The Descent of Bolshevism/The Assassins
CHAPTER IV
The Assassins
Three students in Neishapur, swearing eternal friendship to each other, entered one day into a fantastic agreement by which they were to circumvent Fortune. Whoever succeeded first, pledged himself to lend a helping hand to the others. The one was destined to power; the other to fame; and the third, to the universal malediction of mankind. Nizam ul-Mulk, who
afterwards became vezier to the Sultan Malek Shah; Omar Khayyam, who refused the proffered favors of his former college friend, preferring the Book of Verse and the Jug of Wine; and Hasan ibn Sabah, who was later known and feared as the Old Man of the Mountain, the founder of the Sect of Assassins, were the three young covenanters of Neishapur.
In his early days Hasan nursed the dream of power; and this agreement, which was made at his suggestion, was an insurance policy, as it were, to his dream. And to be sure, Nizam ul-Mulk made good his promise, and Hasan, unlike Omar, was glad to accept the post he secured him at the court of Malek Shah. But as he was not capable of serving any one else but himself, he no sooner sat on the divan of authority than he began to build him a ladder of the favors of his benefactor and former fellow student. Before he had taken the first step, however, which was to be on the very head of Nizam, he was given a lesson in fidelity and gratitude, and politely escorted to the gate. The lesson was wasted upon him, and Nizam was thereafter marked out as one of his enemies. It was Hasan's boast that, with the aid of two faithful friends, he could have overturned the power of "the Turk and the Peasant," meaning the Sultan and his Vezier. For twenty-two years he nursed his grudge, while laying the foundation of his power. His patience, like his rascality, was inexhaustible.
Having fallen at the court of Malek Shah, Hasan joined the Ismailites, was initiated into their high mysteries and soon became a dai, missionary, of persuasive eloquence and zeal. Meanwhile he was planning for new adventures in foreign lands. The Sultan of Egypt at that time was an Ismailite and consequently a rival to the Khalif of Baghdad. Hasan would set forth to Egypt, therefore, to warm his hands at the fire of the Khalif's favor. His fame as an Ismailite dai had preceded him. And when the Khalif Mostanser heard he was coming, he sent a delegation to meet and greet him at the border.
Honors were showered upon Hasan. He was received at court as a man of righteousness and piety; he was invited to speak at the Lodge of Cairo; he was made a member of the Council of Wisdom; he was proclaimed the chief bearer of the torch of truth. But soon his fortunes at the court of Mostanser began to radiate his egregious egotism, fostering the seeds of hate and jealousy all around. And his ladder of intrigue for absolute power which he had built, toppled finally under him, and once more he was politely escorted to the gate. Nay, to the castle, where he was to meditate in solitary confinement on the practical uses of fidelity and gratitude. But the castle, as the story goes, fell like a house of cards without any visible cause whatever, before Hasan reached it. Which was looked upon as a divine sign in his favor and decided the Khalif to banish him from Egypt.
He was placed, therefore, on board of a ship which had to weather many storms before it reached the Syrian coast. The stormy sea gave Hasan an opportunity to perform one of those miracles that mark the beginning of a prophet's career. His fellow travellers, who were not students in meteorology, soon became disciples and followers of the new Mahdi, the commander of the winds and waves. In Damascus and Aleppo he sowed, in passing, the seeds of his secret doctrines, which were later to grow into daggers dripping with blood. And on his return to Persia he entrenched himself with a few faithful followers in the mountain fortress of Alamut. This marked the beginning of his power.
The sect of the Assassins was established principally on the tenets of the Karmathians. The only difference being that, instead of waging open war against his enemies, against society in general, Hasan adopted the policy of secret assassination. This required emissaries who would blindly obey his commands. Like the Karmathian, therefore, his sect was formed of different degrees of membership. Those who stood lowest in the order were the novices, the common people. They had to observe the ordinary tenets of Islam. The dais or missionaries were, a degree higher than the rafiks or companions; and they were both taught to believe in nothing and to scoff at the devotion of the Faithful.
But the most important class of the Order was that of the fadais or assassins, who were schooled in self-sacrifice and murder. And at the head of it was Sheikh ul-Jahal, the Old Man of the Mountain, Hasan ibn Sabah, and chief of the three provinces over which his power soon extended. Hasan never forgot his former college friend and benefactor Nizam ul-Mulk. He was certainly a man of enduring grievances and long-cherished grudges. So the Vezier of Malek Shah and his son were the first victims of the Assassins.
The fadais were chosen of the youth of the land. Upon them the Old Man of the Mountain chiefly depended, and to them he looked for the consummation of his scheme of universal happiness. To fire their spirits, therefore, and arouse their self-sacrificing zeal, he contrived for them the most seductive pleasures. The valley of Alamut was walled in and a most brilliant garden was laid in the enclosure—a sample on earth of the Prophet's paradise. In it were streams and fountains of milk and honey, and water and wine; bulbuls and nightingales singing to the rose; gazelles prancing in the scented glades; serving boys with faces like the moon; and jasmine covered kiosks where black-eyed huris languished in voluptuous bliss.
