As he sat upon his horse in readiness for the attack, splendid in red and gold arms and armour, girt with the sword of his ancestor Ali and wielding two lances, the animal pranced and one spear fell. The evil omen turned to good when the prince recited the tale of Moses’s staff, thrown down to confute the wizards of Pharaoh; and the narrator to whom the verse was addressed saluted the light of prophecy which laid the meaning of the Holy Book open to his lord and master, the Son of the Messenger of God, the Imam of the Community.
Qadi al-Askar al-Marwarrudhi, describing the Crown Prince Ismail of the Fatimid Dynasty before an assault on Kharijite rebels in 947*
THE GAINS FOR THE followers of the house of Ali were built on the backs of missionaries who were willing to undertake the dangerous task of propagating their faith and political message throughout the Dar al-Islam whilst under constant threat of discovery by or betrayal to the secret police of the Abbasids. Of these missionaries, the Ismailis were the most radical and far reaching in their preaching, and it is far away from Persia, among the Berbers and Arabs of Ifriqiya and of Bahrain, that their preaching crystallised as a force ready to challenge the Sunni world, both on the battlefield and in the souls of its citizens.
The mihna of Caliph al-Mamun was a turning point in the fortunes of the mission in North Africa and the particular incident for this was the flogging to death of a religious jurist who refused to accept the caliph’s doctrines. As always happens when governments attempt suppression of religions by brutal acts,* the caliphate of Baghdad subsequently lost all control of the religious and political allegiances of its subjects in Tunisia and Morocco, and left a religious vacuum in which the Shiite dais could recruit all the more easily.
In 909 an Ismaili imam emerged from satr in Tunisia and claimed direct descent from Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet and wife of Ali. Fatima was a revered personage throughout Islam – the tale of her kind treatment of the wounded during the Battle of Uhud in 625, at which the Muslims had been led to victory by the Prophet himself and in which Ali had killed the champion of the polytheistic Arabs of Mecca in single combat, was by the tenth century the stuff of legend, as was Fatima’s suffering after Ali’s death. These poignant lines are traditionally attributed to her and added to the affection of the populace for her memory:
There have befallen me calamities such that did they
Befall the days they would become nights
Unfortunately, in writing of the imams who claimed descent from Fatima and would create the Fatimid caliphate, historians have had to contend with fighting their way through a great deal more legend in the form of the dynasty’s own propaganda and the vitriol of later Sunni chroniclers. The famous libraries of the Fatimids were destroyed during Saladin’s capture of Cairo in 1171, and whilst many texts made their way through Yemen to India with refugee Ismailis, these were primarily theological texts and not chronicles of the deeds of the caliphs and their armies. This has made a clear reconstruction of the Fatimids’ rise to power and conquest of North Africa a difficult task, but it can also be said that the events of the years between 910 and 969 can only be recomposed fully if the Fatimid Ismaili vision of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven on Earth’ and of the evolution of ‘God’s purpose in God’s good time’† is entered into. Without at least allowing for the fact that the Fatimids really believed in their own divinity, and that their followers were convinced that they were being led by an imam initially, and then the Mahdi, we cannot begin to understand how they achieved their conquests. To attempt such an undertaking would be similar to trying to comprehend the success of the First Crusade or the creation of the Mongol world empire from a purely secular angle.
The ground had been prepared for this imam’s coming out of satr by a particularly energetic dai named Abu Abdullah from Yemen, who had preached among the Bedouin, Berbers and Arabs of North Africa for some considerable time before the imam revealed himself as the Mahdi – it is certain that the miraculous coming out of satr by the ‘Mahdi-Imam’ was carefully choreographed. This required the murder of Abu Abdullah in 910 – Mahdis by their very nature can have no past and can hold no debts to anyone. It was vital that there should be absolutely no doubt over the divinity of the Mahdi as the forces that brought the Fatimids to power did not share any particular ethnic uniformity or indeed any real political identity before the advent of the Fatimids. And yet they carried the dynasty all the way from the fringes of the Islamic world right to the walls of Baghdad – it could be argued that success breeds loyalty, but the Fatimids rode a hard road of failures and setbacks up to their conquest of Egypt in 969. It could only have been their own unshakeable belief that they themselves were divine, and their ability to project this messianic belief to their troops, that maintained both themselves and their army through this period. This deep personal belief is reflected in their throne names, the first imam being named al-Mahdi, which is of course the ‘awaited one’ of the Shiites; North Africa was a hotchpotch of faiths, the Fatimids also used its identification with the Messiah of Jewish and Christian traditions to good effect – al-Mahdi’s successor took the throne name of al-Qaim, another Islamic term for Messiah.
