The Prophet said: A man will come out of the East who will preach in the name of the family of Muhammad, though he is the furthest of all men from them. He will hoist black flags which begin with victory and end with unbelief. He will be followed by the discards of the Arabs, the lowest of the mawali, slaves, runaways, and outcasts in remote places, whose emblem is black and whose religion is polytheism, and most of them are mutilated.*
IN 1253, AT THE command of an adored imam, four hundred men left remote castle strongholds in the high mountains of northern Persia and set off to travel across Asia to the Mongol capital of Qaraqorum. They were an army of murderers, disguised as merchants, mendicant preachers and messengers; their intention was to assassinate Mongke, the Great Khan and grandson of Chinggis Khan. Each man’s plan would have been simple. They would get close to the Khan and then strike him down with a consecrated dagger before the Mongol bodyguard hacked them to pieces. The assassin would certainly be killed – tortured and killed more likely – after striking down Mongke, but that was part of the divine plan too. For the man who struck down the Khan of the Mongols would be assured a place in the highest Garden of Paradise, there to be attended by virgins for eternity.
Ultimately, this army of killers failed, but such was the fear that their poniards, of terrible length and sharpness, placed in the hearts of Mongol chiefs that body armour was worn both day and night by every man of importance in the Khan’s dominions. The response of the Mongols, the superpower of the Middle Ages, to these men began with enslavement and massacre of their women and children and ended with a brutal invasion of Persia and an ensuing genocide that even today, eight hundred years later, still resonates in the consciousness of Iranians.
In 1092 a man from the same sect, armed only with a sanctified blade, had effectively destroyed a great Islamic empire with one political killing. This single murder divided and weakened the Muslim states of Iraq and Syria to such a degree that it gave the knights of the First Crusade the chance they needed to be able to take Jerusalem and create the Latin Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Later, in a violent and ironic twist of fate they acted as a catalyst for the Islamic jihad that would eventually eradicate the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem.
These were the Assassins of the Nizari Ismailis, Muslims whose emergence into the religious and political landscapes of Persia and Syria was viewed by the rest of Islam as a trumpet blast heralding the Last Days. Their devotees eradicated whole political dynasties in Persia through campaigns of assassination and numbered caliphs among their victims. Even Saladin, the most famous leader of the Holy War against the infidel Crusaders, lived in fear of their ability to penetrate a sultan’s close bodyguard and to infiltrate royal households. The Ismaili grand masters never left the safety of near-impenetrable castles in Persia and Syria and yet no man of importance, from Cairo in the west to Samarqand in the east, could consider himself beyond the reach of their disciples’ knives.
Their infamy did not end, however, at the borders of the Dar al-Islam. Beyond the lands of the Muslims the Assassins’ assaults on the Crusaders of Syria led to warnings travelling as far as the royal court of France. It was believed that there were agents planted in every king’s household ready to undertake political murder at the word of the grand master. The life of Edward I of England was very nearly ended by the Assassins’ blades and Richard the Lionheart’s reputation as the avatar of chivalry was sullied by association with them after they murdered Conrad of Montferrat, the hero of the Crusader resistance to Saladin, in the streets of Acre.
The Assassins operated as a military power, not through direct confrontation but through their skilled and selective political killings and by fifth-column infiltration. Their selection of these tactics was due to the requirements of the asymmetrical wars they were forced to fight against numerically superior, militarily advantaged and logistically dominant enemies who could not be met on the battlefield with any real hope of success. In these uneven wars the Nizari Ismaili Assassins maintained an impressive record of frustrating the ambitions of great princes and their mission to slay the Khan drew on chameleonic skills of concealment learned over the course of a century and a half of eliminations and intimidation and was driven by an unswerving devotion to their grand master.
Had they been able to kill the Khan, the Assassins might just have been able to save Islam from the Mongol rage that was soon to engulf it. As it was, their failure only hastened the galloping horses of the coming Apocalypse.
Such was the action during the waning of the golden age of Islam. To uncover why the Ismaili Assassins came about, and how their methods evolved we have to go back to the seventh century, when Islam was just beginning its incredible journey of conquest, and to the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Muhammad’s death left the Muslim Arabs with a succession dilemma as the Prophet had always insisted that he was not divine but just a man. Therefore succession to his leadership could not logically be based on being God’s anointed as the enthronements of Byzantine emperors and western kings were. This meant that although Ali was both the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet he was only equal to other lifetime companions and comrades of Muhammad in the right to succession. The succession crisis was solved in the short term by the creation of the position of khalifah or caliph. The word simply means deputy, in this case to the Prophet, and was neutral enough to avoid any idea of divine right of succession by any man or of continued descent of the title through one family. This decision also has to be viewed against the pre-Islamic traditions of the Arab tribes, where leadership was by election and based on success or ability rather than by consanguinity.*
The problem was that there was a faction within the new nation that felt that Ali, despite the denial of personal divinity by the Prophet, had a better claim than other candidates of the Quayrash, the leading tribe of the Arab Muslims. The admittedly apocryphal statement of a deputy of Mecca as quoted by Gibbon,† ‘I have seen the Chosroes of Persia and the Caesar of Rome, but never did I behold a king among his subjects like Muhammad among his companions,’ at the very least gives credence to the fact that any relative of the man who had brought the Arabs a unifying faith of their own and a sense of nationhood was going to attract at least some supporters who believed in a God-given right to rule for Muhammad’s direct descendants through his daughter Fatima.
Furthermore, at this time politics and the religion of Muhammad were indivisible. The Prophet’s religious revelation was what had unified the early Arab converts and what had set them on their road to conquest. The series of documents that have been called the Medina Agreement* very definitely show how Muhammad’s social and political message was bound up in the new faith. The actions of a Muslim towards fellow believers and towards unbelievers are expressed very clearly in the Medina papers: ‘Believers are patrons and clients one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders.’ The hadith or customs and sayings of the Prophet, which found expression in the Medina Agreement, were what regulated Muslim society after Muhammad’s death and the same religio-social message can be found in the Quran. The emphasis was on social justice and the redistribution of riches throughout the Muslim community and the nature of Islam was such that it required a change of consciousness in the individual, from viewing himself in the singular or in terms of family or tribal ties to viewing himself rather as part of the umma, a community of the faithful.† Therefore, whilst Muhammad’s message was ostensibly religious, it could not be implemented without large-scale social and political change; in this way religion, society and politics were indivisible. This synthesis of faith and government was an immediate cause of strength for the nascent Arab-Muslim state, as it would later be for the Assassin Missions, but it would soon enough ensure immense difficulties in securing a stable and progressive Islamic polity.
