The Assassins

by Bernard Lewis.

This is the history of the Assassin sect: a branch of Ismaili which are a branch of Shia. Thumbnail: Ismaili followed the disinherited Isma'il, who they regard as the correct 7'th Imam. There came to be two branches: Old Preaching and New Preaching. The New Preaching was most prominent in Persia, and the adherents showed two political distinctives: concentrating on acquiring or building castles in mountainous regions, and creating loyalists who were willing to stab those their Imam declared to be enemies--and die in the effort.

Their skills at infiltration must have been terrific, because they were quite successful for a while at making it dangerous for rulers to oppose them. Their killers seem to have limited themselves to daggers, and not used poisons or ranged weapons. And for a surprisingly long time (especially since the Crusaders turned up during their heyday), their enemies and usual targets were Sunnis.

When things started getting hot in Persia they sent missionaries west to Syria, where the "castle in the mountains" approach didn't work so well.

He cites a story, possibly even true, about an Ismaili messenger requesting a personal meeting with Saladin. He was searched carefully, and allowed in, where he said he had a message for Saladin alone. Everybody left except Saladin's private bodyguard.

Saladin said, "I regard these as my own sons, they and I are as one." Then the messenger turned to the two Mamluks and said "If I were to order you in the name of my master to kill this Sultan, would you do so?" They answered yes, and drew their swords, and said "Command us as you wish."

Saladin was impressed.

After a while they decided Crusaders were legitimate targets (or else it was politically appropriate--other times they allied with them), and started killing some. They found that the Hospitallers and Templars were tough, and one of the Ismailis explained why they didn't assassinate many of them. Recall that many of the Middle East rulers held power through personal loyalties, and these didn't always survive their deaths. The spokeman said the Hospitalars would just replace a murdered ruler with another one just as good, so the Ismailis would lose assassins and not achieve any useful objective, so they decided to leave them alone. Another possibility that occurred to me is that Hospitaller security was better (less interest in buying local status luxuries?), making it hard for Moslems to worm their way into proximity--and the Ismailis would never admit that since it would be giving away trade secrets.

At any rate, the Mongols were the last straw for the Persian branch, and their castles were taken from them or destroyed, and in Syria they lost too many local conflicts. The remaining Ismailis seem to have been peaceful--or as peaceful as any other group in the region. Their "force-multiplier" (they were a minority group) assassin corp is long gone.

At the end Lewis found it necessary to cite other scholars' ideas about why the Ismailis went the assassination route--mostly economic. The economic reductionists should get out more.

If you're curious, read it. Lewis writes well.

Side note on a grim story

Indonesia is forcing pagan tribes to convert to Muhammadanism. The excuse is that they can't get birth certificates (and therefore schooling), unless they adhere to one of the recognized religions. They're not happy about it. "There is no compulsion in religion" is once again more honored in the breech than the observance.

One novel bit about the story was the relationships of the tribesmen to their Muslim neighbors. The tribe described is nomadic:

"We have no space to live. We are always told we are nomadic people with no religion, no culture," he told me.

"Our religion is not respected. The government is always insisting that we convert and live in houses in one place. We can't do that. Our way of life is not like that."

And there are sources of friction:

The officer, Budi Jayapura, took me aside to check my documents and said: "We need to watch over them.

"They don't understand the concept of stealing. They say the fruit grew by itself on the tree so it can be taken, but it was planted by someone. Maybe in their belief system it is OK, but not in our society."

The fact that they hunt and eat wild pigs also creates social tensions, he added.

"This is a Muslim community. If they see the pig's blood and the leftover bits, they are disturbed," the officer explained.

What is taboo, or haram, for the Orang Rimba directly contrasts with what Muslims eat, explains Mr Manurung.

"Orang Rimba will not eat domesticated animals such as chickens, cows or sheep. They think it's a form of betrayal. You feed the animal, and when it gets fat you eat it. The fair thing to do is to fight. Whoever wins can eat the loser."

I read of a visit to an Amazon tribe, where people hunted and ate every sort of animal, but if somebody brought it into the village and treated it like a pet, nobody would harm it.

The Death of a Prophet by Stephen Shoemaker

Muhammad's life is very poorly known. The standard biography is very late, and draws on unreliable sources. In fact, almost all documentation about Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam is drawn from unreliable sources. Muslim scholars agreed that 99% of the hadith were forgeries, and chains of witnesses were forged to go with them.

