Nizari Isma'ili State

A state with no middle

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)formation

In 1090 Hasan-i Sabbah took the castle of Alamut, on a rock in the Alborz north of Qazvin, without fighting for it. He had been in the valley for some time, the population had been converting, and when enough of the garrison had come over the Seljuk-appointed holder found the place was no longer his. He was paid off and allowed to leave.

That is the founding and it is also the method. Over the following decades the same thing happened in Quhistan in the east, in the Alborz valleys, and from the 1130s in the Jabal Bahra in Syria: a mission arrives, converts, and a fortress changes hands. What resulted was a polity with no middle — dozens of strongholds and the cultivated valleys beneath them, scattered across a thousand miles of country belonging to somebody else, with no contiguous territory at any point in its existence.

The shape was a choice and it worked. A conventional state can be defeated by beating its army; this one had no army to beat, and taking a castle in Quhistan did nothing to a castle in Daylam. The Seljuks campaigned against them repeatedly, took individual fortresses, and could not finish the thing, because there was no thing to finish — only a network with local governors who had wide initiative and a hierarchy that survived the loss of any part of it.

Assassination belongs in this paragraph rather than in a lurid one of its own. A polity that cannot field an army and cannot be conquered is still vulnerable to whoever decides to spend a decade trying, and the answer was to make that decision personally expensive: the killing, in public and usually by a man who made no attempt to escape, of the commander or minister who had ordered the campaign. It is a weapon of the structurally weak, chosen because the alternatives were unavailable, and it worked well enough that the word for it in several European languages is still a corruption of a name for these people.

Nobody has ever published a figure for how much territory this polity held, and nobody could. A state of castles and the valleys beneath them has no area of the kind a map is drawn from. Shading it in would be a lie about its shape, and the shape is the whole of what it was.

The King's Fortress

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume II: From Firdawsi to Sa'di (1906)expansion

Within seventeen years of Alamut the same method had been worked on Malikshah's own castle outside his own capital.

Shahdiz — Dizh-i Kuh, the hill fortress, renamed the King's Fortress because the sultan had built it — stood close to Isfahan and held arms, treasure, some of the royal pages and girls of the court, and a garrison of Daylami soldiers. Ahmad ibn Attash went up to it regularly on the understanding that he was giving the young people lessons, and over time, with fair words and presents, brought the garrison over. His father Abd al-Malik had been a literary man of Isfahan driven out for Shi'i sympathies, who went to Rayy, met Hasan-i Sabbah and wrote to a friend: I have fallen in with the Grey Falcon, and it has made up to me for what I left behind. The son, who traded in linen, was left alone in Isfahan because he professed to detest everything his father believed. He then opened a mission house at the gates of the city and, according to the Seljuk chronicler Browne is following, brought thirty thousand people over to him.

What happened next is the part to handle carefully, because it is the single most lurid story in this history and its source is a chronicle written at the court of the sultan who was besieging the fortress. People in Isfahan began disappearing. A beggar-woman asking alms at a house heard groaning inside, called out a blessing on the sick, was invited in for food, took fright and ran; a crowd broke the door down and found four or five hundred people in the cellars, dead, crucified, or not quite dead. The house belonged to a blind man called Alawi Madani, who at dusk used to stand at the end of the long dark lane leading to it asking God to reward whoever would take a poor blind man's hand and lead him home. He and his wife and several accomplices were burned in the market-place. The story has been retold for nine hundred years and no independent account of it exists; what can be said is that it is what the besieging side believed and repeated, and that a city which had lost thirty thousand of its people to an enemy inside the walls will believe a great deal.

The siege itself was decided by a plot that failed for domestic reasons. Ibn Attash, nearly out of supplies, sent word to the sultan's minister Sa'd al-Mulk that he could not hold on and wanted terms. Be patient a week, the minister answered, until I have destroyed this dog — meaning Sultan Muhammad, who was bled once a month and whose surgeon-barber had been bribed to poison the lancet. The minister's chamberlain knew, and told the chamberlain's beautiful wife, who told her lover, who told an officer, who told the sultan. The barber was summoned and scratched with his own knife, turned black, and died in front of everybody. The minister was crucified with four others.

