Chapter 77. Esoteric Shi’ism: Ismailis, Fatimids, Nizari ‘Assassins’, Druze and Alawites

Twelver Shi’ism withdrew from politics to wait for a Hidden Imam. The “Sevener” line did the opposite. It produced a secret missionary network, a counter-caliphate in Cairo, a mountain state in Iran whose ruler abolished the religious law, a new religion that took the sixth Fatimid caliph for a manifestation of God, and an older “extremist” (ghulat) sect, the Nusayris or Alawites, which a thousand years later supplied the ruling family of modern Syria. Each of these groups combined the same ingredients in different proportions: an esoteric reading of scripture (batin), graded initiation, cyclical sacred history, and the readiness of a minority to use secrecy or violence to survive among hostile majorities. Their enemies wrote much of the record, so the library’s sources disagree sharply about what is legend and what is history. This chapter sets the medieval polemic (as transmitted by Hammer and Keightley) beside the revisionist account of Anthony Campbell and the modern political uses traced by Amir Taheri and Edward Luttwak.

The Seveners: doctrine and da’wa

Karen Armstrong defines the movement by its succession dispute. The Seveners or Ismailis “held that Ali’s line had ended with Ismail, the son of Jafar as-Sadiq, who had been designated imam but had died before his father. They did not, therefore, recognize the legitimacy of Jafar’s second son, Musa al-Kazim, whom Twelvers revered as the Seventh Imam.” Unlike the quietist Twelvers, “they tried to devise a wholly different political system and were often activists.” Members “were initiated gradually into the sect by the local dai (agent).” The lower grades resembled Sunnism, but higher grades used “mathematics and science as a means of awakening a sense of transcendent wonder.” Their history was cyclical: six great prophets (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad), each with an “executor” (Aaron for Moses, Ali for Muhammad), would be followed by “the seventh prophet, the Mahdi.” Ismailis spoke of God as “He Whom the boldness of thought cannot contain” and held that “no one revelation or theological system could ever be definitive,” which Armstrong says was “alarming to the more conservative of the ulama” [Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, #53062, “The Esoteric Movements”].

Anthony Campbell begins with the paradox of the movement: “What started as a secret or semi-secret organization acquired a capital city and an empire, and yet in spite of its great temporal success it preserved its inner mystery” [Campbell, The Assassins of Alamut, #69687, “Who were the Ismailis?”]. He describes the missionary’s method. The missionary would speak “of religion as a hidden science” and ask questions such as “Why are there seven cervical and twelve dorsal vertebrae?” in order to suggest that “the universe is a magnified man.” He then administered an oath of allegiance, secrecy and financial contribution. Campbell finds the ritual “oddly reminiscent of modern Masonic initiation.” Against the Sunni charge that initiates were led “step by step to the ultimate abandonment of all religious belief,” he argues that the Ismaili texts show “a serious attempt to raise human consciousness to a higher plane” [Campbell, #69687].

Thomas Keightley, writing in 1837 from Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s history, gives the hostile version: a nine-degree course of initiation that ended with the teaching that “Prophets and teachers, heaven and hell, all were nothing … all actions were permitted” [Keightley, Secret Societies of the Middle Ages, #64544, account of the degrees of initiation, after Hammer]. Keightley himself warns that his main source, the Mongol vizier Juvaini, who burned the Alamut library after reading it, “was at liberty to invent what atrocities he pleased” [Keightley, #64544, ch. V].

The Fatimid counter-caliphate and the Nizari split

Armstrong dates the Ismaili seizure of Tunisia, under a leader styling himself al-Mahdi, to 909. In her account, “In 983 the Ismailis wrested Egypt from the Abbasids, and set up their own rival caliphate in Cairo, which lasted nearly two hundred years.” (The reference shelf dates the Fatimid conquest of Egypt to 969 [Wikipedia: Fatimid Caliphate]; 983 is the date as printed in Armstrong.) At its height the Fatimid state “ruled North Africa, Syria, much of Arabia, and Palestine.” Under the Fatimids, she adds, “Cairo became a vital city of art and learning,” and “the caliphs founded the college of al-Azhar” [Armstrong, #53062, “A New Order”]. Campbell notes that the Fatimids’ claim of descent from Fatima “has been questioned,” but that Bernard Lewis “thinks it was probably genuine,” with support “from secret Ismaili works and from the Druze scriptures” [Campbell, #69687]. Hidden Religion notes that the Nizari Ismailis are “still active in parts of Syria, Pakistan, India, Iran,” and that “some in the Nizari Ismaili sect still claim to be descendants of Nizar, one of the Fatimid Caliphs believed to be a descendent of Ali and Ismail” [Issitt & Main, Hidden Religion, #66220, “Ismaili Assassins”].