The Fatimid army was initially made up of the Berbers of Kutama, but after the first imam al-Mahdi conquered the Aghlabids of North Africa it absorbed both Anatolian Greeks, who were known as the Rum, a corruption of Rome, and black slave soldiers from the Aghlabids’ now disbanded forces. The Fatimids also carried off slaves from the coast of Italy to add to their contingents of European slave soldiers; their taking over of the Aghlabid colony of Sicily in 914–15 added to this influx of ‘recruits’. The question of the ethnic make-up of the Fatimid army is particularly problematic when discussing one of its key components: the Zuwayla. They may have been Arabs, Berbers or black Africans; the region from where they were drawn, just north of Lake Chad, is a mixed area. Certainly, they were trusted early followers of the Fatimids as they took part in a failed amphibious assault on Egypt in 920, and such was their degree of association with al-Mahdi that after the Fatimid fleet was destroyed off Rosetta by the Abbasid-Egyptian navy and its crews and mariners taken prisoner, only the Kutama, Berbers and Zuwayla were executed, whilst the Sicilian sailors were freed.*
A suburb of al-Mahdiyya, the Fatimids’ first capital in Tunisia, was called Zuwayla, and these troops were instrumental in turning back a rebellion of the Kharijites at the walls of the palace-city in 944. The rebellion came very close to crushing the Fatimids’ nascent state even though the Kharijites had earlier been strong supporters of the Fatimids. We last met the Kharijites murdering Ali in disgust at his truce-making with the Umayyads, and raiding Iraq from their mini-state in eastern Persia. So it says a great deal about the wide-ranging activities of the wandering dais that such an extreme and isolated group of religious anarchists, whose rallying cry was ‘Man owes no obedience to rulers who disobey God!’ had ever been brought into the Fatimid fold, even if they later rebelled against the new Shiite champions.
Meanwhile, the most important dai in Iraq, Hamdan Qarmati, started an independent movement in the 870s that would culminate in yet another revolt in Kufa. The revolt gave birth to the Qarmatians who, ‘began to murder Muslims, pillage their goods and carry off their children’.† They then carried their banner to the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula to establish what can conveniently be called a religious republic, just prior to the Fatimid revolution in 899. From this wide geographical range of activity, it is obvious that the Ismaili dais were both numerous and effective. Certainly, the Sunni writers of the period went out of their way to warn solid orthodox citizens of their wiles:
The first thing to which I bear witness, as I shall explain and make clear to the Muslims, is that he has deputies whom he calls the authorised missionaries, and others whom he nicknames the trained dogs likening them to the dogs of the hunt, because they set snares for people and deceive them with cunning tricks. They shrink from every intelligent person and cling to every ignoramus. By stating a truth with false intent they urge him to practise the laws of Islam concerning the ritual prayer, the alms-due and the fast, like someone who scatters seeds for birds so they will fall into his net. They devote more than a year to watching over him observing his patience and scrutinising his condition. They deceive him with misquoted reports from the Prophet [Allah bless him and give him peace] and falsified sayings. They recite the Quran to him incorrectly, and the words out of their contexts.*
The writers suggested that once their target was selected the dais would move to indoctrinate him with their perverse ideas of the batin, or hidden meaning, in the Quran and give him the idea of joining a privileged and select group:
As you have surely noticed, the egg has an outer aspect and an inner aspect. The outer aspect is that which human beings have in common, and it is familiar to both the elite and the ordinary folk. As for the inner aspect the ordinary folk have no knowledge of it, and only a few are acquainted with it. That is alluded to in His sayings [Glory be to Him]:
And only a few believed with him.
And they are few
And few of My servants are very thankful.†
Such was the success of the missionaries’ work in Bahrain‡ and Yemen that both states were completely lost to the Abbasids in short order. The Qarmatian sect was soon, however, also to reject the claims of al-Mahdi’s Fatimid successors after initially supporting them and they generally remained antagonistic to the Fatimid caliphate. They even fought against the Fatimid armies during their invasions of Egypt and Syria between 953 and 975, but that did not prevent them being even more of a threat to the economy of Abbasid Iraq, since their state effectively dominated the trade routes of the Persian Gulf and they raided shipping with impunity. Their attempt to extend their empire to Syria failed, but they remained a thorn in the side of whoever controlled Persia until their extinction in the eleventh century – for orthodox Muslims they were the epitome of the excesses of radical Ismailism.
