Alamut (Scala Translation)

by Vladimir Bartol

A man is like a sensitive harp on which a woman must play hundreds and hundreds of different melodies. If she’s clumsy and stupid, then oh, what pitiful sounds will come from it. But if she’s gifted and has learned something, then with her deft hands she’ll be able to produce harmonies on the instrument that have never been heard before.

Halima felt a twinge of emotion, bitter and sweet at the same time, as though she were a tiny creature who had gotten lost in a strange, magical world.

“Sayyiduna alone is our commander and we obey no other,” both Yusuf and Suleiman intoned at the same time.

“Don’t think that obedience is an easy thing. The evil spirit of rebellion will begin speaking to you, your body will refuse to follow your will’s dictates, and your reason will whisper a thousand reservations about the orders you get from your commanders. You need to be aware that all of that resistance is just the cunning design of demons intent on turning you away from the true path. Be brave and overcome all resistance in yourself, and you’ll become a powerful sword in the hand of Our Master.”

Our body, which is inclined to sloth and cheap comfort, fears the difficulties that the realization of our lofty goals would pose. Its base passions cripple our will and our nobler desires. Overcoming those passions and freeing the spirit of their bonds is the purpose of our exercises. Strengthening the will and channeling it toward a definite and suitable goal. For that is the only way we become capable of great feats and efforts of self-sacrifice.

“Allah created Adam from the four elements. First, he took hard material, but it was inelastic and fragile. He crumbled it into dust, and then he took another element—water. He mixed this with the dust and got clay, which he used to knead the form of man. But that form was soft and changed shape every time it was touched. Therefore, he created fire and used it to dry out the external surface of the human form. Now man had a skin which was elastic. But he was very heavy, so he removed some of the matter from his chest, and to keep the outer walls of the empty space that formed this way from collapsing, he filled the hollow with a fourth element, air. In this way the human body was completed, and to this day it consists of those four original elements—earth, water, fire and air.

“In order to bring man to life, Allah breathed a soul into him. Being of divine origin, the soul is exceptionally sensitive to the harmony of the elements in the human body. As soon as the equilibrium among them is disturbed, the soul departs the body and returns to its origin, which is Allah himself.

Ibn Tahir glanced around him in distress. He saw faces that expressed extreme religious fervor. No, they couldn’t understand what was perplexing him so much and forcing him to doubt.

But then, one more time, he summoned his home, his father, his mother and sister before his mind’s eye, and he silently bade them farewell. The images began to fade, and in sweet anticipation of new things to come he fell fast asleep.

She thought, she shuddered with fear, and she enjoyed her shivers of curiosity, since she felt she had finally struck on the nerve of the mystery.

Work each individual in accordance with his nature and his views, unobtrusively leading him to doubt the rightness of the existing order.

At the same time, show yourselves to be modest and content with little, behaving in accordance with the ways and customs of whichever land you’re in and whichever class you’re dealing with, and in all insignificant things concur with your partner in conversation. He should have the impression that, although you may be learned and experienced, you still value him highly and place a great deal of weight on guiding him to the one true way.

What if, in a moment of clarity, one of these eunuchs became aware of his humiliated human state and clubbed his master on the head with a mace? One of these terrifying Egyptian guards, whom he tamed like wild animals with his gaze, who were entranced by him, like snakes are by their master’s flute?

‘If a person realized that everything people call happiness, love and joy was just a miscalculation based on a false premise, he’d feel a horrible emptiness inside. The only thing that could rouse him from his paralysis would be to gamble with his own fate and the fate of others. The person capable of that would be permitted anything.’

“All of us think too much about ‘later,’ and as a result the ‘now’ continually recedes from us.

The truth is unknowable. Therefore we believe in nothing and have no limits on what we can do.’

What’s more, Christians of all sects, Jews, Brahmans, Buddhists, fire worshippers and pagans were just as passionate about their teachings. Philosophers of all persuasions made their claims and refuted each other, one claiming there was only one god, another that there were many of them, and a third claiming there was no god and that everything happened by pure coincidence. More and more I began to see the supreme wisdom of the Ismaili dais. Truth is unattainable to us, it doesn’t exist for us.

I tried to open just the brighter individuals’ eyes. Many of them listened to me carefully. But when I would finish, they would reply that they had had similar doubts themselves, but that it seemed more practical to them to hold onto something solid than to grope their way through eternal uncertainty and endless negation. Not just simple folk from the masses, even the more exalted minds preferred a tangible lie to an ungraspable truth.