Non-Muslim sources were not subject to such pressures, but they by definition look at the situations from the outside and not the inside, and are much sketchier.

The standard biography says Muhammad died in his wife's house, after carefully making sure Bakr was understood to be his successor. Before he's buried there's a contretemps with Umar, who refuses to admit that he's dead until quelled by a never-before-heard quotation from the Quran by Bakr (or by somebody pointing out that the body is starting to stink, according to a different tradition). In either case, this is before the great push into the north.

Yet there are non-Muslim sources and traces in some Muslim traditions saying that Muhammad was with his conquering troops as they started up the Levant. And these also tend to say that the Muslims required very little beyond tribute and a profession of monotheism--at the time.

Plus there's evidence that the first center of worship, or at least a major one, for Muslims was Jerusalem and not Mecca. I reviewed a book addressing that thesis last year.

Shoemaker suggests that Muhammad died 3 years later than the canonical date, that he had been with armies heading for Jerusalem, which I gather they wanted to capture to "immanentize the eschaton," that he believed the end of the world was coming very quickly, and that when it didn't, a process of re-interpretation and tightening the standards for what it meant to be Muslim meant that later Muslims wound up revising the chronology to put Muhammad's death and the holy place back firmly into Arab land--far from the other monotheists.

He can't prove it. Nobody can, with the data at hand--nearly everything is either a rubber ruler or not relevant. The Quran has very little about Muhammad, for example (and there's evidence that even that wasn't fixed yet), and the relevant sira and hadith are generally flimsy and false.

He argues bitterly that given the mountain of speculation about Jesus, despite a plethora of documents, similar speculation about Muhammad and the development of Islam is not just allowable but reasonable given the scarcity of reliable documents. (He seems to think the Jesus Seminar is scholarly. Composed of scholars, yes--scholarly in approach, no.)

It looks as though the direction of Muslim worship changed, if grave and architectural evidence can be believed, but the why is not easy to prove.

As to Muhammad's death year and place--maybe these were reinterpreted for religious reasons, or maybe Umar suspected something was amiss--and it was, and it was covered up. (Utter speculation on my part.)

I read it so you don't have to.

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I heard his book on Marian devotion was out, and discovered this one in the library along with it. Twofer deal.

Conversions in Germany

The AP reported that hundreds of immigrants were converting to Christianity in Germany. Some are skeptical, seeing it as a ploy to get a better chance at staying. It is a dramatic way of burning your bridges: Christian converts are, to put it mildly not welcome in their home countries.

Even in Germany a convert isn't safe: their fellow immigrants can threaten or worse.

The pastor quoted in the article said that 90% of the converts kept coming to church, another measure of how serious the conversion was.

I think what we're seeing is a measurement of a minimum level of enthusiasm for Christianity in Muslim countries. Without harder numbers about the total number of immigrants I can't say much, but if Germany had 130,000 in the first 4 months and about 1/4 of them wound up in Berlin (wild guess from the routing of refugees described in another article), that's about 33,400 refugees in Berlin, from which one church added 450 members, or about 1.3%. Multiply by that 90% and get 1.2 as the minimum--and there may be other churches as well. These I think are the people who are serious about Christianity; there are probably many more who are interested but not willing to take the risky steps.

The will of the people

The BBC reports about the Pakistani couple (and unborn child) martyred by a mob. It ends with this:

Pakistan is a long way from changing or repealing its notorious blasphemy laws.

At best, the only thing the country's vulnerable and at risk communities can really hope for now is that the authorities will treat this case seriously and possibly deter similar gruesome crimes from happening again.

What this conclusion skims over is the implications of this:

Clerics from local mosques used loud speakers to incite violence. Soon, hundreds of angry people converged on the brick kiln looking for the Christian couple.

This didn't happen because of blasphemy laws in Pakistan. The blasphemy laws happened because this is the attitude of the people. You know and I know that burning harmless people alive is unjust and vile. But it is also perfectly democratic--this is what they want; or at least what a large number want while the rest are willing to go along with it.

Is "free and fair elections" a sufficiently powerful incantation to purify the vices of a people and automatically produce good government?