They came close to seizing Baghdad itself in 927, and continually raided hajj caravans and pilgrims. They outraged the entire Muslim world in 930 when they seized the holy black stone from the Kaaba; they then massacred perhaps as many as thirteen thousand hajj pilgrims and subsequently desecrated the holy well of Zamzam with the bodies during a sack of Mecca. Their Mahdi’s abolition of sharia law also helped them become the greatest bête noire of Sunni writers until the advent of the Assassins. In fact, the Qarmatians did show a few of the social and religious traits that the Ismaili Assassins would later develop. They were accused of sharing their women amongst themselves by Sunni writers and, whilst this has not been proven, it does seem that there was some degree of community of property, sharing of labour to create for the whole community and an attempt to create a state with equality for all. Later, one of the appeals of the Ismaili Assassins to local populations would be a message of egalitarianism, with very real evidence of social order and of a community working together to maintain their common agricultural and economic base.
In the increasingly insecure society of the Abbasid caliphate, banding together was the only form of security the lower orders of the populace could utilise, and such groups would have found the opportunity of joining a larger, stronger band such as the Ismaili Assassins very appealing. The Assassins would also, at one point in their history, abandon sharia law as the Qarmatians had.
Ironically enough, one of the Qarmatians’ key leaders was eliminated by a Sunni Assassin in 915. This individual, a skilled physician, worked hard, just as the later Shiite Ismaili Assassins would, to gain access to the inner sanctum of the leader al-Qarmati. He started by treating the lower-ranking leaders of the ruling clique. His particular forte was that medieval staple of medicine – bleeding. He was so skilled at opening veins painlessly that soon enough he was able to tend al-Qarmati. We are told he then hid poison in his hair so that he might smuggle it past the ruler’s ever-vigilant guards:
He took out the scalpel and sucked it . . . Then he rubbed his head with it, so the necessary amount of poison stuck to it from his hair. He performed the venesection on him, and then departed immediately, mounting his riding animal and fleeing away. When the enemy of Allah felt the presence of death, he commanded the killing of the physician but he was absent, so they caught him below Naqil Said in front of Qinan. They killed him there [may Allah the Exalted bestow His mercy upon him], and al-Qarmati died [may Allah not bestow His mercy upon him].*
Despite all the above blood and anger, Qarmatian Bahrain was in many ways just a side-show whilst Egypt was the main attraction – only its conquest could prove that the Fatimid dynasty and Ismailism were viable alternatives to the Sunni-Abbasid caliphate. However, even Egypt’s reduction could only be a staging post to the taking over of the entire Islamic world – the millenarian nature of the Fatimid movement required nothing less. Both al-Mahdi and his heir al-Qaim made attempts on Egypt, which had experienced the collapse of the Tulunid dynasty back in 905, followed by a reversion to direct Abbasid control. Since 935, however, it had been practically autonomous again under the Ikhshidids who only recognised the Abbasids as their overlords in theory.
In 968 Kafur al-Ikhshidi, a former Ethiopian slave of the ruling dynasty who had usurped their power in the 940s, died, and the political and economic strife this brought to a state that had long endured both the attacks of the Fatimids and internecine fighting in its own army, made the Fatimids’ final conquest fairly easy:
In Kafur’s time the flood of the Nile was deficient. In that it only reached twelve cubits and some fingers. Foodstuffs became dear, and death was rampant so that they could not shroud and bury the dead. It was rumoured that the Qarmatians were advancing on Syria and Kafur’s slaves, consisting of 1070 Turks, apart from Greeks and local blacks turned against him. He died when ten days remained of Jumada I, 357 [13 April 968], at the age of 60. He ruled Egypt and Syria and the two Holy Cities [Mecca and Medina] for twenty-one years, two months and twenty days, of which two years, four months and nine days he ruled alone, after the deaths of his master’s children. After him Egypt was on the verge of destruction until the coming of the armies of al-Muizz, under the commander Jawhar, when Egypt became the seat of the [Fatimid] Caliphate.*
Al-Muizz had used the sword for the bringing down of Egypt but he reached for his pen to subvert the eastern lands of Islam.† His correspondence documents a campaign aimed at persuading the Shiites of Iran and Iraq that the time for the return of the caliphate to the line of Ali was at hand and that action was required to ensure that it took place.* The fact that Kafur had been the guardian of Mecca and Medina and that Kafur’s possessions had now all fallen to al-Muizz was, of course, a huge propaganda boost. Al-Muizz’s evangelism was a careful balance of claiming full rights to the imamate for his house by descent through Fatima, whilst allowing Jafar al-Sadiq, the sixth imam, and Ismail, the seventh imam, places in his genealogy. It was this manipulation and misrepresentation of the blood line that finally set the Qarmatians against the Fatimid mission, but it brought many Iranian Ismailis completely into the Fatimid camp and these were the bravest, most numerous, articulate and influential Ismailis to be found anywhere in the Dar al-Islam.