In only a short period of time, the faction backing Ali had become definable enough to be recognised as the Shia-tu Ali, or the party of Ali, later known as the Shia. At this point, however, there was no true religious schism in Islam as there would be later. The Shia were simply the political supporters of Ali for the top job. In this, they were immediately disappointed as, in what was perhaps not an altogether open or fair election, the close companions of the Prophet put up Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, as the new leader without consulting the tribes – according to one tradition, whilst Ali was preparing the Prophet’s body for burial. Later Shiite radicals would claim that it was at this point that, whilst Ali and his supporters followed the commandments of the Quran, the rest of the people, ‘went astray like a blind camel’.*
Ali finally succeeded to the caliphate only after two other caliphs had occupied the throne. This period of the four Rashidun or ‘rightly guided’ caliphs was, on the surface, a hugely successful one for the Arab-Muslim community. By 651 Egypt, Syria, Iraq, the central lands of Persia and parts of North Africa had all come under Arab control either by conquest or by treaty, and in 654 there was even a naval victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of the Masts. There were, however, also portents of what was to come for so many caliphs and sultans in the future as three of the four Rashidun caliphs died bloodily. The second caliph, Umar, was killed by a Persian Christian slave; his successor, Uthman, was murdered by Muslim mutineers; and Ali was slain by a religious fanatic who was supposed to be on his side in Ali’s civil war against the Umayyad clan – a distant branch of the Prophet’s family tree. It was with Ali’s death and the victory this gave to the Umayyads in Islam’s first civil war that the Shia began the transformation from being simply a political faction to being a discernable religious division within Islam. Some of its adherents were of course Arabs, but it was among the mawali, non-Arabs who would soon begin converting to Islam in newly conquered Persia, that it made its greatest appeal.
Islam’s conquests were so rapid, in part at least, because the long war between Sassanian Persia and the Byzantines (603–28) had totally exhausted both of western Asia’s main powers. It had only drawn to an end with the Emperor Heraclius’s forces driving the Persians from the very gates of Constantinople and forcing their retreat from Egypt and the Holy Land. The later Byzantine sack of Ctesiphon, deep in Persian territory, had effectively ended the conflict but at enormous cost to the Byzantine Empire and to its reputation in the Levant. Sassanian Persia collapsed into near anarchy after the higher lords of the state had slowly shot their monarch King Chosroes to death with arrows as a punishment for his folly in attacking the Greeks and in order to appease Heraclius. All this left a power vacuum that the now unified and well-organised Arab forces were able to fill. This said, there was still hard fighting to be done for the Muslims in the Sassanian heartland around Fars, where loyalties to the old order died the hardest.
Antipathy towards Greek Orthodox Byzantium came from its hard-taxed and religiously persecuted Syrian and Egyptian subjects, who were chiefly Aramaic and Coptic Christians, and from the Jews of Palestine who were being punished by Byzantium for their support of the Persians in the long war. This undoubtedly also assisted the Arabs in their rapid conquest of the Byzantine dominions in the Middle East.
The only hiatus in this seemingly unending catalogue of success was the civil war that began with the murder of the third caliph, Uthman, in 656. The murder of one man essentially threw the entire empire into chaos and this peculiar feature of medieval polity is worth noting at this juncture, as we start to determine both the use and effectiveness of assassination as a policy. In a period where an individual was not just the leader of a state but also essentially embodied the state, then his removal would almost certainly cause the state to stumble and even in certain cases to disintegrate entirely. What is also worth noting, politically, is that Uthman’s murder was almost a direct result of his favouring of his own clan – the Umayyads, a leading family of the Quayrash. The Quayrash were the old elite of pre-Islamic Mecca and Uthman gave them preference over other groups with longer histories of conversion to Islam and loyalty to the Prophet. Muhammad had in fact been of the Quayrash himself but from one of its less aristocratic branches and he had never therefore been part of the more exclusive pre-Islamic aristocracy. This nepotism went against the equality professed in early Islam and set off a series of small revolts in the armies against what was seen as a hijacking of the Islamic Arab nation by the Umayyad family.
Uthman’s murderers came from the Arab army stationed in Egypt and they killed him in Medina where they had travelled ostensibly to discuss dissatisfaction within the Egyptian forces. A desire for social justice, and the perceived lack of it in the Islamic polity was a major cause of the later formation of radical Shiite sects that ultimately led to the birth of the Assassins. It was also a primary factor in the later ability of the Ismaili Assassin sect to recruit abundant numbers of lay supporters and devotees with their ‘New Preaching’ or dawa jadida, which appealed strongly to townsfolk, low-ranking military men and peasants.
The murder of Uthman brought the much-delayed ascension of Ali to the caliphate, but his apparent lack of either remorse for Uthman’s bloody death or desire for revenge on the perpetrators prevented a smooth succession. It was even suggested in higher political circles that the new caliph had a vested interest in the death of his predecessor and soon enough rebellion was brewing again. Furthermore, by taking into his government men of Kufa, a garrison city of Iraq, who were clearly implicated in the murder, Ali only worsened matters.
The role of women is not large in recorded Islamic history, but at this juncture the opposition of the Prophet’s widow Aisha to Ali was decisive as she called for war against the fourth caliph. The Umayyads of Syria took the opportunity of the political chaos this war cry caused in Medina and Mecca to bring Syria fully under their dominion and break away from the empire. Ali defeated Aisha’s forces at the Battle of the Camel, so named because the majority of the action took place around the dowager’s camel, in 656 near Basra. The lady was soon enough sent back to Mecca and Ali was in control of Arabia and Iraq, at least for a little while.
The Battle of the Camel, by its very nomenclature, sounds like a small-scale battle and it might indeed have been, as ‘pure’ Arabian warfare was based on a principle of avoiding unnecessary loss of life. The limited manpower available in the peninsula precluded large-scale engagements and there was an accepted code of conduct in warfare that the sort of ‘absolute war’ described and decried by von Clausewitz so many centuries later should not take place. Razzia or raiding was the most common tactic employed by the Arabs in this early period and it was used against both the Byzantines and Persians with great effectiveness, to make the holding of territory by the two empires untenable. The Assassins also found themselves disadvantaged in terms of simple numbers against all their foes, their selection of methods of both attack and defence reflecting this disparity, as did those of the early Arab conquerors.
There was also a degree of ‘chivalry’ present in warfare in Arabia, even before the advent of Islam. Single combat was not uncommon between champions of either side and Abu Bakr had laid out the rules of war in 632:
O people! I charge you with ten rules; learn them well!
Do not betray or misappropriate any part of the booty; do not practice treachery or mutilation. Do not kill a young child, an old man or a woman. Do not uproot or burn palms or cut down fruitful trees. Do not slaughter a sheep or a cow or a camel, except for food. You will meet people who have set themselves apart in hermitages; leave them to accomplish the purpose for which they have done this. You will come upon people who will bring you dishes with various kinds of foods. If you partake of them, pronounce God’s name over what you eat. You will meet people who have shaved the crown of their heads, leaving a band of hair around it. Strike them with the sword.
Go, in God’s name, and may God protect you from sword and pestilence.*
In many ways assassination, which eliminated the commanders at the top and thereby denied those at the bottom of belligerent orders, could theoretically avoid much of the wanton destruction of war and there may have been a sprinkling of Abu Bakr’s philosophy of righteous war in the approach of the Assassin sect in later centuries. There is certainly no record of the Assassins ever harming children or women in their murders, and civilians generally were never caught up in what we today, somewhat euphemistically, label ‘collateral damage’, in any of the Assassins’ missions. This said, it is certain that both their and Abu Bakr’s clemency was also highly pragmatic. The desertion of the populations of Syria and Iraq from the Byzantine and Persian causes to the Arabs in the seventh century has been described briefly above; part of the appeal of the Arabs as new masters were the easy conditions of surrender and occupation that they imposed on their new subjects. Much later, the Assassins would need to preserve their base of support from both townspeople and the peasantry, and the avoidance of total war and the horrors this always brought to civilians was central to this, especially as their Persian powerbases were in regions that had a fragile agricultural structure† built almost entirely on the laborious management and maintenance of complex underground irrigation canals or qanats. The disruption of war could soon enough lead to failure of this water system, with subsequent crop loss and famine. This was something the Mongol invaders of the thirteenth century would quickly discover to their cost.