Two days later Ibn Attash surrendered the King's Fortress. He was paraded through Isfahan on a camel, pelted, mocked in verses the chronicler thought worth recording, then crucified and left on the cross seven days while people shot arrows at him, and his body burned. He had a reputation as an astrologer, and someone standing under the cross asked him whether his science had shown him this. He said that his horoscope had told him he would cross the streets of Isfahan with more than royal pomp and parade, and that it had not told him in what fashion.

The state of castles had reached into the imperial capital and taken the sultan's own stronghold with tutors and presents rather than with an army, and lost it, and the losing cost one fortress. Sultan Muhammad then resolved on the systematic extirpation of the sect, sent his atabeg against Alamut, and died before anything came of it. That is the shape of the whole first century: the network extends, a piece of it is destroyed at enormous cost and effort, and the man who organised the destruction does not outlive the campaign.

The day the law was abolished

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)peak

On a day in August 1164, in the courtyard at Alamut, Hasan II had a pulpit set up facing the wrong way — away from Mecca — and announced to the assembled community that the imam had lifted the obligations of the outward law. The Resurrection, the qiyama, had arrived. What the law had commanded was fulfilled and no longer binding on those who recognised the imam; the fast was broken there and then, and the day was kept as a festival afterwards.

It is about as radical a thing as any state has ever done to itself, and it needs holding at arm's length from the sensationalism it usually attracts. The doctrine is intelligible: an Isma'ili tradition had always distinguished the outward form of religion from its inward meaning, and the claim was that for a community living in the imam's presence the form had done its work. It is also a political act by a state that had spent seventy years being besieged, declaring that the world outside its walls was not merely hostile but superseded.

The cost is legible in what happened next. Hasan II was murdered eighteen months later by a brother-in-law. His son maintained the doctrine; his grandson, Jalal al-Din Hasan, reversed it publicly and completely after 1210 and was recognised by the caliph al-Nasir, who was in the middle of the one late Abbasid reign that nearly reconstructed real authority. A state that had abolished the law in 1164 was seeking Sunni respectability inside two generations.

Both moves are usually read as cynicism and neither has to be. What they show is a polity whose doctrine and whose security were the same instrument, adjusted as the pressure changed — first separating itself absolutely when separation was its only defence, then rejoining the world when the Khwarazmian and Mongol storm made isolation lethal.

It did not save them.

The old man of the mountain

Drafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)peak

The Syrian half of this polity is the half Europe met, and it is where the legend was manufactured.

Nizari missionaries had been working in Syria since early in the twelfth century, with the usual difficulty: Syria's towns were held by Turkish garrisons who did not want them, and the first attempts to hold urban ground — at Aleppo, at Damascus — ended in massacres. What worked was the method that had worked in Iran. From the 1130s the mission took fortresses in the Jabal Bahra, the hill country between the Orontes and the coast, and made itself unremovable in terrain nobody wanted enough to pay for.

Rashid al-Din Sinan governed that network for about thirty years from the 1160s, from Masyaf, with a degree of independence from Alamut that the sources notice and do not fully explain. He is the figure the Crusader chroniclers called the Old Man of the Mountain, and the negotiations they record — with Amalric of Jerusalem, with the Templars over tribute, with Saladin — are why this small polity is in the European record at all.

Saladin is the useful case. He besieged Masyaf in 1176 and withdrew without taking it, having survived two attempts on his life. The circumstances are reported several different ways, including a story in which he wakes to find a dagger and a note beside his bed; what is not disputed is that he lifted the siege, came to terms, and afterwards left them alone. A power with a few thousand people and no field army had made itself expensive enough for the strongest ruler in the Levant to prefer an arrangement.

That is the same calculation the Seljuks had failed to escape in Iran, running in Syria against different opponents. And it explains the shape of what Europe took home: Crusader lords dealing at close quarters for a century with a sect they could not defeat, could not read, and whose method was the targeted killing of individuals, produced the vocabulary — and then, at a safe distance, the story.