So Ismailism was spreading throughout the House of Islam through the travelling preachers, but what were they preaching now? The Quran itself was the most powerful weapon the revolutionaries had: the esoteric meanings or batin they claimed it held, which they claimed were more important than the zahir or the ‘plain’ meaning evident to all, were used to entice new adherents as the batin could only be seen by the initiated. Indeed, such was the importance of this aspect of their indoctrination that the followers they accrued were often termed Batini by Sunni writers because of this heresy.
Another aspect of their propaganda was that time was cyclical. This was a central tenet of the preaching because it gave hope of change and that those at the bottom might soon be at the top. According to Ismaili theory, dynastic changes were ‘due’ every 240 years. It might be a little cynical to point out that one of the major works on this important element of Ismaili theocracy, The Epistles of the Sincere Brethren, was composed almost exactly 240 years after the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate.† Another central belief that grew out of the idea of the batin of the Quran was that one’s teacher was owed total loyalty and that there were grades of knowledge through which a convert passed. The need to accrue knowledge, but only under ‘correct’ tutelage, is made clear by the following Ismaili text:
Both reason and a true teacher are required. Through reason we realize the need for the authoritative imam to lead us to knowledge of God.
Unity is an indication of the true religion; diversity of the false. And unity stems from the acceptance of the authority of the imam, while multiplicity of sects derives from the use of individual judgement.*
The hierarchical structure and total dependence on a tutor or guide that this simple tenet implies sounds dangerously close to brainwashing and was certainly responsible later for the Assassins’ blind devotion, which made them prepared to give up their lives for the cause. They were equally devoted to their grand master who was, of course, also their teacher and later their imam. The incredible resilience of the sect when faced by attack from powerful enemies was built on this allegiance to both teacher and creed.
With the conquest of Egypt in 969 by the Fatimids, and their construction of Cairo, ‘The Victorious’, with its new universities and the great college mosque of al-Azhar to produce even more religious agents and missionaries, the Ismaili world was given its first real headquarters. But the new Shiite caliphate did not stop there – the Fatimids moved on to take full control of Arabia and, by that act, of the Red Sea. Their armies’ progress was slowed, but not stopped, in Syria by Qarmatian opposition more than by the armies of the Hamdanids, the autonomous dynastic Sunni power of the region. The bringing under control of all the Islamic lands seemed almost inevitable and the Fatimids had proven that a Mahdi could be a real entity and not just a dim vision of future hope. Their Mahdis were flesh and blood and had countless banners and vast armies, but then that became the central problem with the Fatimid state – with the establishment of Cairo, the religious revolution they headed lost much of its dynamism. There was now the state or dawla, which so often lay at odds with the dawa or divine mission of the dynasty. The caliphate and imamate were essentially unable to survive this secular–spiritual dichotomy. The secular requirements of a leader were to collect taxes, maintain a police force and army and to normalise relations with neighbours so that trade, the lifeblood of the state, could continue uninterrupted. The dawa, however, called for an ongoing religious revolution. Indeed, in its purest sense such a movement would have to be similar to the ‘perpetual revolution’ called for by Mao Ze Dong in 1966 in China – and was likely to be just as catastrophic for the Fatimid state as the Cultural Revolution would later be for the People’s Republic.