The chivalry of Arabia made an appearance in the Battle of Siffin on the Euphrates between Ali and the Umayyad forces of Syria in 657; it was Ali’s undoing. Ali was advancing into Syria from Iraq at the head of a tribal army, to remove Muawiya, the Umayyad governor of Syria, from his position. Muawiya had not directly challenged Ali’s position as caliph at this juncture, but he had demanded the punishment of Uthman’s murderers, to which Ali had replied that no crime had been committed as Uthman had acted as an oppressor of the Muslims. There was also evidently an unspoken political divide appearing within Islam as Uthman and then Muawiya spoke for the aristocratic rights of the old Arab families, whilst Ali’s support base cut right across the new society as he had tried to reinvent the role of the caliph. Ali seems to have felt that the leader of the Muslim world should not be an administrator and tax collector but rather a spiritual leader or imam. This idea particularly appealed to those at the bottom of the social order: the mawali, the new Muslim converts.
Muawiya knew he could rely on the fighting men of Syria, who had become deeply attached to him and his family. It was almost certainly this that made him confident enough to refuse to give the baya, the oath of loyalty, to the new caliph, and now Ali was marching with his army to force him to do so. Ali’s army met Muawiya’s Syrian forces in April, but there was little stomach for a fight on either side and the action was limited to skirmishes. Both sides would have been concerned over the opportunities their dispute gave to the enemies of Islam. The Byzantine border, a Syrian concern, was far from pacified and the north-eastern marches of Persia were also unstable, with Turkish incursions increasing in frequency. Muawiya’s intransigence over the baya was enough, however, eventually to force a confrontation, and battle was joined on 26 July. Ali’s forces, despite facing some of the toughest troops in Islam, were soon close to victory and only desisted from their attacks when Muawiya’s men hoisted Qurans aloft on their spears with a cry of ‘Let Allah decide!’
Ali, despite personal misgivings, and under pressure from factions within his own forces who viewed the Syrians’ demands for financial autonomy as being valid, agreed to further negotiations and even arbitration from neutrals in the conflict. The armies withdrew from the field, but Ali was doomed by his gallant act. In the negotiations Muawiya refused the title of amir al-muminin or Commander of the Faithful to Ali. This fatally weakened Ali’s position with many elements of his rainbow coalition and, together with the interminable slowness of the negotiations, it was enough to cause the desertion of a group of his most ardent followers. The name they were given, Khawarij or Kharijites, reflects this abrupt abandonment. It literally means ‘those who leave’ and they were only an extreme illustration of the wide-ranging discontent that was present in Ali’s forces. Ali failed to push the real issue – who should lead the Muslim world – and he allowed the negotiations to continue to drag on, even though he could see that they were draining his army’s morale.
Many others, like the Kharijites, were now voting with their feet; Muawiya had also used the time that the talks consumed to detach Egypt diplomatically from Ali’s dominion. The loss of Islam’s richest province eroded Ali’s powerbase even further. It is likely that he was even considering a formal truce and partition of the empire with Muawiya when he was murdered by a Kharijite in January 661. Certainly his son, Hasan, immediately gave up all hope of challenging Muawiya, who had become, almost by proxy, the new caliph of all Islam. Hasan took a large payment from Muawiya and retired to Medina, where he was poisoned by one of his wives eight years later. The lessons of Ali’s failure as a result of his reliance on coalitions and his expectation of honourable actions by his opponents were not immediately learnt by the Alids* and Shiites that would follow him. The Nizari Ismaili Assassins’ later challenge to the Islamic world was, however, built on an exclusive, not inclusive, faith base that stressed dogma and single-minded devotion to the cause above all else and which gave absolutely no quarter to opponents.
Under the Umayyads, the successes on the borders kept coming and compared to the factional anarchy of Ali’s caliphate the state was in much better shape. By the end of Muawiya’s reign the north-east of Persia, the huge province of Khurasan, was being occupied and colonised with mawali, slaves and former prisoners from Iraq. Up to fifty thousand families were, to all intents and purposes, forcibly relocated to the region. By 716 Spain had been conquered with the help of armies of newly converted Berbers from a now consolidated North Africa. Charles Martel’s hammer and the Franks’ new belief that they were the People of God defeated the Muslims at the week-long Battle of Poitiers in 732 and kept the Muslims from taking France, but in the east the area corresponding to modern-day Pakistan became part of the empire.
So the Umayyads were successful kings, indeed the chroniclers recorded their dynasty by using the Arabic for kingdom, mulk. The writers declined to call the Umayyad state a caliphate,† and despite all the glory of conquest the chronicles of this period show an absolute disillusionment with the empire so acquired. The reasons for this are easy to find. First, there was division and jealousy. Syria, at this time one of the jewels of the empire, was reserved for settlement by the Quayrash clan. Others looked on green-eyed, which only deepened divisions that had never fully healed since the Ridda Wars of the early 630s in which Arab tribes who had attempted to break away from the nascent Arab-Islamic state were savagely brought to heel. Later Islamic writers describe the Ridda Wars as being against desertion of the faith by these clans – ridda literally means apostasy – but it is just as likely that the war was about reasserting the authority and pre-eminence of the men of Mecca and Medina over the other tribes of Arabia as much as any question of a loss of faith. Indeed, war aimed at conversion of any populace was an anathema to the ideals of Islam in the medieval age and large-scale voluntary conversion, when it took place in Islam’s new lands, was essentially the cause of the destruction of the Umayyad caliphate and the end of the Arab Empire.
Conversion took place without any semblance of active encouragement from the Arab overlords in the occupied lands, but there were immediate advantages to accepting the faith that meant no urging was needed. For example, a community made up of the descendants of sixth-century Sassanian-Persian occupation forces in Yemen converted to Islam simply to gain support against local hostility. In Iraq Sassanian nobles and military men converted to try to maintain their old positions in the new society and government order; fighting for the Arabs was relatively lucrative – up to eight dinars per month could be expected.* The Arabs needed manpower as the Arabian Peninsula could not possibly produce enough men to garrison the empire, huge as it now was, and whilst military slavery was already prevalent in this period† the shortfall could not be made up just by human bondage. The initial response from the Muslim Arabs was that these new converts could be classified as mawali or clients of Arab families, but a two-tier Islam was oxymoronic given the precepts of the Quran on the equality of the umma. The class divisions that this conversion introduced into the empire and its armies were made all the more obvious by the new converts’ exclusion from the diwan: the ‘share’ that Arab Muslims were entitled to from the booty of new conquests. These were conquests that mawali soldiers were now helping to secure.