The New Musulman

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume II: From Firdawsi to Sa'di (1906)contraction

Jalal al-Din Hasan succeeded in 1210 and spent the next decade demonstrating, as publicly as it could be demonstrated, that Alamut was an ordinary Sunni power.

He made formal profession of fealty to the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir. He opened relations with the Muslim princes around him. He sent his mother to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage. And because the jurists of Qazvin were the neighbours and therefore the hardest people in the world to convince that the conversion was genuine, he invited them to send a deputation up to the castle, go through his libraries, and burn whatever they judged heretical. They went, and they were convinced, and so was everyone else; Browne records that all were at last persuaded of the sincerity of his professions.

The caliph then honoured him so conspicuously that Muhammad Khwarazmshah became jealous, and Browne dates the estrangement between Khwarazm and Baghdad — which had consequences out of all proportion to its cause — to that jealousy.

The rest of the reign is a small state discovering how much room orthodoxy buys. He allied with the atabeg Uzbek against a rival; then with Jalal al-Din the Khwarazmian; and he is the only grand master of Alamut who ever lived outside his own fortresses, spending a year and a half in Iraq, Arran and Azerbaijan among people who a decade earlier would have killed him on sight. For a polity whose defining physical fact was that it could not be reached, that is an extraordinary thing to have done.

Then Chinggis Khan crossed the Oxus, and Jalal al-Din Hasan sent envoys to submit to him — the first ambassadors of any Muslim power to do homage to the Mongols. He died suddenly a few weeks later, on 2 or 3 November 1220, supposedly poisoned by women of his household. Browne's reading is that the homage finished whatever patience his own community still had with him, and the reading is hard to argue with: his heir was nine, and the regent inaugurated the reign by putting a number of the dead man's female relatives to death, several of them by burning, on suspicion of the poisoning.

Twelve years earlier the community had been living under a declaration that the law was abolished and the Resurrection had come. It was now governed by a regency that had proved its orthodoxy to the satisfaction of the jurists of Qazvin, was in correspondence with Baghdad, and had sent its submission to a Mongol camp on the Oxus. Every one of those moves was rational. Together they gave up the only thing that had ever protected the place, which was that it had nothing to negotiate with anybody about.

The surrender

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume II: From Firdawsi to Sa'di (1906)end

The state that no army could finish was talked into opening its gates, and the man who did the talking had been living in it for twenty-odd years as a prisoner.

The hostage

Nasir al-Din Tusi is one of the great figures of Islamic science — astronomer, mathematician, author of the Akhlaq-i Nasiri, the best-known work on ethics written in Persian.

He was at Alamut because he had been kidnapped. Nasir al-Din, the Isma'ili governor of Quhistan, seized him and sent him to the fortress, where he remained — in Browne's phrase, an honoured if unwilling guest — until the Mongols took it. The book on ethics was written there. It is named after the governor who abducted him and was originally dedicated to that man, and in a later recension Tusi apologises both for the dedication and for certain concessions he had made to Isma'ili sentiment.

Bear that in mind, because it is the fairest thing that can be said for what he did next.

1256

Hulegu came west in 1252 with a thousand Chinese engineers to work the catapults, and the castles that had defeated the Seljuks for a hundred and sixty years were now facing an enemy that could reduce them one at a time and had no reason to stop.

Rukn al-Din Khurshah had been grand master for about a year. His father Ala al-Din, who had come to the throne at nine under a regent and had developed, on Rashid al-Din's account, a moody melancholia that made it dangerous to bring him unwelcome news, had been killed.

It was Tusi, Browne says, who first induced Rukn al-Din to surrender himself into the hands of the Mongols.

He did. The castles were handed over and systematically dismantled. Alamut was taken that December; Juvayni, Hulegu's secretary, went through the library, chose a few things to save, and had the rest burned. Rukn al-Din was sent east towards the great khan and killed on the road, and Möngke ordered the Persian Nizaris put to death.

And what became of the negotiator

Tusi went straight into Hulegu's service. Two years later, when Hulegu was deliberating whether it was safe to execute the last Abbasid caliph, it was Tusi who assured him that no heavenly vengeance was likely to follow. He built an observatory at Maragha with Mongol money and compiled his astronomical tables there, assisted by Chinese astronomers.