In 996 a caliph, al-Hakim, came to the Fatimid throne; his behaviour has been seen as madness by many historians, but his actions can also be viewed as an attempt to bridge this divide between the worldly and divine natures of Fatimid rule.* Certainly under al-Hakim, the Fatimid dream of conquering the entire Islamic world gathered pace again and both Kufa and Mosul fell briefly under Fatimid influence, if not their complete control. But whilst those far away from Cairo were perhaps willing to come into Caliph al-Hakim’s embrace, those closer to home were finding him increasingly dangerous to know. Juvaini tells us how the caliph would write notes:
some saying, ‘Give the bearer of this note 1,000 dinars, or such or such-and-such a costly robe of honour’ and some saying, ‘Kill the bearer of this note, or take such-and-such a sum from him, or cut off this or that limb of his, and torture him’. And he would seal the notes with wax, ambergris or sealed earth, and on audience days he would scatter them about and everybody according to his luck would avidly snatch up one of these notes and bear it off to the local administrators and whatever the contents of the note might be they were put into effect immediately.†
Dogs, secretaries and women also did pretty badly under Caliph al-Hakim:
He had both hands of Abu-l Qasim al-Jarjarai, who had been the secretary of Ghayn, cut off. He had Ghayn’s remaining hand cut off, so that he lost both hands. Then after cutting off his hands al-Hakim sent him a thousand pieces of gold and garments but then later he also had his tongue cut out. He abolished a number of taxes, had all the dogs killed and rode by night. He forbade women to walk in the streets . . . The shoemakers were forbidden to make women’s shoes and their shops fell into disuse.‡
But it was al-Hakim’s indiscriminate killings of judges, ‘stirrup holders’ and beer makers that provoked an uprising in the name of the Umayyads in 1006. However improbable such a rebellion in the name of the Sunni caliphs of Spain might seem, it proved to be very difficult to put down.
Al-Hakim ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to be knocked down in 1009 and there were intermittent persecutions of Jews and Christians. The caliph’s favourite intimidations seem to have been forcing Jews to wear bells, and Christians to ‘wear’ large crucifixes of one cubit’s length.* At this time the pilgrimage to Jerusalem from Europe had been flourishing. Although al-Hakim’s destruction of the Sepulchre Church’s fabric (along with the Fatimids’ reputation for tolerance) was quickly repaired by his successor, this desecration of the holiest place in Christianity by a Muslim monarch was a major theme of the call for the First Crusade by Pope Urban II at Clermont in 1095.
Al-Hakim himself disappeared whilst on a hunting trip with some nobles in 1021 – it seems highly likely that he was murdered by a group led by his own sister, who felt, given his past form, that it was wiser to strike first. However, the story of his being taken up into heaven caused a small schism within Ismailism and remains the central creed of his followers, the duruz or Druze of Lebanon and Syria. To this day they await his return.†
After his death, the Fatimid state seemed to lose all of its energy. Indeed, al-Hakim’s generous sponsorship of a Dar al-Ilm, or House of Wisdom, for extending the Ismaili revolution, and a Palace of Initiates for the dais that carried this revolution abroad, was neglected by his successors. It is notable too, that he created a new post of ‘Trustee of the Sword and Pen’ – this was uncommon in Islamic medieval government where civil and military administrations were most definitely separated. Al-Hakim was the last Fatimid caliph to conjoin these offices – in the same way that they would be unified in the person of the grand master of the Assassins.
The Fatimid caliphate retained its economic threat to Baghdad through its control of the Red Sea, the ports of Yemen and its extensive European commercial connections. The state continued to grow in prosperity as well as territorially – indeed in the middle of the eleventh century, just as Iraq collapsed into complete anarchy, a Fatimid army even entered Baghdad itself and for a brief period of time the Friday prayer, the khutba, was called in the Fatimid caliph’s name. However, the Fatimid caliphate’s religious dynamism had disappeared and it was falling more and more under the control of the military – the men of the sword. Just as the Abbasid caliphs of Samarra and Baghdad had become the helpless puppets of their own praetorians, so now the Fatimids became mere figureheads for a series of military dictators.
After Egypt had been taken, the imams had begun to rely more and more on imported slave soldiers and Turkish mercenaries. This was inevitable given that the Fatimid push into Palestine and Syria pitted them against armies of a far greater quality than they had faced in North Africa. Army reform had therefore begun in the reign of the imam al-Aziz in the late 970s and he relied on his wazir Ibn Killis to institute many of the changes needed. The first Turkish troops to arrive in Cairo were in fact the remnants of the defeated cavalry forces of a rebellious emir of Damsacus who had tried to secede from the Fatimid Empire. In the 1040s, the Ismaili dai and writer Nasir-i-Khusrau described how he saw ten thousand Turks and Persians parading in Cairo alone.
