The Assassins (6 page)

There was much that made men seek an alternative. The great social and economic changes of the eighth and ninth centuries had brought wealth and power to some, hardship and frustration to others. In the countryside, the growth of large and, often, fiscally privileged estates was accompanied by the impoverishment and subjection of tenants and smallholders; in the towns, the development of commerce and industry created a class of journeyman labourers, and attracted an unstable and floating population of rootless and needy migrants. Amid great prosperity, there was also great distress. The dry legalism and remote transcendentalism of the orthodox faith, the cautious conformism of its accredited exponents, offered little comfort to the dispossessed, little scope for the spiritual yearnings of the uprooted and unhappy. There was an intellectual malaise, too. Muslim thought and learning, enriched from many sources, were becoming more subtle, more sophisticated, more diverse. There were great and agonizing problems to be considered, arising from the confrontation of Islamic revelation, Greek science and philosophy, Persian wisdom, and the hard facts of history. Among many, there was a loss of confidence in traditional Islamic answers, and a desire, of growing urgency, for new ones. The great Islamic consensus - religious, philosophical, political, social - seemed to be breaking up; a new principle of unity and authority, just and effective, was needed to save Islam from destruction.

It was the great strength of the Ismailis that they could offer such a principle - a design for a new world order under the Imam. To both the devout and the discontented, the message and ministrations of the dais brought comfort and promise. To philosophers and theologians, poets and scholars, the Ismaili synthesis offered a seductive appeal. Because of the strong reactions against the Ismailis in later times, most of their literature disappeared from the central lands of Islam, and was preserved only among the sectaries themselves. But a few works of Ismaili inspiration have for long been widely known, and many of the great classical authors in Arabic and Persian show at least traces of Ismaili influence. The `Epistles of the Sincere Brethren', a famous encyclopaedia of religious and worldly knowledge compiled in the tenth century, is saturated with Ismaili thought, and exercised a profound influence on Muslim intellectual life from Persia to Spain.

Not surprisingly, the dais achieved special success in those places, like Southern Iraq, the shores of the Persian Gulf, and parts of Persia, where earlier forms of militant and extremist Shi'ism had already won a following, or where local cults offered favourable ground. At the end of the ninth century a branch of the sect known as the Carmathians - their precise relationship with the main Ismaili body is uncertain - was able to win control and establish a form of republic in Eastern Arabia, which served them for more than a century as a base for military and propagandist operations against the Caliphate. A Carmathian attempt to seize power in Syria at the beginning of the tenth century failed, but the episode is significant and reveals some local support for Ismailism even at that early date.

The greatest triumph of the Ismaili cause came in another quarter. A mission to the Yemen had, by the end of the ninth century, won many converts and a base of political power; from there further missions were despatched to other countries, including India and North Africa, where they achieved their most spectacular success. By 9o9 they were strong enough for the hidden Imam to emerge from hiding and proclaim himself Caliph in North Africa, with the title al-Mahdi, thus founding a new state and dynasty. They were known as the Fatimids, in token of their descent from Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet.

In the first half-century, the Fatimid Caliphs ruled in the west only, in North Africa and Sicily. Their eyes, however, were on the East, the heartlands of Islam, where alone they could hope to achieve their purpose of ousting the Sunni Abbasid Caliphs and establishing themselves as sole heads of all Islam. Ismaili agents and missionaries were active in all the Sunni lands; Fatimid armies prepared in Tunisia for the conquest of Egypt - the first step on the road to the Empire of the East.

In 969 this first step was duly completed. Fatimid troops conquered the Nile valley, and were soon advancing across Sinai into Palestine and Southern Syria. Near Fustat, the old seat of government, the Fatimid leaders built a new city, called Cairo, as the capital of their Empire, and a new mosque-university, called al-Azhar, as the citadel of their faith. The Caliph, al-Mu'izz, moved from Tunisia to his new residence, where his descendants reigned for the next two hundred years.

