Everybody Loves the Assassins (Cont.)

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Everybody Loves the Assassins (Cont.)


	Greetings from Assassin country: the trekking crew leaves Sharestan. (Rob Howard)

THE BEST STORY WOULD BE that the Mongols, having lost a few officials to Assassins, set out to destroy the sect and, with it, the very concept of terrorism. The fact is that the grandson of Genghis Khan, Hülegü Khan, who wished to be called the World Conqueror, had already subdued most of Turkey and southern Persia before he took on the Assassins, entrenched as they were in their mountain fastness. The supreme leader of the Assassins in the year 1256 was Rukn al-Din Khurshah, who had installed himself in the unconquerable cliff-face castle called Maymun-Dez.

The Persian historian Juvayni, whose job it was to glorify Hülegü, describes the Mongol advance on Maymun-Dez: "They set out...like a flood in their onrush and like a flame of fire in their ascent; and their horses' hooves kicked dust into the eyes of Time."

Maymun-Dez was formidable, no doubt about it. We had walked up to it through the village of Shamskalayeh, a jumble of adobe houses, where old men stared at us from glassless windows. As we ascended, the trails degenerated into goat tracks and then disappeared, and I found myself crawling on all fours. Abbas and Shahram took the hill upright, kicking dust into the eyes of Tim.

Presently we arrived at the base of a vertical rock wall. There was some beige plaster stonework on the face of the red rock, and I could see a number of caves set about halfway to the summit. Abbas had climbed up there a few times. These caves, he said, had been carved out to form enormous rooms, and then more rooms on top of rooms, which must have been connected, one to the other, by wooden ladders. A spring near the summit of the cliff fed water to the castle. From where I stood, at the base of the cliff, I could see a man-made walkway between the two largest cave rooms. Abbas wouldn't hear of a climb to the caves: We had no ropes, and he himself wouldn't go into those echoing rooms ever again. The caves were collapsing up there.

In November 1256, the Mongols laid siege to Maymun-Dez. They confounded the Assassins with their new and terrible weapons technology. The kaman-i-qav was a huge crossbow-like device capable of firing flaming javelins well over a mile. Juvayni relates that "of the devil-like Heretics, many soldiers were burnt by those Meteoric shafts."

Rukn al-Din surrendered and sought terms from the Mongols. Hülegü ordered him to command the surrender and destruction of all the remaining Assassin castles. Most garrisons obeyed. After Rukn al-Din had served his purpose, he was "kicked to a pulp then put to the sword." The castles were looted and systematically destroyed. All the captured Assassins were to be executed. One source estimates the number of Ismailis killed at 100,000. As Juvayni put it: "Of him [Rukn al-Din] and his stock, no trace was left, and he and his kindred became but a tale on men's lips."

In fact, there are Ismailis today, mostly centered in India, Pakistan, and cities on the Indian Ocean, and their spiritual leader is the present Aga Khan. The Ismailis are among the most pacific and tolerant sects in Islam. Many of them are shopkeepers in Bombay.

Back in the days of the Assassins, however, Alamut, the castle of the feared Hasan-i Sabbah, was the headquarters of the sect. It wasn't far from the castles we'd already seen, but unlike Lammasar or Maymun-Dez, there were road signs all the way. Set on a massive knob of rock that Freya Stark said looked like the bow of a ship seen from the side, Alamut rises 800 feet above the town of Gazorkhan, which was bustling with foreign visitors.

In the past few years, Alamut has become a tourist destination. There was a series of excavated steps leading to the top of the ship rock. The path plunged through a tunnel of stone and emptied out onto a narrow ridge where there were broken turrets and tumbledown walls and a number of cisterns carved out of the solid rock. The Iranian Cultural Heritage Department was restoring some of the walls and towers.

There was no place that might have been a heavenly hashish-fired garden. If the fabled paradise ever existed, it must have lain below, in Gazorkhan, probably next to the bus station—all in all a rather rinky-dink heaven on earth. Bernard Lewis, in assessing the Assassins' place in the history of Islam, assures readers that the movement was regarded as a profound threat to the existing order, but what he finds most significant is "their final and total failure. They did not overthrow the existing order; they did not even succeed in holding a city of any size." And their followers, he notes, "have become small and peaceful communities of peasants and merchants."

That is the lesson of the castles.

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