‘He announces to you that the sacred Law is abolished for the hour of the Resurrection has sounded. God imposed on you his Law to make you earn Paradise and indeed you now deserve it. From today on, Paradise is yours. You are thus free of the yoke of the Law.
‘Everything that was forbidden is permitted, and everything that was obligatory is forbidden!
‘The five daily prayers are forbidden,’ the Redeemer continued. ‘Since we are now in Paradise and in permanent contact with the Creator, we no have any need to address Him at fixed times; those who persist in making the five prayers show thereby how little they believe in the Resurrection. Prayer has become an act of unbelief.’
On the other hand, wine, considered by the Quran to be the drink of Paradise, was from now authorized; not to drink it was considered to be a manifest sign of a lack of faith.
‘When this was proclaimed,’ a Persian historian of the time related, ‘the assembly started to rejoice on the harp and the flute and to drink wine conspicuously on the very steps of the dais.’
It was an excessive reaction, in proportion to the excesses practised by Hassan Sabbah in the name of Quranic Law. Soon the successors of the redeemer would set themselves to diminishing his messianic ardour, but Alamut would never again be this reservoir of martyrs desired by the Supreme Preacher. Life would henceforth be sweet and the long series of murders which had terrorized the cities of Islam would be interrupted. The Ismailis, as radical a sect as there ever was, would change into a community of exemplary tolerance.
In fact, after having announced the good news to the people of Alamut and its surroundings, the Redeemer sent emissaries off to the other Ismaili communities of Asia and Egypt. They were provided with documents signed by his hand, and asked everyone to celebrate the day of redemption whose date they gave according to three different calenders; that of the Hijra of the Prophet, that of Alexander the Greek and that of the ‘most eminent man of both worlds, Omar Khayyam of Nishapur’.
At Alamut the Redeemer gave orders that the Samarkand Manuscript be venerated as a great book of wisdom. Artists were commissioned to ornament it with pictures, to illuminate it and to make for it a casket of chased gold encrusted with precious stones. No one had the right to copy its contents but it was placed permanently on a low cedar table in the small inner room where the librarian worked. There, under his suspicious surveyance some privileged members would come to consult it.
Until then, people knew only a few of Khayyam’s quatrains, which had been composed in his impetuous youth; now many others were learnt, quoted and repeated — some with serious alterations. This period also saw one of the strangest phenomena: whenever a poet composed a quatrain which might cause trouble for him, he would attribute it to Omar; hundreds of false rubaiyaat came to be intermixed with those of Khayyam, to the extent that, in the absence of the manuscript, it was impossible to discern which were truly his.
Was it at the Redeemer’s request that the librarians of Alamut, from father to son, took up the chronicle of the manuscript at the point where Vartan left it? In any case, it is from this single source that we know Khayyam’s posthumous influence on the metamorphosis the Assassins underwent. The concise yet irreplaceable account of history was carried on in the same way for almost a century until a new brutal interruption — the Mongol invasions.
The first wave, led by Chengiz Khan, was, beyond a shadow of doubt, the most devastating scourge ever to cross the Orient. Important cities were razed and their population exterminated. Such was the case with Peking, Bukhara and Samarkand, whose inhabitants were treated like cattle with the young women handed around the officers of the victorious horde, the artisans reduced to slavery and the rest massacred with the sole exception of a minority who, regrouping around the grand qadi of the time, very quickly proclaimed their allegiance to Chengiz Khan.
In spite of this apocalypse, Samarkand appeared to be almost favoured, since it would one day be reborn from its rubble to become the capital of a world-wide empire — that of Tamerlane — in contrast to so many cities which were never to rise again, namely the three great metropolises of Khorassan where all this world’s intellectual activity had long been concentrated: Merv, Balkh and Nishapur — to which list must be added Rayy, the cradle of oriental medicine whose very name would be forgotten. The world would have to wait several centuries in order to see the rebirth, on a neighbouring site, of the city of Teheran.
It was the second wave of Mongol invasions which swept over Alamut. It was a little less bloody, but more far-reaching. How can we not share the terror of the people alive at the time, knowing that the Mongol troops were able, over a period of a few months, to lay waste to Baghdad, Damascus, Cracow in Poland and the Chinese province of Szechuan.
The Assassin’s fortress thus opted to surrender, the fortress which had resisted so many invaders over a hundred and sixty-six years! Prince Hulagu, grandson of Chengiz Khan, came in person to admire this masterpiece of military construction; legend says that he found provisions which had been conserved intact from the days of Hassan Sabbah.
After inspecting the place with his lieutenants, he ordered the soldiers to destroy everything, not to leave a stone untouched, not to spare even the library. However, before setting fire to it, he permitted a thirty-year-old historian, a certain Juvayni, to go inside. He had been in the process of writing a History of the Conqueror of the World at Hulagu’s request, which book is still today our most valuable source on the Mongol invasions. He thus was able to go into this mysterious place where tens of thousands of manuscripts were kept in rows, stacked up or rolled up; outside he was awaited by a Mongol officer and a soldier with a wheelbarrow. What the wheelbarrow could hold would be saved, the rest was to be victim to the flames. There was no question of reading the texts or cataloguing the titles.
A fervent Sunni, Juvayni told himself that his first task was to save the World of God from the fire. He started to pile up as quickly as he could any copies of the Quran, recognizable by their thick binding and stored in the same place. He had a good score of them and made three trips to carry them out to the wheelbarrow which was already almost full. Now, what to chose? Heading toward one of the walls, against which the volumes seemed to be better ordered than elsewhere, he came across innumerable works written by Hassan Sabbah during his thirty years of voluntary reclusion. He chose to save one of them, an autobiography of which he would quote some fragments in his own work. He also found a chronicle of Alamut which was recent and apparently well documented and which related in detail the history of the Redeemer. He hurried to take it away with him, since that episode was totally unknown outside the Ismaili community.
Did the historian know of the existence of the Samarkand Manuscript? It seemed not. Would he have looked for it if he had heard it spoken of, and having thumbed through it, would he have saved it? We do not know. What is told is that he stopped in front of a group of works devoted to the occult science and that he delved into them, forgetting the time. The Mongol officer who came to remind him with a few words had his body covered with thick red-framed armour and had as head protection a helmet which broadened out like long hair toward the neck. He was carrying a torch in his hand and to show just how much in a hurry he was, he placed it next to a pile of dusty scrolls. The historian gave in and gathered into his hands and up to his armpits as many as he could grab, and when the manuscript entitled Eternal Secrets of Stars and Numbers fell to the ground, he did not bend over to pick it up again.