Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

Mahmud’s son Masud built himself a winter capital on the banks of the Helmand River, about a mile downriver from my own boyhood town of Lashkargah. The ruins of the city are still there.

Masud himself was a formidable specimen of a man. Too heavy for most horses, he customarily rode an elephant, of which he had a whole battalion penned up in the marshy canebrakes along the Helmand River. Make no mistake, however, his great girth was all muscle. He went into battle with a sword only he could swing and a battleaxe so huge, no one else could even lift it. Even the great Sultan Mahmud reputedly feared his boy.

When the father died, Masud happened to be in Baghdad. The courtiers proclaimed his brother the new king. Masud came rushing back, gathering up an army along the way, dethroned his brother lickety-split, and put out both his eyes to make sure he would never try anything like that again. Then he took over the Ghaznavid Empire

Yet four times during Masud’s reign, rugged Oghuz Turks from the north stormed across the Oxus River to attack Ghaznavid realms. Led by a family called the Seljuks, they made their way into Khorasan (eastern Iran, western Afghanistan). Four times Sultan Masud sallied forth to meet them on the field of battle. Three times he beat them back, but in the fourth battle, his forces got hammered. In 1040 he lost Lashkargah and his western strongholds to those Seljuks. I’ve described the dread demeanor of the frightening Masud; now imagine what kind of men it must have taken to beat him. Masud retreated to the city his father had built and lived out his reign, but the glory days of the Ghaznavids were done. The Seljuk era had begun.

In 1053 CE, a young Seljuk prince was sent to govern the province of Khorasan. His name was Alp Arslan, which means “heroic lion”—a nickname his troops gave him. Alp Arslan took along his Persian secretary, soon to be known as Nizam al-Mulk, which means “order of the realm.”

He extended Seljuk power into the Caucasus region and then kept moving west, finally leading his armies into Asia Minor,

In 1071, on the outskirts of a town called Manzikert, Alp Arslan met the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes in battle and smashed his hundred-thousand-man army. He took the emperor himself prisoner, sending a shock rippling through the Western world. Then he did the unthinkable; he released the emperor and sent him home to Constantinople with gifts and admonishments never to make trouble again, a courtesy that only underscored Seljuk might and added to the Christian emperor’s humiliation. The battle of Manzikert was one of history’s truly seminal battles. At the time, it seemed like the greatest victory these Seljuks could ever achieve. In fact, it may have been their biggest mistake, but no one would realize this for another twenty-six years. Alp Arslan died the following year in Khorasan, but his son Malik Shah stepped right into his shoes, and under the expert tutelage of Nizam al-Mulk proved himself nearly the equal of his father. It was he who conquered Syria and the Holy Lands for the Turks.

The Turks would keep order with their military strength, the Arabs would provide unity by contributing religious doctrine, and the Persians would contribute all the remaining arts of civilization—administration, philosophy, poetry, painting, architecture, science—to elevate and beautify the world. The new ruling class would thus consist of a Turkish sultan and his army, an Arab khalifa and the ulama, and a Persian bureaucracy staffed by artists and thinkers.

But Nizam al-Mulk had a sinister opponent working to unravel his fabric, a ruthless genius named Hassan Sabbah, founder of the Cult of the Assassins.

Shi’is believe in a central guiding religious figure called an imam, of whom there is always one in the world. As soon as the imam dies, his special grace passes into one of his sons, making him the imam. The trouble is that every time an imam passes away, disagreements can arise about which of his sons is the next imam. Each such disagreement can lead to a split that gives birth to a new branch of the sect. Just such a disagreement had broken out about who was the fifth imam, spawning the Zaidi sect, also known as the Fivers. A more serious disagreement arose after the death of the sixth imam, giving rise to a sect called the Isma’ilis, who became the dominant branch of Shi’ism for a while, since the Fatimids who captured Egypt and set up a rival khalifate were Isma’ilis.

In the late eleventh century the Isma’ilis themselves branched into two. The minority was a revolutionary offshoot angered by the wealth and pomp of the now-mighty Fatimid khalifate and dedicated to leveling rich and poor, empowering the meek, and generally getting the Islamic project back on course.

In Persia, Sabbah developed his own power base. He took control of a fortress called Alamut (“the eagle’s nest”), situated high in the Elburz mountains of northern Iran. No one could touch him there because the only approach to the fortress was a footpath too narrow to accommodate an army.

Whatever the case, there at Alamut, Sabbah got busy organizing the Assassins.

Centuries later, Marco Polo would claim that Sabbah’s agents smoked hashish in order to hop themselves up for murder and were thus called hashishin, from which derived the word assassin.

Sabbah was the archetypal prototerrorist, using murder largely for its propaganda value. Since he lacked the resources and troops to fight battles or conquer cities, he sent individuals, or at most small groups, to assassinate carefully targeted figures chosen for the shock their death would spark. The Assassins plotted their killings for months or even years, sometimes contriving to make friends with the victim or enter his service and work their way up to a position of trust.