Marco Polo gives us a first hand account of this terrestrial paradise, which was designed for the fadais to spur them to their bloody task. Hasan's invention was a great success. A fadai, we are told, was first given hasheesh—hence the name assassins—was drugged into a trance and taken to the garden, where he awoke to find himself surrounded with all kinds of sensual and voluptuous pleasures. He imagined himself in a dream of paradisal bliss. But it lasted only a few days, when he would be drugged again with hasheesh and carried out in the same manner as he was carried in.
This foretaste of Paradise, which he was to enjoy in full and forever by executing the will of his Master Hasan, steeled his heart to the boldest and bloodiest deeds. These young fadais made no secret of their calling. They were conspicuous for the red caps and girdles they wore and the terror-spreading daggers they carried. And their bloody deeds were sometimes done in the open and sometimes in the most mysterious manner. King Sanjar once determined to attack the castle of Alamut. But one morning he found near his bed a dagger stuck in the ground and bearing this message: Sultan Sanjar, beware. Had not thy character been respected, the hand which stuck this dagger in the hard ground could with greater ease have stuck it into thy soft bosom. Whereupon, King Sanjar changed his mind.
There is no doubt that Hasan ibn Sabah was a man of penetrating insight and deep worldly wisdom. And he might have become a power at the court of either Malek Shah or the Khalif Mostanser, had he been decent enough to be thoughtful at least of his benefactors. But the imposing rascal would never have become the supreme ruler of a sect that made a profession of crime and a religion of assassination. Still, he must have died a disappointed man. For the thrones he sought to overturn and the religions he tried to destroy by the doublefaced Monster of atheism and piety, of lawlessness and submission, continued, though rudely shaken during his time, to sway the minds and souls of men. And why? Because of the inconsistency and dishonesty that even an assassin or a chief of assassins, with the insight of Hasan, could well have avoided.
But his weakness was that he followed unquestioning in the path of the Ismailites who taught that lawlessness is good for the ruler, but bad for the subject; that the many are held together by the few through the bridle of the law; that religion is for the common people, knowledge and freedom from all restraints for the elect; and that a secret system of atheism and immorality could work the destruction of those in power. Such demoniacal cynicism never established a dynasty, much less a state of any endurance. Mazdakism was more consistent, if not also more sincere. "God the best ruler sufficeth us: nothing is true, all is allowed," said the chiefs and the initiated of the Assassins.
On the other hand, believing sincerely that morality and religion are the best sureties of a nation, the strongest bulwark of a state, they affected an extraordinary sanctity, wearing the coarsest garments and abstaining, in public at least, from wine and sensuous pleasures. Hasan himself, whatever his motive, rarely ventured outside of his castle in Alamut, where he lived a recluse for thirty-five years. But invisible himself, he saw with a thousand eyes the subtle machinations of princes, the sluggish engines of Oriental politics, the veiled altars of inimical sects and creeds. And he was the lord of a thousand secret daggers.
But in the ranks there was often dissension and murmurs of discontent. The reign of assassination, tempered with readings from the Koran, did not always succeed in veiling the high mysteries from the people, who were kept in the bonds of law and religion, while the chiefs often enjoyed every immunity. The disparity was becoming fatal to the cause. And Hasan himself seems to have had his remorseful moments. Once, at least, he feared lest he should die without obtaining a knowledge of the truth! As a rule, however, his self-confidence and self-sufficiency triumphed in the end, even though he recognized the virtue of compromise. For on certain occasions, to mollify his followers, he would announce from the pulpit that the gates of mercy and grace are open to those who obey him; that they are the elect of mankind, free from all the obligations of the law, released from the burden and bondage of all commands and prohibitions. Except, of course, his own. For he, Hasan ibn Sabah, has brought to them the day of resurrection. A saturnalia such as that of the Mazdakites generally followed these pronouncements.
But the dynasties he had set out to desstroy,—the Fatemite of Egypt, the Abbaside of Baghdad, the Seljuk of Persia,—were still standing and holding their own despite his thousand secret daggers. Hasan, therefore, would set up one of his own. And by bribing his followers with immunity from all laws and his assassins with a foretaste of Paradise, he succeeded in founding the dynasty that spread its red terror in many lands for more than two centuries. He invoked in his aid the Ismailite doctrine of hidden and revealed imams only to strike out one of its main supports. There was to be no more concealed imams; the last of them died before Hasan. Thenceforth, in his political scheme, the imam had to appear or lose his throne by default.
Every one of his successors, therefore, had it proclaimed that he was the promised imam, promised by his predecessor or by Hasan himself. And to preserve and strengthen the new dynasty, each one was to remove certain prohibitions, or rather to extend the immunity from laws and creeds to a greater number of his subjects. One of the rulers won so many adherents because he drank wine openly and freely and indulged in other forbidden practices. They saw in these lawless habits a clear sign of the coming imam who was to do away with all prohibitions. And there was always, to be sure, a coming imam. This was the ideal the people continued to cherish,—the ideal that the leaders forever dandled before their eyes. And as a rule of succession, although marked with poison and slaughter,—the most natural thing in the world,—it was an improvement upon all the others.
