ONE OF THE MORE regrettable consequences of the much greater specialisation that characterised the historical profession in the twentieth century was that historians seemed increasingly to be writing only for other professional historians – and for a diminishing number even of them. There came a time when the appearance of a book on a best-seller list would be almost enough in itself to destroy its author’s scholarly reputation. In the years I have spent teaching the history of the Middle East and Central Asia, both in London and, more recently, in the United States, I have done my best to persuade my students – especially graduate students, some of whom would be making careers as historians, and therefore writing history – that historical writing does not have to be boring and unreadable in order to qualify as worthwhile.
That time, fortunately, seems to have passed: no one has any doubts about the scholarly credentials of, say, Simon Schama, despite his various television series and the number of people who buy his books. There is, at last, an increasing awareness of the fact that there is a large reading public that is interested in being offered history that, on the one hand, is well researched and has something significant to say; and on the other, is written in jargon-free English that it is actually a pleasure to read. The historiography of the medieval Islamic sect known (in the West) as the Assassins (more properly the Nizari Ismailis) offers examples of both tendencies.
For a number of years, the standard book in English was Marshall Hodgson’s The Order of Assassins (1955). That this was and is a work of value, no one would deny – indeed, it was reprinted in paperback as recently as 2005. And Hodgson, who died very prematurely in 1968, was a strikingly original historian whose posthumously published three-volume The Venture of Islam is, among surveys of Islamic history, quite unparalleled as an intellectual tour de force. Even his greatest admirers, however (of whom I am one), could not convincingly argue that he was a master of the English language. He is more than worth the effort: but it is indisputably an effort. A marked contrast came in 1967 with the publication of Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam. Lewis has not only been, over a long career, a very prolific historian of the Middle East: he has also written about it more accessibly and readably than any other scholar writing in English in the twentieth century. The Assassins is a good example of Lewis at his best. When it appeared it was the ideal introduction to the subject. Even after forty years it remains well worth reading, whatever advances in research may have taken place since then. Today, a scholar would go first to books by such historians as Farhad Daftary of the Institute of Ismaili Studies. But Lewis is, deservedly, still in print (now with a new 2002 introduction, in which he very justly expresses serious reservations about the notion that there is any kind of terroristic continuity between the Assassins and al-Qa’ida).
James Waterson’s book is nearer to the Lewis than the Hodgson tradition. He was a student of mine during my last years in London; and if this book and its excellent predecessor, The Knights of Islam: The Wars of the Mamluks (2007), are anything to go by, he seems to have taken to heart (if perhaps only subconsciously!) the advice mentioned in the first paragraph of this foreword. This is a book that is up to date, informative, and in no way difficult to read and understand. The subject is one of great fascination, and James Waterson’s treatment of it is well calculated to pass on that fascination to the wide readership it richly deserves.
David Morgan
University of Wisconsin-Madison