The Turks provided the army with much needed cavalry archers, an arm of the army that could not be formed from within the Berbers.* Whilst a more balanced army in terms of specialised roles was a positive result of the reforms, the other more deleterious effect was the loss of direct identification with the dynasty that the early Fatimid army had held. Furthermore, the army now had the problem of racial tension. This was chiefly between the black African troops and the Turks; on occasion these simple confrontations grew into free-for-all melees in which the major casualties were the civilian population of Cairo. Nuwayri, a chronicler of the regime, wrote that during the reign of al-Hakim the Turks often attacked foreign dais when they visited Cairo, and that the caliph revenged himself on the Turks by putting black officers in command of them. This resulted in a vast fight between the two divisions of the army in 1020 but such disturbances were often simply orchestrated between ‘opponents’ to allow for looting of the city’s markets. The situation worsened in the late 1020s, as an economic crisis caused pay riots among the black troops and recriminations between all the racial groups in the army. In fact the army nearly disintegrated in 1025: after being reduced to eating dogs just to survive, the black Africans mutinied. They attacked the city of Fustat and Caliph al-Zahir had to send Turkish slave troops to defend it. He also authorised the populace to arm itself against the mutineers. Involvement of civilians in military affairs had been unheard of in Islam since the civil war between al-Amin and al-Mamun and the siege of Baghdad in 816.
Given this situation, the caliphs, in order to survive in this divided state that they had created, had to choose a side, and they settled on the Turks. Their favouritism for this faction is evident from al-Hakim’s address to his Turkish troopers in 1000, ‘You are those whom al-Aziz fostered and you have the status of offspring.’ This position of privilege in the state made the Turks into potential kingmakers. They could not, at this point, use their political muscle to decide who would be caliph, but the office of wazir was most commonly filled by their favoured candidate and the wazir, not the caliph, controlled the state by the late eleventh century. The wazirs were military men and many of the members of the ruling junta that backed the wazir were not even Ismailis; the Fatimid caliphate and its messianic mission had lost its raison d’être.
In 1094, the wazir al-Afdal even went so far as to divert the caliphal succession. The caliph al-Muntasir was dying and the succession should almost certainly have fallen to his son, Nizar. Al-Afdal, however, saw that Mustali, a younger son, could be made into a more pliable puppet than the older Nizar would ever be. Furthermore, Nizar was already married with an adult son, whilst Mustali was about sixteen and therefore just coming up to marriageable age, as was the wazir’s daughter. Al-Afdal’s ambitious plan succeeded – Mustali ascended the throne and married al-Afdal’s daughter. Nizar fled with his son to Alexandria, where he hoped to raise an army from the local garrisons, but he was easily captured and imprisoned in Cairo. He was probably killed there, although another account says that he and his son were murdered in an Alexandrian jail.
Initially, the response across the Ismaili world to this judicial murder seems to have been muted, and it could be that the schism in the Ismaili movement, which gave birth to the Assassins, was only retrospectively proclaimed in Nizar’s name as a later justification – for a decidedly earlier and well-planned desertion of the Fatimid cause by the Persian Ismailis. Indeed the Persian-Ismaili sources seem to indicate that the need for a new dawa to replace the outdated religious mission of the Fatimids was the prime reason for the division. In 1092, a full two years before Nizar’s death, but in the same year as the first identifiable political murder of the Assassins, chroniclers recorded that there were ‘two sects’ within Ismailism: the pro-Fatimid followers of Nasir-i-Khusrau, and the newly sworn enemies of the caliphs of Egypt – the followers of Hasan-i-Sabbah.
It seems likely then, that the Persian Ismailis responded to the failing dawa of the Fatimids and to new threats to their own existence in Persia with a new radicalisation of their doctrine and a radical overhaul of their methods of resistance. These methods would be assassination, infiltration and fortification. These three facets made up the Ismaili Assassin defence plan. The strategy was the brainchild of a truly remarkable individual – Hasan-i-Sabbah.
Hasan had been born to a Twelver Shiite family in Qom in north-west Iran, around 1040. He studied as a cleric in the city of Rayy, a university town and long a stronghold of Shiism, and it seems that his education was wide enough to embrace study of mathematics, astronomy and astrology, as well as the natural sciences. In Rayy, he claims he came into contact with the doctrine of the caliphs of Egypt and with Nasir-i-Khusrau, who was the most important Ismaili propagandist of the time, known by his fellow dais as ‘the Proof of the Faith’. If Hasan actually met Nasir, then it would be hard not to be dazzled by the great man’s fame as a traveller, poet and writer. Such a meeting does in fact seem possible, as in this period Nasir had just returned to Persia from Egypt, where he had devoted himself once more to the caliph, and to the expansion of Ismailism throughout the east. Hasan, in his autobiography, suggests that Ismaili teaching had affected several of the more powerful magnates of the region and, because of his intellectual ability, Hasan would naturally have been a prime candidate for recruitment. Hasan says he was swayed from his Twelver beliefs by the Ismaili preachers being able to disprove his doctrine through argument and debate. He was also impressed, he says, by their abhorrence of alcohol and because they were God-fearing, pious and charitable.
