New York Diary

Assassin!

I recently read Bernard Lewis's The Assassins, a reasonably scholarly account of the Ismailis generally (they being the second largest Shi'a community after the Twelvers) and the Assassins in particular (they being a particular Ismaili sect, now pretty much defunct). Their historical story is gripping, and it kind of surprises me that we don't have more references to it in popular culture.

Reading about the Assassins in a post-9/11 world must be a very different experience than doing so just 5 years ago, I realize. While it doesn't seem prudent to make the claim that the Assassins were the first terrorists (history is long, and I'm hardly an expert on such things), they certainly do seem to prefigure terrorism today--a point that Lewis makes abundantly clear in his (new?) final chapter. The assassins sent people out to murder political and religious enemies; they privileged martyrdom and promised paradisal rewards to those who died while carrying out a mission; they appeared cult-like and secretive to those around them; they followed even self-destructive orders with uncanny devotion; they performed their killings in public, apparently in order to inspire fear; they didn't often control territory, and didn't particularly appear to want to do so (that is, they weren't fighting for land--which is part of what made them so frightening to their contemporaries); they infiltrated governments and killed heads of state routinely.

But there are important differences, which, perhaps, are not played up enough. The Assassins were Shi'a; most of their murderous efforts were directed against the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate. For most of their history, their disagreements were over the correct succession of power after Mohammad--a political problem, to be sure, but also a religious problem set squarely within a shared Islamic context, and buttressed, at the beginning at least, with significant amounts of religious scholarship and well-drafted theological philosophies. This was not interreligious terrorism as we know it now, then (even if, later on, the Assassins were occasionally thought by their neighbors not to practice Islam; and they allied with Crusaders from time to time; and they eventually practiced a kind of populist, millenialist, firebrand religion in which Islamic law was sometimes suspended).

Moreover, it's worth noting that the Assassins didn't kill innocents. While they publicly murdered numerous heads of state, political advisers, and Sunni religious leaders, they were painfully careful to do so in a well-ordered manner (usually leading to their own capture) in order to avoid harming others. They almost always killed with a knife, from close quarters; they wouldn't shoot arrows or use poison to attack their victims. They didn't wreak havoc, but sometimes spent years gaining the confidence of the intended target in order to get close enough to attack. Assassins never chose to attack large numbers of people ("all the people at the Sunni court," for example), instead focusing on carefully chosen individuals whose names they recorded and whose death they prepared for with a kind of single-minded devotion. This is scary and indeed caused great fear among the enemies of the Assassins, but is hardly equivalent to today's terrorism.

And finally, the Assassins were recognized as a (sometimes quite powerful) government unto themselves. They certainly sponsored terror-like practices, and horrific killings, but they also entered into alliances with other, clearly legitimate powers. They had serious negotiating power (as evidenced, for example, by their ultimate truce with Saladin after he had been bent on destroying them). To be sure, the Assassins were recognized as odd, frightening, and disturbingly obedient to their leaders--but they were also recognized.

It's easy to fall into the post-9/11 trap of viewing those who consistently use murderous means to achieve their ends as terrorists. The parallel between terrorist and Assassin seems even stronger, I posit, because of the Islamic character that we give to each of them these days (though that's hardly fair these days; we would do well to remember the IRA, for example). We should be careful here, though. While the history of the Assassins may indeed shed some light on terrorism, it cannot, I think, correctly be called terrorism itself.

posted by Skay @ 11:51 AM