Once, the story goes, in order to demonstrate the dedication and discipline of his followers before a messenger of Sultan Malak Shah, Hasan pointed his finger towards one of them and that man instantly stabbed himself and fell dead. According to another legend, Henry of Champagne was in the process of concluding a treaty with the grandmaster successor Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain, in the fortress of al-Kahf. The grandmaster, in order to prove his absolute authority to the Frankish visitor (the Arabs used to call the European crusaders Franks or Franjs which became Firangi, when it reached India), ordered two adherents to hurl themselves off the ramparts, which they did without a moment’s hesitation. Hasan did not spare anyone who disobeyed the orders even if they were his sons. Two of his sons met their death at his own hands.
Hasan did not forgive his childhood companion Nizam al Mulk for serving the Sunni Seljuks. The Nizam was executed with a sword-stroke by Hasan’s followers in front of a crowd. Hasan soon expanded his killing operations to Syria where he won the trust of King Ridwan through the Assassins who were dispatched in the guise of astrologers and goldsmiths. As the Assassins gained in strength, the Imams and religious heads, feeling an imminent threat, united and began speaking out openly against them. The Assassins were declared non-believers and dangerous criminals. They convinced the public that the Assassins were Muslims only in appearance and were described as ‘Batinis’—those who adhere to a faith other than that to which they profess in public. This was the beginning of an open war between the Muslim religious organizations and the Assassins. The Assassins had begun killing highly placed persons such as the amirs of Islam in accordance with their secret pact with the Franks. When the pact between the cross-bearing Christian crusaders and the dagger-bearing Assassins came out in public, the mobs began tracking the latter down street by street and massacring them.
Hasan, however, died a natural death. He was only twenty when he had shared the idyllic dreams of his classmates Omar Khayyam and Nizam al Mulk. But about half of the seventy years of his life were filled with plotting, assassinations and bloodshed. This man, who plunged his dagger relentlessly into kings, ministers, clerics and ordinary men in the street, died quietly, of old age, in his fortress, with not even a pinprick hurting him.
Despite the death of Hasan in his Alamut retreat in 1124, there was a sharp recrudescence in the activity of the Assassins in the period that followed. They continued hunting down kings and men of stature and spreading fear among the public. But, bereft of objectives and ideals, they degenerated into indiscriminate murderers, spreading death and terror among king and commoner, Christian and Muslim. They were no longer pests; they had become a plague torturing the Arab world at a time when all its energies were needed to withstand the Frankish onslaught, according to Amin Maalouf.
With Sultan Muhammad laying siege to the fort of Alamut, and the Franks capturing Damascus, the power of the Assassins fell in Persia and Syria. Rashid al Din Sinan, known as the Old Man of the Mountain and commander of the Assassins in Syria, sent a message to Amalric announcing that he and his supporters were willing to convert to Christianity. The Templars, busy with their crusades for recovering the Holy Grail and the Sangreal Documents from beneath Solomon’s Temple, were not interested, but many Assassins were prepared to pay tribute to the Order of the Templars and live in peace.
In 1257, the indomitable horsemen of the steppes, under the leadership of Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu, laid waste the whole of the Muslim world and brought an end to the Abbasid dynasty. Hulegu, like Hasan Ibn al Sabbah, had been interested in philosophy, science and literature before transforming, in the course of his campaigns, into his bloodthirsty and destructive self. Although strongly influenced by Christianity (his mother, favourite wife and several close collaborators were members of the Nestorian Church), he never renounced shamanism, the traditional religion of his people. In the territories he conquered and governed, notably Persia, he was generally tolerant of Muslims; but once he became mired in distrust and the lust for destruction, he embarked on a ruthless and total obliteration of some of the most prestigious and thriving metropolises of Islam. On their way to Baghdad, Hulegu’s army destroyed the Assassins’ sanctuary at Alamut and sacked its library, which was of inestimable value as far as the philosophy of destruction was concerned. Thanks to Hulegu, the knowledge about the theories and activities of this sect — which raised destruction to mystical heights and which remained unapproachable in its time — was irretrievably lost. The remaining Assassins were hunted down and slaughtered. The survivors, if any, scattered. The Ismailiyahs vanished from Persia and Syria. The newly drawn political maps made them irrelevant.
Here the author again dipped into the history of the thugs in a footnote. He drew comparisons with the thugs who were also hunted down and destroyed during the nineteenth century by the British administration in India. He noted that the arrival of trains, roads and motor vehicles brought an end to the movement of traders’ caravans and, as a consequence, to thuggee itself.
Prof. Ameer Ali pointed out the irony that centuries after the destruction of Alamut and the Assassin sect, the Ismailiyahs, now the followers of the Agha Khan, have survived as one of the most peaceable forms of Islam. Who will believe, he asked, that the well-known philanthropist of our times, the Agha Khan, is a direct successor of Hasan Ibn al Sabbah?
Yet, Prof. Ali said in his concluding section that there are many who believe that the doctrines of the Assassins are still being passed down in secrecy in remote and unknown places. That the mountains of Kuhistan shelter them and that it is impossible for even the modern-day esoteric Islam to breach their secrecy. Memories of the invasions of Genghis Khan and the Tartars have turned into myths and now personify evil and horror in the European social psyche. The workings of the machinery of destruction keep the imagination alive and the masters of literature busy creating fantasies. Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the unending science fiction and horror movies of Hollywood are the result. The terrorism-infested history of modern times is proof that the seeds of the doctrine of destruction have ridden the winds and are now germinating in unexpected corners of the world. The fedayeen die but the practice of suicide attacks resurrects with renewed vigour, because the practice of destruction is not limited to the Vikings or the Templars or the thugs — it is an inseparable feature of human nature.
Prof. Ali’s article ended there. There was no note about the author or even his contact information. I cannot deny that this descriptive article, devoid of any original analyses, gave me a lot to think about. I felt that the author, while remaining behind the curtain of anonymity, did manage to raise a few goosebumps here and there. His description of the secrecy with which the Assassins planned their acts and the insistence on the public nature of their executions, the modern-day transformation of the Ismailiyahs from assassins into messengers of peace, the lost books and repositories of their secrets, the parallels with the thugs and, above all, the tantalizing hint that the Assassins still exist … in fact, without really saying it, he gave the impression that they do not just continue to exist, but are active. My paranoid brain started wondering: wasn’t putting that idea into my mind the real purpose of this whole article? I suspected that there was a lot more that he wanted to say, but had left unsaid. For reasons only he knew. Specifically for me, what the article did was, link the names of Hasan Ibn al Sabbah and Zainul Abidin. And pull the name Ameer Ali out of a fictional account of thuggee and thread it into the present in the form of a disembodied voice speaking from the pages of this magazine. All for me. Was this article written for me, or am I becoming delusional? This magazine published and distributed just to carry this article and, of course, the letter to me. Now the job is done, there will be no more issues. Inside a train hurtling forward, piercing the depth of the night, under the light of a fifteen-watt bulb, in the midst of fellow sleeping passengers, I felt suffocated by my own imagination.