The decisive split came in 1094. Campbell explains that the caliph al-Mustansir “had designated his eldest son Nizar,” a designation that “could not be revoked” by Ismaili rules. The military strongman al-Afdal instead enthroned Nizar’s brother al-Musta’li, and Nizar was “defeated, imprisoned, and eventually executed.” Cairo accepted al-Musta’li, but the Iranian Ismailis under Hasan-i Sabbah “remained loyal to Nizar.” Campbell reads the break as partly doctrinal (the same question of an irrevocable designation had created the sect) and partly about “politics and national pride,” since al-Afdal’s troops “were largely Turkish” [Campbell, #69687, “The split with Cairo”].

Hasan-i Sabbah and Alamut

Campbell gives the life of Hasan-i Sabbah in detail. He was born at Qom “and was brought up as a Twelver,” converted after “a near-fatal illness,” and was sent to Cairo. “In 1080 he returned to Iran, surviving a shipwreck on the Syrian coast,” and worked as a propagandist. In 1090 he took the castle of Alamut by infiltration, paying the castellan with a draft for 3,000 dinars on the governor of Damghan, which the governor later “kissed … reverently and paid.” Campbell notes that the year 483 AH yields, in the abjad letter-number system, the name Aluh Amut [Campbell, #69687, “Hasan at Alamut”]. Under Hasan “the Muslim ritual law (sharia) was enforced at Alamut with full rigour.” He had both his sons executed, one for drinking wine. Von Hammer took this as proof of depravity; Campbell calls it “impartiality” [Campbell, #69687].

Campbell treats assassination as a weapon of the weak. The first victim was usually said to be the vizier Nizam al-Mulk (1092). The legend that Hasan, Nizam al-Mulk and Omar Khayyam were school friends is “almost certainly apocryphal” on chronological grounds. Since the Ismailis “were so enormously outnumbered,” Campbell writes, “terrorism was a logical enough expedient,” but “unlike their modern counterparts they did not kill innocent bystanders; they were highly selective” [Campbell, #69687, “The use of terror”]. Armstrong describes a “full-scale revolt” from 1092, a “campaign of terror” that “turned most Muslims against the Ismailis,” and counter-massacres of suspected Ismailis. She also records the state around Alamut “which lasted 150 years and which only the Mongol invaders were able to destroy” [Armstrong, #53062]. Keightley lists Hasan’s seven “rules” for missionaries and the ranks of the order: dais, refeeks, fedavees and laziks [Keightley, #64544, ch. V].

The Resurrection at Alamut (1164)

Campbell calls the qiyama “the central event in the story of the Assassins of Alamut.” Hasan II, “attracted by Sufism,” first relaxed the law. Then, on 17 Ramadan 1164, he assembled the Nizaris before a pulpit that faced away from Mecca, so that the people “had their backs towards Mecca.” He announced in Persian:

“The Imam of our time … sends you blessings and compassion, for you are his special servants. And therefore he has lifted from you the burden of obeying the ritual law and has brought you the Resurrection (qiyama).” [Campbell, #69687, ch. 3 “The Resurrection at Alamut”]

He then broke the fast with food, “possibly accompanied by the forbidden wine,” and music. Campbell observes that since “the ritual law is the civil law,” Hasan “had therefore abrogated the religious law and the civil law simultaneously.” The new doctrine, he writes, “threw away not just the shell of the egg but the white as well.” It made Nizarism “pure esotericism made into a state religious doctrine,” with the Imam as “a manifestation of God” [Campbell, #69687].

The sources differ on the details. Campbell says Hasan was murdered “eighteen months after the proclamation” by his brother-in-law Husayn-i Namavar, and that his son Muhammad II claimed a physical descent from Nizar. Keightley says Hasan “had governed the society only four years when he was assassinated by his brother-in-law, Namver.” He presents the descent claim as Hasan’s own ambition, a man willing “to defame the memory of his mother, and acknowledge himself to be a bastard, provided he could succeed in persuading the people to believe him a descendant of the Prophet.” Both report Juvaini’s two stories: a secret exchange of babies, or adultery between the hidden imam and the lord of Alamut’s wife. Campbell suspects the second is “a later fabrication by the Nizaris’ enemies” [Keightley, #64544, ch. VII; Campbell, #69687].