The Lebanese writer Amin Malouf suggests that actually the word assassin probably derives from the Persian word assas, which means “foundation.” Like most religious schismatics, Sabbah taught that the revelations had been corrupted and that he was taking his followers back to the foundation, the original.

Sabbah’s doctrine strayed pretty far from anything most scholars recognize as Islam. For one thing, he taught that while Mohammed was indeed the messenger of Allah, Ali was an actual incarnation of Allah—as were the succeeding imams.

Sabbah further taught that the Qur’an had a surface or exterior meaning but many levels of esoteric or interior meanings. The surface meaning prescribed the rituals of religion, the outward show, the rules of conduct, the ethical and moral mandates; all of this was for the brutal masses who couldn’t aspire to deeper knowledge. The esoteric Qur’an—and every verse, every line, every letter had an esoteric...

The agents who did the murders for him were called Fedayeen, which means “sacrificers.”

By embracing death, they let the authorities know that not even the threat of execution could intimidate them.

The Assassins added to the anxiety of a world already in turmoil. Sunnis were struggling with Shi’i. The Abbasid khalifate in Baghdad was wrestling with the Fatimid khalifate in Cairo. Nearly a century of Turkish invasions had brutalized society. And now this cult of killers extending its secret tendrils throughout the Middle East injected society with a persistent underlying nightmare.

They killed Seljuk officials and well-known Sunni clerics. They killed two of the khalifas. As often as possible, they carried out their assassination in the biggest mosques during Friday prayer, when they could be sure of an audience. Then in 1092 they murdered the recently retired Nizam al-Mulk himself. Scarcely a month later, they dispatched his master, Sultan Malik Shah, son of Alp Arslan.

These innovations were so subtle that they probably went all but unnoticed at the time. One was a modified, steel-tipped “heavy” plow that could cut through roots and, compared to the older models, dig a deeper furrow in the dense, wet soil of northern Europe. The heavy plow enabled peasants to clear forests and extend their fields into areas previously considered unsuitable for farming. In effect, it gave peasants more land.

A second invention was the horse collar, which was just a slight improvement of the yoke used to harness a beast of burden to a plow. The earlier version could be used only with oxen, due to its shape. If a horse were strapped to that yoke, the strap would press against the horse’s neck and choke off its air supply. At some point, some unknown innovator modified that yoke just enough to have it press against a horse’s shoulders and a lower spot on its neck. With this yoke, peasants could use horses instead of oxen to plow their fields, and since horses plow about fifty percent faster than oxen, they could till more land in the same amount of time.

A third innovation was three-field c...

What did these little changes add up to? Not much. They merely allowed peasants to produce a slight surplus from time to time. When they had a surplus, they took it to certain crossroads on designated days and traded with peasants who had a surplus of something else.

Certain crossroads turned into more or less permanent market sites, which then developed into towns.

Cash allowed some people to spend all their time going from market to market, just buying and selling. Money came back into use in Europe, and as money proliferated, the wealthiest Europeans acquired the means to travel.

And where did they travel? Well, this being a world steeped in religion and religious superstition, they went t...

the only way to pay for it was with gold or silver, which made such travelers prime targets for bandits; so pilgrims often formed groups, hired bodyguards, and organized communal expeditions to Palestine.

Then the Seljuk Turks wrested control of Palestine away from the tolerant Fatimids and the indolent Abbasids. As new converts, these Turks tended toward zealotry.

Christian pilgrims began to find themselves treated rather shabbily in the Holy Lands. It wasn’t that they were beaten, tortured, or killed—nothing like that. It was more that they were subjected to constant little humiliations and harassments designed to make them feel second-class. They found themselves at the end of every line. They needed special permission to get into their own shrines. Every little thing cost money; shopkeepers ignored them; officials treated them rudely; and petty indignities of every sort were piled upon them.

The Byzantine emperors harangued the knights of the West to come to their aid in the name of Christian unity. The patriarch of Constantinople sent urgent messages to his diehard western rival, the pope, warning that if Constantinople fell, the heathen “Mohammedans” would stream right to Rome.

Every generation therefore saw a larger pool of landless noblemen for whom there was no suitable occupation except war, and with the invasions sloping off, there wasn’t even enough war to go around.

Finally, in 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a fiery open-air speech outside a French monastery called Claremont. There, he told an assembly of French, German, and Italian nobles that Christendom was in danger. He detailed the humiliations that Christian pilgrims had suffered in the Holy Lands and called upon men of faith to help their brethren expel the Turks from Jerusalem. Urban suggested that those who headed east should wear a cross-shaped red patch as a badge of their quest. The expedition was to be called a croisade, from croix, French for “cross,” and from this came the name historians give to this whole undertaking: the Crusades. By focusing on Jerusalem, Urban linked the invasion of the east to pilgrimage, thus framing it as a religious act. Therefore, by the authority vested in him as pope, he decreed that anyone who went to Jerusalem to kill Muslims would receive partial remission of his sins.