It seems that Hasan was converted by Attash, a physician who was a hujja, a high-ranking dai. Hasan nearly died during this time from a serious illness but subsequently recovered and this experience encouraged him to complete his conversion. He took his final oath of allegiance in 1072 and was active as a dai from then on. In 1078, he set off from Isfahan for Egypt, the epicentre of any dai’s world, and, like Martin Luther in Rome in the early sixteenth century, Hasan was shocked by the decay of the imamate, by the petty social climbing of Cairo’s politics, and how Caliph al-Muntasir had fallen under the power of his wazir, Badr al-Jamali.
Hasan’s relationship with Badr al-Jamali, the Fatimid wazir and father of al-Afdal whose kingmaking would cause the Nizari schism, was a highly strained one. This was certainly because al-Jamali was setting a course for the caliphate that had more need of ‘real’ soldiers like himself than of radical missionaries. His son, al-Afdal, who continued his father’s policy, may have fully realised what he was doing when he put Nizar aside. Perhaps he had even wished to divide the two halves of the Ismaili world simply because he viewed the empire as a soldier would – territorially, and not ideologically, as a revolutionary would.
Al-Jamali, and al-Afdal after him, also set themselves the task of maintaining what had been directly conquered. Al-Jamali may have realised that the Fatimid dream of total domination in the lands of Islam was over, even before it became obvious to the caliphs themselves.
Despite the internal problems of the army discussed above, it would be wrong to dismiss the Fatimid state as a rapidly collapsing one at this juncture. In the late eleventh century, it was still probably the richest and most cultured state in the entire western world and Nasir-i-Khusrau recorded that during a visit to Cairo in the middle of the eleventh century he found that,
Everyone has perfect confidence in the sultan, and no one stands in fear of spies or evil officials. There I saw wealth belonging to private individuals such that if I would speak of it or describe it the people of Persia would refuse to credit my statements. Nowhere have I seen such prosperity as I saw there. One year the waters of the Nile fell short and corn became dear. The sultan’s wazir summoned a Christian trader and said, ‘the year is not good, and the sultan’s heart is weighed down with anxiety for his people. How much corn could you supply, either for a price or as a loan?’ The Christian answered, ‘thanks to the fortunate auspices of the sultan and the wazir I have in store so much corn that I could supply all Egypt with bread for six years.’*
The army was also impressively large, despite its problems. The most powerful European monarch of the medieval period, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, ruler of Germany, Italy and Sicily, fielded an army of between ten to fifteen thousand men in his Italian campaigns, much of which would have been made up from the temporary addition of the troops of his vassal lords and mercenaries. Nasir-i-Khusrau records the standing Fatimid army as retaining sixty thousand North African cavalry, twenty thousand North African black infantry troops, thirty thousand Nubians and Sudanese, ten thousand Turks, thirty thousand Central African troops and ten thousand caliphal guards.
The problems of the state were deep seated, but not likely to drag it under just yet. The simple presence, however, of Badr al-Jamali at the helm of the state was very much a symptom of what was wrong with the proclaimed Fatimid dawa (mission), if not the dawla (state). He was an Armenian slave soldier, who had fought for the Fatimids in Syria and had shown immense ability as an administrator and military strongman in the province. He had been brought to Cairo primarily because of the deterioration in the relations between the various branches of the army in Egypt, and after stabilising the situation, largely through favouring the Turkish slave soldiers and gaining the full confidence of the sultan, he also had the bureaus of justice and the dawa placed in his care. So, just as al-Jamali was gaining control of the dawa and could begin using it to aid his vision of a conventional state, the revolutionary firebrand Hasan arrived in Egypt. Al-Jamali, now wazir, would have been concerned about maintaining his hegemony over the dawa if the Persian missionary began to draw support from the other dais resident in Cairo.