The sense of injustice that the above engendered in the mawali and the fact that they had often only perfunctorily converted to Islam and retained much of their prior religious beliefs made them ready to accept new traditions within Islam that seemed to promise social justice and that were centred on ideas of divinity. It is beyond the scope of this book to look too deeply into complex theology, but it is notable that the central tenet of Zoroastrianism, the official belief system of Sassanian Persia, and of many of the minority folk religions of Iran today, is that a saviour named Saoshyant will arrive at the end of time to renew all life. These new adherents also perhaps wanted to embrace an Islam that could be identified as being distinctly different to, and standing in opposition to, the more orthodox ideas of the Islam of the Arabs. In 680 an event occurred that would sow the seeds of just such a religious movement, based on ‘saints’, and which would give the new Muslims an alternative to ‘conventional’ Islam.
Husain, the youngest son of Ali and the grandson of the Prophet, upon hearing of the death of Muawiya, left his refuge in Medina and started on his way to Kufa. Kufa was now a key centre on the Euphrates; a city whose Arab population held a strong attachment to Ali and whose mawali were already showing a reverence for the family of the Prophet that went well beyond what could be found in accepted Islamic practice. Whether the slaying of Husain and his family in the desert near Karbala was as tragic and dramatic as it has since been portrayed we shall never know, but the tales of the small party of Husain’s seventy men and his family being surrounded by Umayyad troops, allowed to thirst almost to death and then being slaughtered by cavalrymen did not take long to reach Kufa. It was then embellished with further gory details including how Husain, having seen all of his compatriots killed and having carried their bodies back to his tent, charged at the Umayyad lines and was butchered. His head was inspected with the tip of a stick by the Umayyad governor, despite the pleadings of his own troops not to despoil the face that the Prophet’s lips had touched in life.
At this point the truth of Ali and Husain’s lives, their deeds and deaths, and those of all the other Alids who followed them, became somewhat academic. Revolts were raised in the names of both Ali and Husain and of their descendants, whether these individuals were politically active or not, simply because the revolutionaries needed a rallying point for the numerous discontented factions within the empire by this time. Ali and Husain became, to all intents and purposes, divine imams within a short period of time.
In 685 a rebellion among Persian Muslims failed in Kufa. It had been called in the name of Ibn al-Hanafiyya, who was of the line of Ali, but was the child of another of Ali’s wives and not of Fatima’s bloodline. It seems likely that the young man was not entirely supportive of the revolution instigated in his name and he may have simply decided to lie low for a time while the whole thing blew over. This did not, however, prevent Mukhtar, an old associate of Ali, from declaring Ibn al-Hanafiyya to be both an imam and the Mahdi, the divine one, who after going into concealment for an undisclosed time would once again rise up and usher in a new era of justice. With this and the rapid evolution of the idea that Ali and his descendants were the true imams, Shiism moved from being simply a political movement based around support of the right of Ali’s line to head Islam, to being a distinct sect within Islam with a definable and different belief system to that held by the majority of Muslims. The idea of the Mahdi, the man of ilm – full knowledge of the Quran and of all its hidden meanings – would became one of the most powerful tools of religious propaganda that the Ismaili Assassins would later use to attract new adherents to their faith. That the Mahdi’s reappearance would also usher in a realm of justice on earth was of particular importance in the recruitment of the fidai’in, the devotees who were willing to murder and to lay down their lives for the creed.
Mukhtar demanded absolute binding loyalty from his followers just as the Ismailis would from each fidai:
Then he [Mukhtar] alighted and entered, and we came to him together with the nobles among the people, and he stretched out his hand, and the people hurried to him and swore allegiance to him, and he said. ‘Swear allegiance to me, on the Book of God and the Sunna of His Prophet, to seek vengeance for the blood of the Prophet’s kin and to wage Holy War against those who treat that blood as licit, to defend the weak, to fight against those who fight us and be at peace with those who are at peace with us, to be faithful to our pact of allegiance, from which we shall neither give nor seek release.’*
The Umayyads would spend the remaining seventy years of their rule putting down revolts like Mukhtar’s all over Islam. Many of these were raised in the name of Alid imams but there were also revolts in Syria among their most trusted troops and a continued fallout from the bloody Battle of Marj Rahit, which had been fought successfully by Caliph Marwan in 684 but had essentially divided the province into two camps. The defeated Qays Arabs in the north remained antagonistic to the caliphate of Marwan, whilst his supporters, the Yamani tribes, held the south and a continuing hot–cold war rumbled between the two. Syria’s decline into the distracted and exhausted state it had become by the eleventh century, when the Assassins were able to infiltrate it with relative ease and the Crusaders able to conquer it quickly and almost completely, began in the Umayyad period.
The Umayyads had a particular problem with Iraq, which was reflected by their choice of governor for the rebellious province:
Al-Hajjaj set out for Iraq as governor [in 694–695] with twelve hundred men mounted on thoroughbred camels. He arrived in Kufa unannounced, early in the day. Al-Hajjaj went straight to the mosque, and with his red silk turban, he mounted the pulpit and said. ‘Here, people!’
They thought that he and his companions were Kharijites and were concerned about them. When the people were assembled in the mosque he rose, bared his face, and said. ‘I am the son of splendour, the scaler of high places. When I take off my turban you will know who I am. By God, I shall make evil bear its own burden; I shall shoe it with its own sandal and recompense it with its own like. I see heads before me that are ripe and ready for plucking, and I am the one to pluck them, and I see blood glistening between the turbans and the beards.
By God, O people of Iraq, people of discord and dissembling and evil character! I cannot be squeezed like a fig or scared like a camel with old water skins. My powers have been tested and my experience proved, and I pursue my aim to the end. The Commander of the Faithful emptied his quiver and bit his arrows and found me the bitterest and hardest of them all. Therefore he aimed me at you. For a long time now you have been swift to sedition; you have lain in the lairs of error and have made a rule of transgression. By God, I shall strip you like bark, I shall truss you like a bundle of twigs . . . I shall beat you like stray camels. Enough of these gatherings and this gossip . . .’*
Despite such threats and the slaying of some one hundred and twenty thousand people during the governor’s reign of twenty-two years there were more gatherings and gossiping and revolts and sedition in Iraq. In 740 Zayd ibn Ali, the uncle of the sixth imam after Ali, Jafar al-Sadiq, raised the standard of rebellion and it was almost predictable that he should do so in Kufa. He was let down by the men of the city soon after, however, which perhaps only validates al-Hajjaj’s above characterisation of them. A more loyal faction of his followers did, though, keep faith with him and managed to set up two small militant communities in Tabaristan and to the south of the Caspian Sea. His failed revolt also set a precedent: it made it clear that legitimacy for an imam should be based more on a willingness to take up armed struggle than on having a ‘pure’ Alid bloodline. This idea would be driven to its logical conclusion first by the Fatimids and then by the Assassins.