The Ismaili challenge to the old order was now closer and stronger, and was maintained by a great power - for a while the greatest in the Islamic world. The Fatimid Empire at its peak included Egypt, Syria, North Africa, Sicily, the Red Sea coast of Africa, the Yemen and the Hijaz in Arabia, with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In addition the Fatimid Caliph controlled a vast network of dais and commanded the allegiance of countless followers in the lands still subject to the Sunni rulers of the East. In the great colleges of Cairo, scholars and teachers elaborated the doctrines of the Ismaili faith and trained missionaries to preach them to the unconverted at home and abroad. One of their main areas of activity was Persia and Central Asia, from which many aspirers after the truth found their way to Cairo, and to which in due course they returned as skilled exponents of the Ismaili message. Outstanding among them was the philosopher and poet Nasir-i Khusraw. Converted during a visit to Egypt in 1046, he returned to preach Ismailism in the eastern lands, where he exercised a powerful influence.

The Sunni response was at first limited and ineffectual - security measures against the dais, and political warfare against the Fatimids, who in a manifesto published in Baghdad in iou i were accused, somewhat unconvincingly, of not being Fatimids at all, but descendants of a disreputable impostor.

Yet, despite this imposing strength, and a great effort of political, religious and economic warfare against the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatimid challenge failed. The Abbasid Caliphate survived; Sunni Islam recovered and triumphed - and the Fatimid Caliphs successively lost their Empire, their authority and their following.

Part of the reason for this failure must be sought in events in the East, where great changes were taking place. The coming of the Turkish peoples interrupted the political fragmentation of South West Asia, and for a while restored to the lands of the Sunni Caliphate the unity and stability which they had lost. The Turkish conquerors were new converts, earnest, loyal, and orthodox; they were imbued with a strong sense of their duty to Islam, and of their responsibility, as the new protectors of the Caliph and masters of the Muslim world, to sustain and defend it against internal and external dangers. This duty they discharged to the full. Turkish rulers and Turkish soldiers provided the political and military strength and skill to withstand, contain, and repel the two great dangers that threatened Sunni Islam - the challenge of the Ismaili Caliphs and, later, the invasion of the Crusaders from Europe.

The same dangers - of religious schism and foreign invasion - helped to stimulate the great Sunni revival which was beginning to gather force. In the Sunni world there were still great reserves of religious power - in the theology of the schoolmen, the spirituality of the mystics, and the pious devotion of their followers. In this time of crisis and recovery a new synthesis was achieved, with an answer both to the intellectual challenge of Ismaili thought and to the emotional appeal of Ismaili faith.

While their Sunni adversaries were gaining in political, military and religious strength, the Ismaili Fatimid cause was weakened by religious dissension and political decline. The first serious internal conflicts in Ismailism resulted from the very successes of the Fatimids. The needs and responsibilities of a dynasty and an empire required some modification in earlier doctrines, and, in the words of a modem Ismaili scholar, the adoption of `a graver and more conservative attitude towards the then existing institution of Islam'.' From the first, there were disputes between Ismaili radicals and conservatives, between the preservers and the revealers of the esoteric mysteries. From time to time the Fatimid Caliphs had to face schism, and even armed opposition, as groups of their followers withdrew their assent and support. Already in the time of the first Fatimid Caliph in North Africa, there were controversies between dais of different views, and some defections from the Fatimid camp. The fourth Caliph, al-Mu'izz, faced similar difficulties; at the very moment of his triumph, during the conquest of Egypt, he even had to fight against the Carmathians from Eastern Arabia who, after first supporting the Fatimids, turned against them and attacked their armies in Syria and Egypt. At a later date the Carmathians seem to have returned to the Fatimid allegiance, and disappeared as a separate entity. Another schism occurred after the disappearance, in obscure circumstances, of the sixth Caliph al-Hakim in Io2I. A group of the faithful believed that al-Hakim was divine, and had not died but gone into occultation. Refusing to recognize his successors on the Fatimid throne, they seceded from the main body of the sect. They had some success in winning support among the Ismailis of Syria, where groups of them still survive, in the present-day states of Syria, Lebanon and Israel. One of the founders of this sect was a da'i of Central Asian origin called Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Darazi. They are still known, after him, as Druzes.