No doubt there was also resentment on Hasan’s side against the Armenian wazir, whom he viewed as a foreign impostor backed by other outsiders – Turkish troops. Hasan’s homeland, Persia, was already under the domination of the Turks and in later, highly xenophobic, writings he referred to the men from the steppes as jinn, or devils, rather than as humans. Despite his disgust at the wazir’s nationality and the condition of the imamate, Hasan spent a year and a half in Egypt and left to serve in the international dawa for the Fatimids. Whilst some sources claim that al-Jamali tried to have him deported to the maghrib,* it seems that he was merely very strongly encouraged to leave. There were other tales of his imprisonment in a Cairo prison, which promptly collapsed, allowing his escape; and Hasan also complained in a letter that the Abbasids ‘sent three mules heavily loaded with gold silver, and other goods to Badr al-Jamali so that he may arrest me and send me alive to Baghdad or he may kill me and send my head there’.†
Hasan boarded a ship at Alexandria in 1075 and there is a tale of a huge storm hitting the vessel, and of weeping and crying among the other passengers, whilst Hasan sat calmly through the tempest. When questioned by the other passengers about his serenity, he replied that God had assured him a safe passage in order that he should complete his life’s mission. When the ship arrived safely in Syria, all of the crew and passengers immediately swore to become his adherents. The story is doubtless apocryphal but reflects the powerful attraction of Hasan’s preaching as he undertook a series of travels throughout Persia and Iraq in the 1080s and 1090s.
While he was obstensibly working for Cairo headquarters, it also seems likely that he was already looking for a command centre for himself and planning secession from the Fatimids. He also had a great number of men already under his command, scouting for him, and attracting adherents in his name, not in the name of the Fatimids. The great college mosque of al-Azhar may actually have been the training ground of many of these men and if this is so, it was a severe backlash against the old regime, as the training given to dais was extensive – designed to make them able to bring converts to Ismailism from every part of the Islamic world. For example, al-Kirmam, an eminent Ismaili philosopher and the most learned dai of the Fatimid period, was well acquainted with the Hebrew and Syriac languages; every dai familiarised themselves with the religions and languages of all the peoples of western Asia. Hasan also appears to have fully comprehended the religious and cultural patchwork that was Islam in this period, and he also used the fact that he was born in northwest Persia to good effect in creating enthusiasm for his new dawa among his countrymen.
There is a whiff of a conspiracy, in the chronicles, between Hasan and Nizar, who may have already realised he was being pushed aside by the wazir, al-Afdal. Ibn al-Athir has Caliph Mustansir himself tell Hasan that the imam was to be Nizar, but that Nizar already knew he would be thwarted. Given the long-standing compliance of the caliph to his wazir’s orders, this seems unlikely, but not as unbelievable as the tale that Hasan had smuggled the grandson of Nizar out of Egypt to Persia, to be brought up in the Nizaris’ new stronghold of Alamut Castle. The tale of the infant’s escape was, however, a useful propaganda tool and it seems to have been believed at the time; among the later Assassins, the tale would take an even more elaborate form and would directly affect the policy of the order’s leaders.
Hasan’s Ismaili revolution was taking place in Persia, despite the presence of the new Sunni sultans’ troops, the Saljuq Turks, in both his homeland and in Iraq. The Saljuqs’ dismembering of the Twelver Shiite Buyid sultanate in the 1050s may actually have assisted him, as the Daylamites, on who the Buyid state had largely been built, started to convert to Ismailism as a form of resistance to the Turks. Their mountainous homeland in the north of Persia had never been conquered – in the seventh century there is a tale of their leaders being so confident of both their men and the redoubtable peaks which they would be defending, that they sent a map of their lands to the Arab invaders with a note inviting them to try an attack. Their mountains were therefore the ideal area in which to make a stand against the Saljuqs.
In the 1070s, Saljuq invasions of Syria made for a renewed Sunni challenge to Fatimid power. There was extensive Saljuq settlement in Syria and also in Anatolia; the full implications of the Anatolian invasion became apparent later. For now it is enough to say that the advent of Badr al-Jamali’s regime, the decline of the Fatimids into mere figureheads and the militarisation of the Fatimid state were inevitable as the Sunni world now had new champions who were already in full control of Persia and had begun to push the Fatimids back into Egypt in the late 1070s.
The Shiite Buyids had been swept away and the Ismailis of Persia, whilst beginning to organise their resistance under the formidable Hasan, were faring little better than the other Shiites at this point. Earlier in the eleventh century, it had seemed that the entire Islamic world might become Shiite, but just as this seemed attainable the Alid cause was smashed by the the new Sunni champions, the Saljuqs. Violent disorders call for violent remedies and the Assassins and their killings were born of a desperate response to the seemingly unstoppable progress of the Turks.