The last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, tried to reform the state as it became more and more obvious that the dynasty’s time was up and that its nemesis would come from within Islam. The work of military advice that Marwan wrote for his son in 747 concentrated on the threat of the continued rebellions of the Arab Kharijites in south-east Persia and not on the dangers beyond the borders. The tensions within the empire as a whole came to a head in 750 with the Abbasid Revolution, but it has been suggested that the Umayyad caliphate, with its Arab hegemony and investment of a few favoured individuals with all the power of the empire was simply so unstable that it could not survive the pressure from so many disaffected groups and would have fallen even without the Abbasids’ rebellion.* Of course, one could equally argue that a family firm cannot really be expected to have enough individuals within its household to run an empire that stretched from Spain to Transoxania.†
The Abbasid revolution was given a religious character by the raising of black banners by its forces under the Persian mawali Abu Muslim in distant Khurasan. Black flags, as alluded to in the Prophet’s portent at the head of this chapter, are an allusion to Armageddon and the Last Days and the revolutionaries made a ‘vague messianic promise of a just and equitable society’ to come.‡ Abu Muslim was acting for the family of the Abbasids, who called for a return of the caliphate to the house of the Prophet and who were descended from an uncle of Muhammad, whereas the Umayyad claim on the blood line of the Prophet was much more tenuous. They had also managed to gain the support of a Shiite sect formed around Hasim, the son of al-Hanafiyya, upon whom the hopes of the Kufa rebellion of 685 had been based. Hasim was childless and allegedly transferred his rights to the imamate of Ali over to the family of Abbas. The Abbasids therefore commanded a wide coalition in which the hopes of mawali Persians, Shiites and mainstream Muslims, disgusted by the secular and nepotistic nature of the Umayyad state, were merged.
The Abbasids relied for military force on the army of Khurasan and mawali forces of Iraq. The Khurasani army was used to fighting with the Turks on its northern border and were the best troops within Islam at this time. It is difficult to be sure of these troops ethnicity, but it is likely that up to 80 per cent of the Khurasani army was non-Arab.* The Khurasanis won a series of victories over the Umayyad troops of Syria, who were certainly no slouches: they had fought the Byzantines in the Taurus Mountains over a protracted period and had been involved in several seaborne attempts on Constantinople. It was the Khurasanis’ victories that brought the Abbasids to power.
The Abbasid revolution was a success, but only inasmuch as it was a straightforward Arab coup d’état. Abu Muslim should perhaps have raised red herrings rather than black banners; his murder by his ungrateful patrons and the large number of Umayyads left in position as judges and governors by the Abbasids† are strong evidence that an ongoing Arab Empire was planned – not a new Islamic society. Unfortunately for the new Abbasid caliph a Muslim polity of fairness and equality was exactly what the peoples of the Islamic lands wanted and they were voting for it by converting to Islam.
The Arab hegemony of numbers was essentially over by the end of the eighth century; there was a ‘bandwagon’ period of conversion in this period that led directly to the later establishment of independent Islamic-Persian dynasties and the almost immediate breakdown of the caliphal authority throughout the empire.‡ Conversion appears to have been a springboard for a re-emergence of regional identities and revolts against the Arab centre. The Abbasid caliphate was unrecognised in Spain as an Umayyad refugee had established a caliphate there that lasted until the Christian Reconquista of the eleventh century. In 788, what is today Morocco became the domain of the Idrisids and also the first obviously Shiite state. Syria was simply lost to civil war and banditry.
Persia especially showed a resurgence of national feelings. The Saffarid Dynasty that emerged in eastern Persia in the ninth century used this rebirth of national identity to separate itself and its subjects from the Arab Abbasids. The notion of a superiority in terms of culture, heritage and ‘breeding’ to the ‘new’ Arabs certainly contributed to the later formation of the Assassin sect as a breakaway Persian movement from its parent, the Arab Fatimid Empire, in the eleventh century. This sense of the Assassins being a distinctly Persian enterprise even survived the order’s spread to Syria and helped maintain it during its wars with the alien Turks and Mongols. Persian nationalism was also a defining characteristic of the Shiite Persian Buyid Dynasty of the tenth century – there was an attempt made by the Buyids to link themselves with the pre-Islamic past of Persia, through fictional genealogies that gave them illustrious ancestors with Sassanian bloodlines. Buyid coinage even showed its kings wearing the winged crowns of old Persia and carried the legend ‘may the glory of the shahanshah increase’.* Significantly, there was heavy recruitment by the Assassins among the Daylamites of the Elburz Mountains, who had formed the body of the Buyids’ army before its dissolution, and that they remained its most steadfast pool of fidai’in recruitment even late into the Assassins’ history.
The Abbasids were then effectively the inheritors of a dying Arab kingdom. Even the great Caliph Harun al-Rashid of Charlemagnic legend, who ruled between 786 and 809, was willing to appease the people of Khurasan with virtual autonomy and exemptions from taxes† in order to prevent their secession. And it is notable how much time the early Abbasid caliphate spent using the military to suppress Islamic grass roots revolutions. Their response to the military men breaking away to form dynastic states was to separate fiscal control of provinces from military governance and to create an immense espionage network. These policies on the whole failed, although the spy network was later a useful weapon against the Ismaili missionaries, who were the bricks and mortar of the Assassin movement. The immediate results were both fiscal and administrative oppression that led to more revolts, first among the Copts of Egypt in 798 and then among the peasants of both Transoxania and Khurasan. These smallholder revolts were often instigated by ‘prophets’ and this is an indication of the growing abundance of self-legitimising Islamic leadership amongst the grass roots in this period. It was this disaffection and desire for politico-religious leadership among the peasantry that the Ismaili Assassins would later tap into to build their organisation, and from which they progress to recruitment in the cities of Islam.
It is notable too that this fiscal oppression and these revolts were taking place during a period of relative affluence and success for the Abbasids. In this period their armies reached the Asian shore of the Bosporus opposite Constantinople and the Byzantines were forced to make peace and pay tribute to the tune of ‘sixty-four thousand Byzantine dinars, two thousand five hundred Arab dinars, and thirty thousand ratls of fine wool’.* During the financial crises that would come in the future, radicalisation of the sort propagated by the Assassins during their missionaries’ attempts to indoctrinate the peasantry, would find even more fertile soil in which to take root.
The Ismaili Assassins’ direct attack on the orthodox caliphate was, however, still in the future and, broadly speaking, during the eighth and ninth century the Shiite response to the betrayal of the house of Ali by the Abbasids following the revolution seemed essentially muted. Many of Ali’s descendants acquiesced to the new rule and some of the Alid family even lived at the Abbasid court. The Abbasids were, however, evidently peeved at the ongoing reverence that many Muslims still expressed for the family of Ali. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur is given this speech by the ninth-century historian al-Tabari, delivered from the pulpit of a mosque in Khurasan:
Al-Hasan his [Ali’s] son succeeded him, and God knows, he was no man for the job: money was offered to him and he accepted it: Muawiya intrigued with him, and said ‘I’ll appoint you my successor after me’, and that deceived him, and he divested himself of the office he held and delivered it over to Muawiya. Then he turned to women, marrying a new one every day, and divorcing her tomorrow, and he kept that up until he died in his bed. After him, Husain ibn Ali made an uprising, and the people of Iraq, the people of Kufa, the people of schism and hypocrisy and of submersion in discords, the people of these boroughs of misfortune – here he pointed towards Kufa – who by God are neither so hostile to me that I should make war on them or so submissive that I should make peace with them; may God keep me and Kufa separated – forsook him and delivered him to his enemies, so that he was killed.†
Given the Abbasid caliph’s real sentiments towards them, his understandable feelings about their main centre of support Kufa, and since every one of them was under surveillance from the Abbasid secret police, the Alid family’s generalised submission can hardly be surprising. Indeed if any credence can be given to a court functionary’s tale this submission would have been a simple matter of survival. Al-Mansur’s perfumer claimed to have discovered how the caliph kept a vast cavern under his palace in which were stored all the bodies of the family of Ali that he had had secretly executed. The bodies were all perfectly preserved and each corpse could be identified by a tag in its ear. The bodies ranged from young children to old men and women and each tag identified the place in the genealogy of the house of Ali of each one.