During the long reign of the eighth Caliph al-Mustansir (1036-94) the Fatimid Empire reached its peak and fell into a swift decline; at his death the Ismaili mission was torn apart by its greatest internal schism.

In the prime of Fatimid power the Caliph retained full personal control of affairs, presiding with equal authority over the three great branches of government - the bureaucracy, the religious hierarchy, and the armed forces. The head of the civil bureaucracy, and the effective head of the government under the Caliph, was the vizier, a civilian; the head of the religious hierarchy was the chief of the dais or missionaries (dd'i al-du`dt), who besides controlling the Ismaili establishment within the Empire also commanded the great army of Ismaili agents and missionaries abroad. The commander of the armed forces, in what was essentially a civilian regime, headed the third branch. Since the death of al-Hakim, however, the military had been steadily increasing their power at the expense of the civilians and even of the Caliph himself. The setbacks, misfortunes, and upheavals of the mid-eleventh century accelerated this process; it was completed in Io74 when, at the Caliph's invitation, Badr al-Jamali, the military governor of Acre, moved into Egypt with his own army to take control of affairs. He was soon master of the country, with the three titles, conferred by the Caliph, of Commander of the Armies, Chief of the Missionaries, and vizier - signifying his control over all three branches, the military, religious, and bureaucratic. It is by the first of these titles that he was usually known.

Henceforth the real master of Egypt was the Commander of the Armies, a military autocrat ruling through his troops. The post became a permanency, in which Badr al-Jamali was succeeded by his son and grandson, and then by a series of other military autocrats. Just as the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad had become the helpless puppets of their own praetorians, so now the Fatimids became mere figureheads for a succession of military dictators. It was a sad decline for a dynasty which had claimed the spiritual and political headship of all Islam - a decline that was in striking contradiction with the beliefs and hopes of the Ismaili faith.

Such a change inevitably awoke discontent and opposition among the more militant and consistent of the sectaries, the more so since it coincided with a period of renewed activity among the Ismailis in Persia. The replacement of Badr al-Jamali by his son al-Afdal in 1094 made little change in the state of affairs, and when, on the death of al-Mustansir a few months later, the Commander of the Armies was confronted with the need to choose a new Caliph, his choice was not difficult. On the one hand there was Nizar, the eldest son and an adult, already appointed heir by al-Mustansir, known and accepted by the Ismaili leaders; on the other his younger brother al-Musta'li, a youth without allies or supporters, who would consequently be entirely dependent on his powerful patron. It was no doubt with this in mind that al-Afdal arranged a marriage between his own daughter and al-Musta'li and, on al-Mustansir's death, proclaimed his sonin-law as Caliph. Nizar fled to Alexandria, where he rose in revolt with local support. After some initial success, he was defeated, captured, and later killed.

In choosing al-Musta'li, al-Afdal split the sect from top to bottom, and alienated, perhaps intentionally, almost the whole of its following in the eastern lands of Islam. Even within the Fatimid boundaries there were movements of opposition; the Eastern Ismailis refused to recognize the new Caliph and, proclaiming their allegiance to Nizar and his line, broke off all relations with the attenuated Fatimid organization in Cairo. The divergence between the state and the revolutionaries, which had begun to appear when the state was first established, was now complete.

Before long, even those Ismailis who had accepted al-Musta'li broke their links with the regime in Cairo. In I13o, after the murder of al-Amir, the son and successor of al-Musta'li, by supporters of the Nizaris, the remaining Ismailis refused to recognize the new Caliph in Cairo, and adopted the belief that a lost, infant son of al-Amir, called Tayyib, was the hidden and awaited Imam. There were to be no more Imams after him.

Four more Fatimid Caliphs reigned in Cairo, but they were no more than a local Egyptian dynasty, without power, influence or hope. In 1171, as the last of them lay dying in his palace, the Kurdish soldier Saladin, who had meanwhile become the real master of Egypt, allowed a preacher to recite the bidding-prayer in the name of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad. The Fatimid Caliphate, already dead both as a religious and as a political force, was now formally abolished, amid the almost total indifference of the population. The heretical books of the Ismailis were heaped on bonfires. After more than two centuries, Egypt was restored to the Sunni fold.