Because truth, which for me stood at the summit of all values, was worthless to the rest of humanity.

‘Ultimate knowledge is impossible, because our senses lie to us. But they’re the only mediator between the things that surround us and our thoughts, our intellect.’

‘The masses have always been like that,’ Omar continued. ‘They’re afraid of uncertainty, which is why they prefer a lie that promises something tangible to even the most exalted truth if it doesn’t give them anything to hold on to. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whoever wants to be a prophet to the masses has to treat them like children and feed them fairy tales and falsehoods. That’s why a wise man always keeps his distance from them.’ ‘But Christ and Mohammed wanted good for the masses.’ ‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘They wanted good for them, but they also recognized all their utter hopelessness. Pity moved them to conjure up fairy tales about an otherworldly paradise that would be theirs as a reward for their suffering in this world.’ ‘Why do you think Mohammed would have let thousands die for his teachings if he knew they were based on a fairy tale?’ ‘Probably,’ he answered, ‘because he knew that otherwise they would have slaughtered each other for even baser reasons. He wanted to create a kingdom of happiness on earth for them. To do that, he invented his dialogues with the archangel Gabriel, otherwise they wouldn’t have believed him. He promised them heavenly delights after death, and in so doing made them brave and invincible.’

But at that moment a powerful and immutable plan was born in me, the likes of which the world had never seen. To test human blindness to its utmost limits! To use it to attain absolute power and independence from the whole world! To embody the fairy tale! To turn it into such reality that our remotest descendants would talk about it! To conduct a great experiment on man!”

Love is like a roast. The older the teeth, the younger the lamb needs to be.”

What a marvelous adventure this whole life was! The Turks besieged the castle and Sayyiduna defended it from them without anyone ever seeing or hearing a thing. And still they were in the grips of great danger. How mysteriously beautiful it all was!

The moment marking the highpoint of his life was receding, and the unspeakably sweet feeling that had filled it was already turning into a burning ache for some wonderful, lost thing. This he realized: the moment he had just experienced, and that was so hopelessly short, would never come again.

“Amusing, really. The wise man has to disguise himself if he wants respect and confirmation from the people.” “That’s how the world is,” Apama added.

He looked at the stars glimmering above him, small and sharp. He became aware of how small and lost he was in the universe. And that awareness was almost pleasant.

If somebody wanted to press even further, he learned that all faiths are equal in their accuracy or inaccuracy. Until, finally, a small, elite handful was ready to learn the highest truth of all, based on the negation of all doctrines and traditions. That grade required the greatest courage and strength from a man. Because it meant that he would spend his whole life without any firm ground beneath his feet and with no support.

The power of that institution will be built on a completely new kind of man. His distinctive trait will be an insane desire for death and blind devotion to the supreme commander. We can achieve both of these things through his utter faith—what faith!—his firm knowledge that the joys of paradise will be waiting for him after death.”

I swam in enjoyment of this miraculous omnipotence. Strangely physical and plastic cubes that were dazzlingly illuminated in the most garish colors started accumulating in front of my eyes. It took my breath away when I saw they were building a city bigger and more magnificent than Cairo, more elegant than Baghdad and mightier than Alexandria. Powerful minarets shot into the sky, and gold, silver, yellow, red and green cupolas arched over the roofs. My soul bathed in magnificence and bliss.

Where did he get this power that he exerted over people? “That’s the power of intellect,” he explained it to himself. These castrated beasts feared nothing in the world, except strength of character.

Against an enemy he found any trick, any violence permissible. But pulling a trick like this on your own most faithful adherents?

I was terrified by that unexpected success. I had just vividly demonstrated to myself what a tremendous force faith is, and how easy it is to awaken. You just need to know a little bit more than the ones who are supposed to believe. Then it’s easy to work miracles. These are the fertile grounds out of which the noble blossom of faith grows.

So I divide humanity into two fundamentally different layers: the handful that knows what really is, and the vast multitudes that don’t know. The former are called to lead, the latter to be led. The former are like parents, the latter like children.

So if deception and trickery are inevitable for leading the masses toward some goal that you see and they don’t understand, then why shouldn’t you be able to use that deception and trickery to build a deliberate system?