That the caliph could not give public burial to his victims was obvious: a shrine would quickly spring up around each Alid saint, which could quickly become a focus for opposition. But even more significant was the ‘tagging’. It meant that the total extirpation of the Alids was a deliberate policy of Caliph al-Mansur and that he was cataloguing his progress.*
Despite the Alids’ apparently calm acceptance of their fate, what did occur at this point within the section of society holding allegiance to the family was the definite conjoining of the idea of the imams with that of the Mahdi. It was now believed that the imams would sustain the Shiite community whilst it awaited the coming of the Mahdi. The death of the Alid Muhammad, who fought with a small handful of supporters against a powerful force of Abbasid cavalry outside Medina, effectively sealed the deal. From the time of his death in battle while holding the Prophet’s sword and being struck down by arrows, before being beheaded and having his head displayed by the Abbasid caliph on a silver dish, the idea of the imam, the Mahdi and the house of Ali were inseparable. The fact that Muhammad tried to repeat the exact defence plan that his ancestor the Prophet had used – digging a trench to fight from – only added to the romance and legend. The Prophet’s Battle of the Trench in 627 had been a success. In 762 however the Abbasid cavalry merely tore the doors from houses and bridged the ditch before surrounding its defenders.†
The Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi who ruled from 775 to 785‡ seems to have realised how all these failures were making the Alids into successful imams and he abandoned his own family’s traditional claim to the imamate and instead based their right to rule totally on consanguinity with the Prophet. ‘Mahdism’ had by now, however, developed even further as an idea. It was now believed that the Mahdi would also spread the faith to the limits of the world and conquer Constantinople before ushering in the perfect Islamic state. In fact the Abbasids had even encouraged such ideas in the early eighth century, during the build-up to their revolt against the Umayyads, through their sponsorship of radical Shiite groups that professed this idea, and used the hidden messages that they claimed were built into the Quran as evidence for their millenarian ideas. Of course, there were also enough overt messages in the Quran to bring hope to those at the bottom of the empire too: ‘And verily We have written in the scripture, after the Reminder: My righteous slaves will inherit the earth.’*
In this period too, we see the beginnings of extensive preaching of the Shiite cause, including both the idea of the imam and of the coming of the Mahdi throughout the empire, by wandering missionaries or dais. Passages of the Quran such as the above were selected and the Quran’s approval of rebellion against, and regicide of, sinful rulers was stressed. The sufferings of the Ahl al-Bayt, or house of Ali, were also emphasised and the reversal of the injustices carried out against both the imams and the downtrodden in what must have felt, to a large group of Muslims, to have become the ‘wrong empire’, was promised. There was also a further evolution of the idea of secret messages or batin in the Quran and the exegesis of these by mystical processes known only to initiates of the sects. The formation of secret societies and the chasing down of them by the Abbasids’ intelligence agencies are a constant feature of this period.
At this point there was also a division within the Shiites that has remained constant to this day. The majority of the Shiite camp recognised the line of the family that ended with the death of the eleventh imam, Hasan al-Askari in 874 and the going into occultation or satr of his son in 878. In simple terms this means that Hasan al-Askari’s son mysteriously and miraculously disappeared and it was believed that he was being kept in some immortal condition until some unspecified date in the future. His return from satr as the twelfth imam Muhammad al-Muntazar is still awaited by the Twelver Shiites of Iran and southern Iraq, indeed by the majority of Shiites in the world today. For them, his return as the Mahdi will herald the end of time. The Twelver Shiites, however, in the early medieval period, whilst remaining distant from the ruling Abbasids and disenfranchised, were on the whole quiescent.
A smaller division, however, broke away much earlier in 765 with the death of Jafar al-Sadiq, the sixth imam and the ‘succession’ to the imamate of his son Musa al-Kazim whose line led to the Twelver Shiites discussed above. This succession was disputed by a group that declared Ismail to be the sixth imam.* Ismail was another son of Jafar, who had been disinherited by his father either because he was a radical, and therefore a danger to the tactic of survival by submission to the Abbasids, or because he was an inebriate. Needless to say, the sources differ dependent on the particular chronicler’s religious and political colours and the later Sunni writer Juvaini goes so far as to state that Jafar said of his son, ‘Ismail is not my son; he is a devil that has appeared in his shape.’† Ismail died before his father, and his son Muhammad disappeared mysteriously – he may well have been secretly murdered by Abbasid agents. Muhammad was recognised as the seventh imam by this new division within Islam which took the name of the Ismailis.
It was this group, and more specifically their wandering propagandists, who caused the Abbasids real problems. They would usher in what has become known as the Shiite Century and would, in time, give birth to the terror tactics of the Assassins. Indeed, such was the success of the New Preaching that the Abbasids went to great pains to make sure the story of Ismail’s body being inspected by well-respected notables and elders of Medina before being buried in Baqi, the cemetery of Medina where the Prophet’s only son and daughters were also buried, was disseminated all over the Islamic lands. There was also a propaganda campaign to spread the word that the new creed was not of Ismail’s making, but was that of an individual who was variously branded a Jew, a Christian and a Zoroastrian. In short, there was an attempt to pull Ismail posthumously back into the world of orthodoxy, but in fact he was already long lost to radical Sevener Shiism and there were other tales – that he was not even dead – that proved impossible to counter.
The death of Musa al-Kazim after he had been imprisoned by the Abbasids certainly gave a boost to the Ismaili cause, as followers of the House of Ali could see that compromise with the caliphs was evidently not an option. The idea that Musa had laid down his life for Ismail to escape into hiding became popular and within a very short period of time many Shiite intellectuals had gone ‘underground’ to propagate the Sevener Ismaili cause.
One of the most important factors in the spreading of the new Ismaili creed was the Pax Islamica itself – never before had such a vast swath of Asia and Africa enjoyed almost unfettered communication. Whilst the provinces of Africa and eastern Persia had certainly slipped from Abbasid control, in that they could not exact taxation from the powerful families and governments controlling these areas, there was still an underlying sense of the wholeness of Islam, and travel within the lands that professed the faith was, at this point, relatively easy. Furthermore, Islam had allowed for the formation of a network of trade within the region far beyond anything that had ever preceded it, and this both facilitated transport for the missionaries and made financing them from distant centres relatively simple too. The invention of the saqh or cheque, cashable in almost any centre against distant funds was an Islamic invention as was the diwan, which the French Crusaders later took back to Europe as douane, but it was only concerned with revenue collection and not the movement through trade ports of dangerous agitators.