Browne's verdict is unqualified: what irony that this double-dyed traitor should be the author of one of the best-known works on ethics written in Persian.

It is worth entering the other side of it. Tusi had been taken by force and held for decades by a state that was about to be destroyed whatever he did, in a world where a scholar's only protection was a patron. Advising the man with the catapults is not obviously worse than continuing to write ethics for the people who had abducted you. Browne is a Victorian Persianist with strong views about loyalty; the situation had no honourable exit in it.

What is not in dispute is the outcome. A polity whose entire method for a hundred and sixty-six years had been that it could not be reached was ended by a conversation, conducted by a man it had kidnapped.

After the fortresses

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)afterlife

Most accounts of the Nizaris stop at 1256, and they should not.

Girdkuh held out until 1270. The Syrian castles fell not to the Mongols but to Baybars, who reduced them between about 1270 and 1273 and then did with them what the Mamluk sultanate did with everything — kept the garrisons in service. A son of the last imam is reported to have held Alamut briefly again in 1275.

What actually survived was not territory. The community went underground in the Iranian highlands, in Afghanistan, in Sind and Gujarat, and the imamate continued in concealment — the line was maintained, disputed at points, and its existence was not public. For long stretches the Nizaris of Iran were taken for Sufis and the Nizaris of India were known by other names entirely, which is how a community survives when being identified is fatal.

The line came back into the open in the nineteenth century, when its imam left Iran after a failed rising, was given the title Aga Khan, and settled eventually in India — where the largest body of his followers, by then, had been for centuries. The Isma'ili community that descends from Alamut is now several million people across some two dozen countries.

Set that beside the other Isma'ili states and the pattern holds. The Fatimid caliphate fell in 1171 and its mission outlasted it: the Tayyibi line reconstituted in Yemen under Arwa went on to Gujarat and is still there. The Qarmatian state in Bahrayn went and left nothing at all, because what it had was a prediction rather than an institution.

This one lost every fortress it held and kept the thing the fortresses had been built to protect. The dates on it — 1256, 1270, 1273 — are the dates of a polity, and the polity was never the point. It was the arrangement a community made in order to have somewhere to be while it was being hunted, and when the arrangement was destroyed the community changed its methods and went on. Being taken for Sufis for six hundred years is a worse way to live than holding Alamut, and it works.

The garden that was not there

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)aside?What aside means

Almost everything widely known about this polity comes from people who hated it or had never been near it, and the Alamut library burned in 1256, which means the correction has had to be assembled from what survived elsewhere.

The famous story is Marco Polo's, written a generation after the state was destroyed and set in a place he did not visit: a secret garden of wine and women behind the fortress, into which young men were drugged, allowed to believe they had seen paradise, drugged again, and told they would return there if they died on command. It is a good story. It has no support in any Isma'ili source, no support in the Persian histories written closest to the events, and its structure — the hidden garden, the counterfeit paradise — belongs to a family of tales told in Europe about several groups.

The drug is a philological accident on top of that. Contemporary hostile Syrian and Egyptian writers called the Nizaris hashishiyya, from which the European word derives, and the term appears to have been an insult of the ordinary kind — low, disreputable, of no account — rather than a description of what anybody consumed. No source close to the community reports its use, and a hierarchy that trained agents to spend years in place under cover is not obviously running on intoxicants.

Plenty of states have had their history written by their enemies. The Umayyads were written up under the dynasty that overthrew them; the early caliphate is known from compilations made a century and more after the events. This is the extreme version of the problem, and it has three stages rather than one: the archive was deliberately destroyed, the survivors were dispersed or killed, and the vacancy was filled by a traveller's tale composed at a distance of two thousand miles.

That tale is still the first thing most readers hear, seven hundred and fifty years later, and no correction has ever caught up with it.

The honest position is smaller and duller than the legend. A religious minority held a network of fortresses for a hundred and sixty-six years against every power in the region, governed the valleys it held, kept a library good enough that a Mongol official salvaged part of it before the burning, and used targeted killing as one instrument among several. That is remarkable enough without the garden.