But the inconsistencies of these Old Men of the Mountain sometimes reach the sublime. We have no reason to doubt that Hasan himself, unlike Mazdak four centuries before him, lived the life of an ascetic in his castle on the hilltop. The miniature paradise, which he could behold from his window, was not for him, but for the young fadais who were willing to die in doing his will. A magnanimity hardly to be surpassed in this world. And he was a Spartan too, this Hasan. He slew both his sons for no apparent reason except that one of them was suspected of conniving at the murder of a dai, the other was seen drinking wine. And he himself—the ruthlessness of Logic, the irony of Fate!—was slain by his own brother-in-law after a long and prosperous reign, and when old Omar was still rhyming in Neishapur.
Those who followed him also passed away in the popular fashion. Jelaluddin Hasan III poisoned his father because he could not wait to succeed him in the ordinary manner. Otherwise, he was a good man. He restored the old doctrine—secret principles for the initiated and Islam for the people—and no assassinations of interest occurred during his happy reign, except, of course, his own. Like his father, he, too, was quietly removed by poison. His son who succeeded him was an imbecile. He took the people into his confidence and revealed to them all the high mysteries of the Sect. Religion, he announced, is abolished forever: laws and moralities are extinct. The people applauded and gave themselves up to feasting and pleasure.
Nevertheless, this imbecile Sheikh ul-Jabal ruled for thirty years, and were it not for his son, he might have died a natural death. Ruknuddin who succeeded him was the last of the Assassin rulers in Persia and the most ambitious if not the most original. He sought the recognition of Europe: he dreamt of rising to respectability among kings. But the envoy he sent to the court of Henry III of England was not received with all the honors due to his rank. One of the King's bishops said something, in his presence, about Mohammedan pigs and hell-fire, which the envoy had to swallow and digest on his way back to his Master. Had Ruknuddin looked eastward, however, instead of westward for a sign, he might have saved himself the mortification of such European recognition.
For out of the heart of Asia at that time came forth the fierce Hulago—the British bishop must have blessed his soul—to bring the hell-fire and the pigs together. The Tartar hordes under his command, issuing from the fertile plains south of the Baikal Lake early in the thirteenth century, swept like a cyclone over Bokhara and Samarkand and Khorasan up to the confines of Persia. One fortress after another fell before them, castle and palace were razed to the dust, cities were sacked and destroyed, and Alamut and Euknuddin were treated to a general massacre that sent the shivers down the spine of Assassindom. Thus the dynasty of Hasan ibn Sabah was completely overthrown in Persia.
But the Syrian branch, which was established during Hasan's time, was still beyond Hulago's power. It continued, even after the fall of Ruknuddin and the capture of Alamut, to be a red terror to rulers and princes as well as to the Crusaders. The reign of the dagger in Syria was based on the principle of absolute impartiality. It made no distinction between Mohammedans and Christians, Orientals and Europeans. The followers of Bahram, the Syrian Old Man of the Mountain, practiced the most unspeakable atrocities against the inhabitants as well as against those in power. Carrying off women and children from the streets in open day, was the least of their crimes. And they improved upon the method of their Persian colleagues by extending the privileges of their Sect to alien princes and rulers.
"They caused assassination to be committed," one historian states, "at the solicitation of other princes for motives of interest in which religion had no share." In other words, they were a corporation of professional murderers, whose services were at the disposal of any prince or ruler in trouble. It is this Syrian branch, which became independent of Alamut, that is known to the Crusaders. Count Raymond of Tripoli and Conrad of Montferrat were slain probably by the fadais, who had acquired so much power that every scoundrel assumed their name as a convenient cloak for his crimes. Their reign of terror struck the mightiest and the boldest with fear and trepidation. It produced two new diseases in the land—moral torpor and mental paralysis.
And the work of the dagger was reinforced with conspiracies and intrigues for additional power. Perhaps the Assassins wanted a window on the sea when they entered into a secret treaty with the Crusaders by which they were to barter Damascus for Tyre. But the plot was discovered in time, and the people of Damascus rose against them, massacring six thousand in the streets and crucifying the more prominent among them along the city walls. Aleppo and Diarbekr followed the example of Damascus. But these massacres had little or no effect, it seems, upon a Sect that lived by assassination. It continued to flourish, even after its power had been broken in Persia, until the Mamluk Sultan Bibars, a score of years later, set out from Egypt to imitate in Syria Hulago's example. And he was as successful as the Tartar chief. For the Assassins were ultimately out-assassined, almost exterminated by Bibars, and their Sect was abolished,—"buried," as one historian puts it, "amidst the ruins of thrones and altars, and covered with the universal execration of mankind."
The fact is, however, that the remnants of it were driven into secrecy and silence; and some of them, till this day, are to be found in Kerman and Khorasan, where they are protected to some extent by British officials. And the Ismailites of upper Syria today, though they be suspected of nature-worship, have forgotten, through centuries of submission to the Turks, the use of the dagger,—they have lost the faculty of violence.