The legend: paradise, hashish and the name ‘Assassin’

The most famous text is Marco Polo’s, which Keightley quotes in Marsden’s translation. It describes a walled valley garden with “streams of wine, milk, honey, and some of pure water” and “elegant and beautiful damsels.” Youths of twelve to twenty were drugged with “draughts of a soporific nature,” carried inside, and told on waking that they could return to that paradise “if you show yourselves devoted to the obedience of my orders” [Keightley, #64544, ch. V]. Keightley adds a parallel Arabic romance, the Sirat al-Hakim, on the gardens at Masyaf, where the drug is benj (henbane). He reports Silvestre de Sacy’s derivation of “Assassin” from hashishin, users of a hemp preparation. Yet he calls Polo’s story “more suited to a place among the wonders of the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ than to admission into sober history,” rejected by “De Sacy and Wilken” but believed by Hammer [Keightley, #64544, ch. V].

Campbell goes further. “It need hardly be said that this is a total fantasy.” He writes that “there is no real evidence that the Assassins used hashish at all, at least for this purpose,” that hashishin “was not used by members of the sect themselves,” and that their usual names were “batinis, Ismailis, or Nizaris.” “Old Man,” he adds, is a literal rendering of the Persian pir. A special corps of fidais “is doubtful, at least until a much later date.” He contrasts Polo with William of Tyre, who wrote about the sect “in a way that reveals a fair amount of understanding” [Campbell, #69687, ch. 1]. Armstrong likewise counts the hashish story among the “wild and inaccurate stories” the ulama spread [Armstrong, #53062]. Hidden Religion concludes that “historians believe that rumors surrounding the Nizari Ismaili’s assassinations were greatly exaggerated,” while noting that “some have speculated that the Ismaili Assassins still exist” [Issitt & Main, #66220].

Syria: Sinan, the Crusaders and the Old Man of the Mountain

Keightley narrates an Ismaili attempt to betray Damascus to the Crusaders. The Ismaili vizier secretly agreed with Baldwin II that the Franks would appear on a Friday while the emir was at the mosque, in exchange for Tyre. The plot was discovered, “a general massacre of the Ismailites” followed (6,000 dead, by his note), and the Franks gained only “the castle of Banias, which the Ismaïlite governor put into their hands” [Keightley, #64544, ch. VI]. Campbell’s chapter on Syria presents Rashid al-Din Sinan, the original “Old Man of the Mountain” of the Crusader sources. He recounts the 1173 embassy to King Amalric “proposing” conversion to Christianity, which was ruined when Templars murdered the returning envoy; one of Sinan’s conditions had been the remission of a tribute the Nizaris paid to the Templars. He also covers Sinan’s conflict with Saladin and the 1192 murder of Conrad of Montferrat, for which Richard I “has also been suspected” [Campbell, #69687, ch. 4]. Campbell’s epilogue follows the Nizaris to India as the Khojas and calls the Aga Khan “the lineal descendant of the Grand Masters of Alamut” [Campbell, #69687, ch. 6].

Amir Taheri reads the sect as the ancestor of modern Islamist terror. “Many of the fedayeen died in the performance of their sacred duty, but the prospect of death did not seem to discourage the followers of the Old Man of the Mountain.” Of the Muslim Brotherhood he writes: “The Supreme Guide of Cairo was to find himself a worthy heir to his namesake, the Old Man of the Mountain, nearly a thousand years before him.” He concludes that “radical Islam is bound to end in terrorism, as the experiences of Hassan Sabbah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Fedayeen of Islam had already proved” [Taheri, Holy Terror, #64433]. Taheri also records “the widespread belief that Hassan was a Persian nationalist and a secret Zoroastrian,” and a theory that “the entire Shi’ite movement was started by Persian nationalists who wished to de-Islamicize Iran” [Taheri, #64433, ch. 3 notes]. He presents these as claims made by “some historians,” not as his own conclusion.

The Druze: al-Hakim and the Unitarian call

The Druze faith grew out of the Fatimid da’wa itself. Campbell notes that the Druze are “a later offshoot from the Ismaili tradition” [Campbell, #69687]. The Wikipedia article gives the chronology. Hamza ibn Ali, an Ismaili from Khorasan, reached Cairo in 1014 or 1016 and “in 1017 … began to preach a Muwahhidun (Unitarian) doctrine.” The sixth Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, “became a central figure in the faith.” The “unitarian call” opened on 30 May 1017. It “removed all attributes … from God” and superseded “ritual, law and dogma,” with Thursday gatherings in khalwats in place of mosques. The preacher al-Darazi, from whom the name “Druze” probably derives, taught that “al-Hakim and his ancestors were the incarnation of God.” According to the article, al-Hakim had him executed in 1018, and the Druze regard him as a heretic. When al-Hakim disappeared on a night ride, “presumably assassinated, perhaps at the behest of his … sister Sitt al-Mulk,” the Druze held that he had entered occultation and would return. The call was suspended in 1018-19 and again in 1021-26 during persecution by al-Zahir [Wikipedia: Druze]. The article characterises the faith as esoteric, with practices “kept secret,” a division between initiated uqqal and uninitiated juhhal, a belief in reincarnation, no conversion, and between 800,000 and a million adherents, chiefly in Syria, Lebanon and Israel [Wikipedia: Druze].