To whom were these agitators preaching? It seems that whilst in earlier centuries the peasantry had been the main locus of the more successful rebellions, and the Ismaili dais continued to appealto this group, they also preached to the growing and increasingly discontented urban populace. The populations of the formerly Byzantine cities of Syria had exploded under the Umayyads and early Abbasids as a response to the new trade routes that now stretched from China to the Mediterranean, and the new garrison towns and cities of Persia and Iraq had attracted more and more of the previously rural population to the growing conurbations. The populations of these cities were a mix of rich and poor, Arab and non-Arab, and every shade of persuasion within the Islamic faith. Later, the Assassins’ missionaries would bring their New Preaching through the same ‘journey’. Their appeals first to the peasantry before moving onto the people of the cities and, in particular, to the members of the ‘brotherhood’ of craft guilds may not have been entirely opportunistic. Certainly, early Shiite rebellions had failed because of their reliance on the allegiance of one city which, when lost, meant the end of the revolt. Consolidation of the revolution in the countryside before moving on to the more politically valuable but equally more difficult-to-indoctrinate cities made more sense if the Assassin movement was to survive. Their strategy has a modern parallel in Mao Ze Dong’s campaign in China, which reversed the ‘normal’ practice of communist revolution by initiating class war among the peasantry rather than among the workers.
The cities were important potential hotbeds of dissent simply because obvious and outrageous wealth was displayed openly within the gaze of the lower orders:
Al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam built his house in Basra, where it is well known at the present time, the year 332 of the Hijra [943–944], and provides lodgings for merchants, sea-going traders and the like. He also built houses in Kufa, Fustat and Alexandria. These houses and estates are well known to the present day. The value of al-Zubayr’s property at his death was fifty thousand dinars. He also left a thousand horses, a thousand slaves, male and female, and lands in the cities we have mentioned.*
Ethnicity, as discussed above, was also important. It is notable that many of the early dais about whom we have any knowledge were Persians and in preaching to the descendants of old Sassanian government families, who had now either lost their aristocratic position or were reduced to managing only ‘local’ affairs of the empire, they would have found willing listeners for their ideas, which might just have been laced with a sprinkling of xenophobia against the Arab dominion.
In fact, such ideas of an exclusively Arab Empire were fading fast as early as the eighth and ninth centuries. Many of the caliphs, including the famed contemporary and alleged correspondent of Charlemagne, Harun al-Rashid, were sons born of one of their father’s non-Arab concubines, rather than of Arab princesses. Similarly the administration, especially of the eastern empire, was falling more and more to Persians and other mawali. A better way of describing the divisions in the caliphate might be simply to say there were the ruling and the ruled and there were certainly plenty who identified themselves as not having anything to do with the rulers of the Abbasid state.
During this time the mihna, an attempt by Caliph al-Mamun (813–33) to impose orthodoxy on the whole of Islam and thereby to create a central ‘church’, where the caliphate would be similar to the papacy – able to make ex cathedra rulings and use both the definition and accusation of heresy as a political weapon – ultimately failed. The caliph showed a readiness to spill blood to see his project through but he was opposed wholeheartedly by the religious intelligentsia, the ulama, and by the Muslim community as a whole. His violence against religious leaders simply isolated the umma from the caliphate.* Indeed Sunnism, or the following of the practice of the Prophet as delineated by the teachers of the Hanbali religious school and later by the Hanafi, Maliki and Shafi schools, developed quickly during this period. Sunnism was then, in many ways, a distinct alternative to caliphal doctrine. The Shiites already had a distinct feeling of identity through their following of the imams but now mainstream Islam had it too. The distinct division into Sunni and Shia camps would come later, early in the tenth century, as a reaction to the growing strength of Shiism. The origins of the ‘schism’ were created by al-Mamun: by losing the theological battle with the ulama over the mihna he also lost practically all the Abbasids’ political capital with orthodox Muslims. His next political blunder, naming the eighth imam of the family of Ali as his successor, made the split in Islam impossible to repair. The rapidly crystallising orthodox faction that would later become known as Sunnism could now directly identify the Shiites as their adversaries in the fight to claim the title of ‘true believers’. Being able to claim that their form of Islam was the only true version of the religion was vital to both factions as it was tied directly to political power in the state.
For those unconcerned with the minutiae of religious matters, there was simple justice to trouble them. The qadis or religious judges appointed by the Abbasids had no credibility with the people who believed that an honest judge would never serve the caliphs. Such was the people’s opinion of these individuals that a contemporary writer recorded, ‘we have seen an adulterous judge, a judge used for sodomy, and a judge committing sodomy, but now behold us observing a judge who is hired as a pimp!’†
People without a care for either religious or judicial argument could be angry about taxation. Unwillingness to pay tax to a distant and unrepresentative government was enough to set off a revolution in 1775 in a British colonial outpost, and this was among a people who at least had had some experience of tolls and taxes, and who even continued them after independence. The introduction of taxation in the name of the Abbasids of Iraq would have been an anathema to Syrian nomads, and by the end of the ninth century the position of the nomadic Arabs had slipped so far down the social scale that they had in fact dropped off it. They had been replaced, as described above, by Persians and other mawali. Over the course of the ninth century even the Persians began to lose the most important positions of power at court due to an explosion in military slavery. The caliphs had decided that mamluks, slave soldiers, would provide more loyal supporters for their increasingly shaky rule than either Persians or Arabs did. From this point onwards mamluks would to a very large degree dictate Islam’s military and political fortunes and this would remain the case right up until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
The mamluks selected by the caliphs were Turks and in this period we also see the beginning of Turkish domination over the old empire of the Arabs that would be completed in 1055 by the Turkish Saljuq conquest of Persia and Syria. Turks had been harvested as young boys for the slave trade from the steppe lands beyond the north-eastern Persian border since the advent of Islam into the region. The victory in 751 of the Abbasid caliphate’s Persian-Khurasani army over a Tang Dynasty Chinese field army just east of the Jaxartes [Syrdarya] River, in what is today Kyrgyzstan, brought the entire western steppe into the orbit of the Islamic Empire. China’s subsequent inability to assist the princes of the Turks was because the Tang Dynasty was simultaneously fighting an internal rebellion, fomented by one of its own Turkish officers.
The area was, in fact, never conquered or colonised by the Muslims but it became the main source both for the caliph’s new army and for the men who would come to rule Islam. Perhaps the Muslims should have looked at how the Chinese lost the battle in 751: their Korean general was deserted by his Turkish levies and crushed between them and the Arab army.* The Muslims would also soon be reliant on forces just as foreign as these men were to the Chinese. By pushing the Islamic Empire so far to the east the Abbasids also gained more and more new Turkish neighbours, who were now unrestrained by a strong China. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire gives one of the key reasons for the barbarian invasions of the third century into Roman territory as being the over-extension of the empire into Dacia under the Emperor Trajan at the end of the first century ad. Dacia was too tempting for the Goths to resist, and Khurasan was too rich a prize for the now unrestricted Turks to ignore, once the Arab Empire had begun its decline.†
Al-Mutasim was the caliph who really started the Turkish Mamluk revolution in the early ninth century. He formed a new aristocracy from his slave soldiers, which was able to take over the highest positions in the state. He personally supervised their training and seems to have become somewhat ‘Turkified’ himself from the amount of time he spent with his ‘slaves’. He also arranged for the Samanids, one of the many independent dynasties of Islamic Persia in this period, who controlled the area around Samarqand, to send him boys directly without them passing through the regular slave market.