The first Muslim ruler to encounter them was a Seljuk prince, Kilij Arslan, who ruled eastern Anatolia from the city of Nicaea, about three days’ journey from Constantinople. One day in the summer of 1096, Prince Arslan received information that a crowd of odd-looking warriors had entered his territory, odd because they were so poorly outfitted: a few did look like warriors, but the rest seemed like camp followers of some kind.

The interlopers openly proclaimed that they had come from a distant western land to kill Muslims and conquer Jerusalem, but first they intended to take possession of Nicaea. Arslan plotted out the route they seemed to be taking, laid an ambush, and smashed them like so many ants, killing many, capturing many more, and chasing the rest back into Byzantine lands.

The next year, when Kilij Arslan heard that more Franj were coming, he dismissed the threat with a shrug.

The Turks picked off the Franj foot soldiers, but the knights formed defensive blocks that arrows could not penetrate and kept moving slowly, ponderously, and inexorably forward. They took Arslan’s city and sent him running to one of his relatives for refuge. The knights then split up, some heading inland toward Edessa, the rest heading down the Mediterranean coast toward Antioch.

When Antioch fell, the knights took vengeance for the city’s resistance with some indiscriminate killing, and then kept heading south, towards a city called Ma’ara.

They too sent urgent messages to nearby cousins, begging for help, but their cousins were only too glad to see the wolves from the west batter Ma’ara, each one hoping to absorb the city for himself once the Franj had blown by. So Ma’ara had to face the Franj alone. The Christian knights set siege to the city and reduced it to desperation—but in the process reduced themselves to desperation as well, because they ate every scrap of food in the vicinity and then commenced to starve.

At last Franj leaders sent a message into the city assuring the people of Ma’ra that none of them would be harmed if they simply opened their gates and surrendered. The city notables decided to comply. But once the Crusaders made it into Ma’ara, they did more than slaughter. They went on a frightening rampage that included boiling adult Muslims up for soup and skewering Muslim children on spits, grilling them over open fires, and eating them.

Jerusalem had some of the highest walls around, but after a forty-day siege, the Crusaders tried the same gambit they had run successfully at Ma’ara—open the gates, no one will be harmed, they told the citizens—and it worked here too. Upon securing this city, the Franj indulged in an orgy of bloodletting so drastic it made all the previous carnage seem mild. One crusader, writing about the triumph, described piling up heads, hands, and feet in the streets. (He called it a “wonderful sight.”) He spoke of crusaders riding through heathen blood up to their knees and bridle reins.4 Edward Gibbon, the British historian who chronicled the fall of the Roman Empire, said the Crusaders killed seventy thousand people here over the course of two days. Of the city’s Muslims, virtually none survived. The city’s Jewish denizens took refuge in their gigantic central synagogue, but while they were in there praying for deliverance, the Crusaders blockaded all the doors and windows and set fire to the building, burning up pretty much the entire Jewish community of Jerusalem in one fell swoop.

The victorious crusaders proclaimed Jerusalem a kingdom. It ranked the highest of the four small crusader states that took root in this area, the others being the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli. Once these four crusader states had been established, a sort of deadlock developed, which ground on dismally for decades.

Just before the Crusades began, Hassan Sabbah had established a second base of operations in Syria, run by a subsidiary master whom the Crusaders came to know as the Old Man of the Mountains.

The Assassins and Crusaders had the same set of enemies so, inevitably, they became de facto allies.

In 1113 CE the governor of Mosul called a conference of Muslim leaders to organize a unified campaign against the Franj. Just before the meetings began, however, a mendicant approached the governor on his way to the mosque, pretended to beg for alms, then suddenly plunged a knife in his chest. So much for the unity campaign. In 1124, Assassin agents murdered the second most influential cleric preaching the new jihad. The next year, a group of supposed Sufis attacked and killed another such preacher, the most influential proponent of jihad, the first of this era to revive the call.

In 1126, the Assassins killed al-Borsoki, the powerful king of Aleppo and Mosul who, by uniting these two major cities, had forged the potential core of a united Muslim state in Syria.

Apparently, they kept detailed records of their work, but because they were so very secretive, no outsiders had access to these records at the time, and when the cult was finally destroyed by the Mongols in 1256, it was destroyed so thoroughly its records were almost all erased from history.

The first of them was the Turkish general Zangi, who governed Mosul, then took Aleppo, and then absorbed many other cities into his domains until he could reasonably call himself the king of a united Syria. This was the first time in fifty years that a Muslim country larger than a single city and its environs had existed in the Levant (the region between Mesopotamia and Egypt).