The Alawites (Nusayris): from ghulat sect to ruling minority

According to the Wikipedia article on Alawism, the sect “originated in 9th-century Iraq as a ghulat sect” founded by Ibn Nusayr. He “declared himself the ‘Bab (Door) of the Imams’, and attributed divinity to Hasan al-Askari,” who “denounced” him. Al-Khasibi then organised the community in Aleppo “a missionary who had gained patronage from Emir Sayf al-Dawla (r. 945–967).” The theology is a trinity of Ma’na (Meaning, Ali), Ism (Name, Muhammad) and Bab (Door, Salman the Persian), together with a mass with “consecration of bread and wine” and reincarnation; the shahada is rendered as “there is no God but Ali.” After “severe persecution by waves of the Crusaders, Mamluks, and by Ottoman conquerors,” an Alawite State was created in coastal Syria after the First World War. The article reports that Ibn Taymiyya called for the sect “to be eradicated,” and that Hajj Amin al-Husseini issued a 1932 fatwa recognising Alawites as Muslims on “political, anticolonial” grounds. Hafez al-Assad’s 1970 coup established an “Alawite-led establishment” that continued under Bashar al-Assad, “who was eventually overthrown during the Syrian civil war” [Wikipedia: Alawism].

Luttwak’s coup chronology shows how sect shaped Syrian politics. President Quwatli “tries (and fails) to destroy the power base of a major Druze clan,” one factor behind Husni al-Za’im’s 1949 coup, the first military dictatorship in the Arab world. In August 1949 Za’im “is overthrown by a group of officers, many of whom are Druzes.” Of the Alawites he writes that “of all the communities of Syria, the Alawites were among the least prestigious,” and that the French “had recruited most of their forces of repression” from them. Syria “went through more than a dozen coups before the Assad family dynasty was established by Hafez al-Assad’s 1970 coup” [Luttwak, Coup d’État, #66112, ch. 2-3 and appendix]. Taheri records that many mullahs considered the ruling Alawites “Muslims of doubtful sincerity.” He describes Brotherhood factions that preached “the destruction of the Alawite ‘usurper regime'” and carried out car bombings, and gives estimates of the 1982 Hama dead “between three and thirty thousand” [Taheri, #64433, chs. 8, 12]. For Nusayri ritual (festivals, “The Nusayri Mass”), the specialist study is Matti Moosa’s Extremist Shiites: The Ghulat Sects (Syracuse, 1988). It is listed in a bibliographic file in the library as “probably the best English-language study,” but the library does not hold it as a separate work [Petrosyan, Haldi and Mithra/Mher, #38285; the library file is a compilation that also contains an Armenian-studies bibliography].

Key points

• Ismailis recognise Isma’il, not Musa al-Kazim, as heir to Ja’far al-Sadiq. They developed graded initiation, batin exegesis and a cyclical prophetology ending in the Mahdi [Armstrong, #53062; Campbell, #69687].
• The Fatimids turned a secret da’wa into a Mediterranean empire with Cairo and al-Azhar. The disputed succession of 1094 split Musta’lis from Nizaris [Armstrong, #53062; Campbell, #69687; Issitt & Main, #66220].
• Hasan-i Sabbah (back in Iran from Cairo in 1080, at Alamut from 1090) built a castle state and a policy of selective assassination while enforcing the shari’a strictly [Campbell, #69687; Keightley, #64544].
• The qiyama of 1164 abolished the law in the name of the Imam. Campbell and Keightley disagree on the duration of Hasan II’s rule and on the meaning of his claim to descend from Nizar [Campbell, #69687; Keightley, #64544].
• The paradise-and-hashish story comes from Marco Polo and hostile sources. Keightley calls it romance; Campbell calls it “total fantasy”; Hidden Religion says historians think the rumours “greatly exaggerated” [Keightley, #64544; Campbell, #69687; Issitt & Main, #66220].
• Taheri treats the “Old Man of the Mountain” as the forerunner of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Supreme Guide” and of modern fedayeen [Taheri, #64433].
• The Druze began in 1017 under al-Hakim, whom they await from occultation. The Alawites, organised by al-Khasibi under Sayf al-Dawla, went from persecuted ghulat to the core of the Assad state [Wikipedia: Druze; Wikipedia: Alawism; Luttwak, #66112].