You, Buzurg Ummid, were shocked by the delusion I’ve drawn the fedayeen into. But you forget that we ourselves are the victims of the delusions of our own senses every day.

Look at those eunuchs in the gardens. We’ve given them the most beautiful girls to guard. They have the same eyes as we do, the same ears and the same senses. And yet! A small incision in their bodies was all it took for their image of the world to be changed entirely. What is the intoxicating scent of a young girl’s skin to them? The repulsive evaporation of sweat. And the touch of firm, maidenly breasts? Unpleasant contact with an alien, fatty body part. And the hidden entrance to the summit of human desire? A dirty waste passage. So much, then, for the reliability of our senses. A blind man doesn’t care about the radiance of a garden in bloom. A deaf man is impervious to a nightingale’s song. A eunuch is indifferent to the charms of a maiden, and an idiot thumbs his nose at all the wisdom of the world.”

Time is like a child playing with colored pebbles, stacking them up and then scattering them again. What a lofty simile! Time is like a ruler, like an artist. Their passion for building and creating mirrors the purposeless will that governs worlds. It calls them to life and then shoves them back into nothingness. But while they last, they are unique and self-contained and submissive to their own strict laws. That’s the kind of world we’re in. We’re subject to the laws that rule in it. We’re part of it and we can’t get out. It’s a world in which error and delusion are important factors.”

So you see, neither things nor actual facts decide our happiness—or unhappiness. Instead, we’re completely and exclusively dependent on our notions, on our perceptions of them. Every day reveals to us how false and error-ridden these perceptions are.

Why is it that higher intellects are always the ones so hopelessly dogged about discovering the secrets of natural phenomena? Why is it that wise men are always so passionately committed to science and racking their brains about the universe?

“Look at this limitless vault of heaven! Who can count the stars scattered across it? Aristarchus said that each one of them is a sun. Where is the human intellect that can grasp that? And still, everything is efficiently arranged, as though it were governed by some conscious will. Whether that will is Allah or the blind operation of nature is irrelevant. Against this limitlessness we are ridiculous invalids.

The realization that our world is just a grain of dust in the universe, and that we’re just some mange, some infinitely tiny lice on it—this realization still fills me with despair.”

“You see, the difference between those of us who have seen through things and the vast masses stumbling through the dark is this: we’ve limited ourselves, while they refuse to limit themselves. They want us to get rid of the blank space of the unknown for them. They can’t tolerate any uncertainty. But since we don’t have any truth, we have to comfort them with fairy tales and fabrications.”

A ruler who fears for his own head is ready to make concessions. So the greatest power would belong to whoever can keep the rulers of the world in fear. But in order for fear to be effective, it has to have a real basis. Rulers are well protected and guarded. Only beings who not only do not fear death, but who passionately desire it can really threaten them in these circumstances. Tonight’s experiment is about creating such beings. My plan is to fashion them into my living daggers, able to overcome time and space. They’re to spread fear and awe, not among the masses, but among the crowned and anointed heads of the world.

He remembered Omar Khayyam, lying amidst his pillows in Nishapur and drinking wine, a beautiful girl serving him while he writes poems and laughs at the whole world. He was free to contemplate and perceive. To enjoy perfect tranquility. At this instant he envied him. “Yes, he drew the best lot of the three of us.”

We know that we’re masters of an infinitely tiny point of the known, and slaves to the infinite mass of the unknown.

Each of them sensed this: that Suleiman had become a completely different person overnight. They looked at him distrustfully and almost with fear.

She and Apama exchanged glances. Both had a sudden sense that they understood each other. It was perhaps the first time they had felt close.

Neither Jehovah, nor the Christian God, nor Allah could have created the world we live in. A world in which nothing is superfluous, in which the sun shines just as gently on the tiger and the lamb, the elephant and the fly, the scorpion and the butterfly, the serpent and the dove, the rabbit and the lion, the blossom and the oak, the beggar and the king. Where both the just and the unjust, the strong and the weak, the smart and the stupid fall victim to disease. Where happiness and pain are blindly strewn to the four winds. And where the same ending awaits all living beings—death.

It was then I realized that somewhere secretly I still believed in a divinity. But that divinity bore no resemblance to the one of my youth. It was like the world itself, evolving in thousands of contradictions, yet firmly fettered to three dimensions. Limitless within its limits. Vast chaos inside a glass beaker. A terrible, grimacing dragon. And I knew at once that I had been serving it all my life.”