enemies was murder. Not only kings, common people too could be made a target. The operators were sent individually or in small groups on assignments to kill chosen persons. They generally disguised themselves as merchants or ascetics and moved about in the city, familiarizing themselves with the habits of their victims. Then, once their plan was ready, they struck. The more secret the preparations, the more public the execution had to be. That was why they preferred mosques, the favourite day being Friday, generally around noon, close to prayer time. The author here drew a comparison with the jihadi terrorists of our times. Also as a footnote he compared and contrasted Bhagat Singh and Nathuram Godse. ‘For Hasan, murder was not merely a means of disposing of an enemy, but was intended primarily as a twofold lesson for the public,’ wrote Prof. Ameer Ali, quoting Amin Maalouf, ‘first as a public punishment for the victim and the second, the heroic sacrifice of the executioner himself, known as fedayeen, or suicide commando, because he was almost always cut down on the spot.’
Prof. Ameer Ali said that contemporaries observed with awe the serenity with which the members of the sect accepted their own death. Here again, in a footnote he touched upon the descriptions of Sleeman about how the thugs walked towards the gallows singing songs and dancing. Contemporaries of the Assassins believed that they were high on hashish at the time of their feats and named them ‘hashishin’, a word that became distorted into ‘assassin’ and was soon incorporated into many languages as a common noun to describe murderers who carried out premeditated, execution-style killings. Did Hasan encourage the adherents to drug themselves so they could numb the pain of death or even make it enjoyable? Or, more prosaically, was he trying to get them hooked on a narcotic in order to keep them dependent on him? Or was he simply urging them towards a state of euphoria so they would not falter during the moment of action? Or did he instead simply rely on their blind faith? Was that blind faith itself the narcotic that intoxicated them? Whatever the answer, there was no doubt that Hasan was a commander par excellence.