The caliph also cut all the Arabs from the military salary roll and used the funds this released to build up his new slave army and to house the army and himself at Samarra beside the river Tigris about eighty miles north of Baghdad. The new city was over thirty miles long. It required its own canal system to meet its needs for water and was chiefly composed of huge walled compounds, with endless successions of living quarters, courtyards, racing tracks and game enclosures, halls, harems and a grid-like web of boulevards and side streets to link each zone. The Jawsaq al-Khaqani, the heart of Samarra, has been described as a palace the size of a city, the monumentality of which was designed to impress and awe visitors. The city of Samarra itself was designed to be self-sufficient and to seclude the ruler from the ruled.*
It was a tacit admission by the caliph that the empire had become ungovernable and the oppressive Turkish military regime he let loose on it only made it easier for Ismaili missionaries to stir up national feeling among Persians. The missionaries were also aided by the worsening, outside of Samarra’s walls of course, of oppression and extortion by petty government officials. A contemporary poet’s lines make the level of misery clear: ‘Would that the tyranny of the sons of Marwan would return to us, would that the justice of the sons of Abbas were in Hell!’†
The realm as a whole also continued to splinter and yet oddly the very thing that had caused its disintegration – mass conversion to Islam – now held it together as a civilisation if not as an empire per se. The Abbasid caliphate was, however, now little more than a cipher to the dynastic ambitions of powerful families such as the Samanids in the east and the Tulunids of Egypt who ruled in its name but offered little in the way of revenue. Indeed, a dynasty in the far east of Persia, the Saffarids, could be seen as a truly independent Persian state, in that they evolved completely without reference to Baghdad as a result of the coming together of militias formed locally to protect villages from the raids of the Kharijites of Sistan. The Persian states of the east therefore paid little more than lip service to the caliph but oddly enough continued to send Turkish slaves to the caliphs as a form of tribute payment. The ability of such states to exist within what should have been, in theory, a united Islamic Empire with the caliph as its undisputed head, would have given succour to the later Assassin statelets that often had to survive while being virtually cut off from each other and being assaulted by armies intent on achieving just such a universal state.
The Abbasid caliphate’s nadir as a viable political entity was pretty much completed by their eventual inability to pay their Mamluk army. Their slave soldiers subsequently rioted and murdered Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 861. This ushered in a period that has been described as the ‘Anarchy at Samarra’.* Four caliphs followed in quick succession and three of them were killed either by straightforward murder or during rebellions – this only mirrored the chaos outside the palace walls.
In 869 a claimant to the line of Ali sacked the town of Asna in Upper Egypt and massacred all its inhabitants. He then defeated and crucified the commander of the army sent to capture him, and as a denouement, cut off his hands and feet, mimicking the way that Shiites were being executed by the Abbasid state. Shiism was becoming more militant and the risings were no longer confined to Arabia and Iraq. As a response the Abbasids cranked up their anti-Shiite legislation. Shiites were forbidden to acquire estates, to buy horses or to own more than one slave. Perhaps this last edict was wise – between 869 and 883 the Zanj, black East African slaves employed in the salt marshes around Basra, were in revolt and beyond government control, attracting many Arabs and Shiites to their cause. The bloody and difficult repression of the uprising required the alleged leader to be skewered from mouth to anus and then slowly turned as a spit-roast over an open fire whilst being forced to reveal the names and whereabouts of his associates.
Although it seems likely that some of the resistance to the Abbasids was spontaneous there was certainly also a large-scale, centrally directed, missionary movement active in this period. The locus of this movement remained hidden from the Abbasids’ secret police and remains so for historians today, though it seems likely that Syria may have held a number of training centres, particularly on its coast. One of the reasons for the difficulty in tracking down Ismaili missionaries and subsequently for detecting Assassins who had infiltrated the palaces and bodyguards of sultans and emirs was that their faith expressly directed them to dissimulate their true religious belief in order to carry out their work. This concept, the taqiyya, evolved in an age where religion was a key identifier of an individual’s allegiances, social position and politics and as a rule was very much worn on one’s sleeve. It allowed Ismaili dais such as the celebrated Ghiyath, a composer of many books and treatises, Abu Hatim, who was apparently an expert on pre-Islamic Bedouin warfare and a fine poet, and emirs such as al-Marwazi to propagate the Ismaili doctrine throughout Persia and as far as Tabaristan.
Things improved marginally for the Abbasid caliphate at the beginning of the tenth century. This was mainly because the internecine fighting between rival Turkish leaders, each wanting to place a puppet caliph on the throne, had burnt itself out. Through the actions of two exceptional merchants and financial wizards working within the government the almost-bankrupt state’s finances had also stabilised enough to satisfy the army’s demands. The fact still remained, however, that the Abbasid caliphate was in terminal decline as a political entity and that the Turks were de facto rulers of the empire. Caliph al-Radi who ‘ruled’ from 934 to 940 said:
By God, I suppose people ask, ‘is this caliph content that a Turkish slave should run his affairs and even control finance and exercise sole control?’ They do not know that this [caliphal] authority was wrecked long before my time . . . I was handed over to the life-guards and palace guards . . . [if ] one of these dogs asked me for something, I had no power to refuse.*
Then, in the late tenth century a slave soldier, Sebuktigin, who had been captured during tribal fighting among Turks across the border from Islam and sold into bondage as a young man, formed a confederation around him that under his son Mahmud of Ghazna would deprive the Abbasids of much of eastern Persia and Transoxania. The Ghaznavid state developed to become something that the people of Persia would experience first under the Turks and then under the Mongols for the next four centuries: not a state that maintained an army, but rather an army that had simply become a state. The only purpose of civilians in this realm was to pay taxes to the men of the sword.* The Assassin Revolution of the eleventh century was, in effect, a reaction to this and would even reverse it to a degree, at least in the lands held by the Ismailis. The daggers of the fidai’in, who essentially constituted the military wing or army of the Ismaili state, were entirely at the service of the head of the state, the grand master. The grand master’s chief function was to preserve the religion of the sect and to protect the state and its populace.
Much of Persia had therefore fallen to the Abbasids’ former Turkish slaves but at least the Ghaznavids remained orthodox in their religion. Before the Ghaznavids’ secession an even greater insult was made to the Sunni caliphs by a confederacy of men – the Daylamites who came from the mountains to the south-west of the Caspian Sea. The Daylamites were famed for their military prowess as infantry and they came under the leadership of the Buyid family, a clan that retained a heritage of fighting for the Iranian kings long before the arrival of Islam and who now embraced Shiism. Their espousal of all things Persian has been discussed earlier and now these Persians came to conquer the Arab city of Baghdad. Backed by Ghuzz-Turkish and Kurdish cavalry, they had effectively conquered Iran and Iraq by 970.
It would be hard to classify the ramshackle arrangement of power-holding warlords that this drive to Baghdad left in its wake as an empire per se, but the Buyids’ achievement in bringing Shiism to the political centre of the Islamic world and effectively holding the Abbasid caliphs as hostages was certainly an impressive feat. It was mirrored by the almost simultaneous creation of an Ismaili Empire in North Africa and of other Ismaili states in Yemen and Bahrain and for a brief period of only eighty years it seemed that the house of Ali had finally triumphed in the lands of Islam.