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According to legend, the Assassins famously relied only on their daggers to kill. They were said to be fanatically committed to their leader, Hasan, and his successors as Grand Master, and they considered martyrdom a great honor. Legend states that Nizari leaders drugged the Assassins with hashish in order to brainwash them into believing they would enter paradise as martyrs, but it's unclear whether that really happened. It's certainly feasible.

The Assassins earned their fame with a series of political murders that helped reshape Persia and Syria during their heyday. The murders were accomplished by stealth and infiltration, and the Nizaris were said to have agents within the courts of many regional kings. They struck Muslims and non-Muslims alike, as it suited their needs. Although they are perhaps most known for their fight against the Crusaders, their "honor roll" of victims included more Muslims by far.

The Assassins were structured as a secret society, or in religious terms, a mystery school. In this sort of structure, the flow of information is controlled by layers. A sect has different levels of initiation, circular layers that proceed from an outer shell to an inner core. As one progresses through the organization, one is initiated into each layer, or degree, with a ritual that culminates in the sharing of new and secret information.

In the outer circles, the information revealed is often pragmatic -- codes, martial techniques, secret signals and the like. Deeper into the organization, the initiation information invariably becomes more important and more shocking, usually consisting of powerful religious content.

Each degree of the Assassins' represented an increasingly sophisticated theological view, with corresponding increases in the presumed power and freedom of the initiate.

The Nizaris employed a form of missionary known as a dai. The dais covertly traveled to Sunni Muslim areas and sought to convert selected individuals to their brand of Shi'ite Islam, known as Ismailism.

Dais often practiced taqiyya, a religiously sanctioned form of deception under which they were permitted to disguise themselves as believers in non-Nizari sects or even to pose as non-Muslims. At one point, the entire sect virtually converted from Shi'a Islam to Sunni Islam in order to secure a political alliance and the safety of the Assassin fortresses. They reverted when the guise was no longer expedient.

Much of the Assassins' own literature was destroyed when Alamut finally fell to a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. That defeat marked the end of the Assassins' visible power in the world. Many of the surviving documents are accounts written by the sects' Christian and Sunni enemies.

Because of this, the description of the sects' inner workings should be taken with a large grain of salt. But enough data exists to approximate the beliefs and functions of each degree. While the surviving accounts likely don't reflect the exact beliefs of the ancient Assassins, they are probably close enough to be instructive.

The following descriptions are culled primarily from Secret Societies by Arkon Daraul, and The Milita of Heaven, by James Wasserman. Their accounts were in turn derived from Crusader records and Sunni Muslim heresiologists. The source texts were written in the 14th century, but cited a supposed source from the 10th century.

The outermost circle of the church, the first circle, relied on classic cult recruiting techniques to draw a prospect into the sect. Once a likely prospect was selected by the dai, the teacher launched an attack on his preconceptions, pointing out inconsistencies in the Koran and logical errors in mainstream theology.

While undermining the recruit's confidence, the dai simultaneously indicated that the answers to these troubling questions lay within the sect, at a deeper level of initiation. And the subsequent degrees were designed to deliver on that promise. In the second through fourth degrees, initiates were introduced to increasingly complex explanations of the symbolism and prophecies of the Koran, including secret symbols, number codes and magical practices.

In addition to unfolding levels of knowledge, the revelations of each degree further estranged the initiates from mainstream Islam, undermining and eventually flatly denying both Shi'ite and Sunni beliefs, and denying the truth of the Koran.

In the fifth and sixth degrees, the instruction became densely esoteric, including teaching on astrology, kabbala, the calendar and Greek philosophy.

More significantly, at the sixth degree, initiates were freed from the constraints of Shariah law, the fundamental code of behavior underlying Islam, which includes detailed instructions on fasting, prayer, pilgrimage and a multitude of other issues. The denial of Shariah was the ultimate in heresy, binding the initiate to the cult and alienating him profoundly from his fellow Muslims.

Sixth degree initiates could become dais in their own right. It was an exclusive level of initiation. Few made it so far, and even fewer moved beyond.

Sixth degree initiates could also be members of the class of Assassin warrior known as a fidai, an Arabic word meaning "faithful." The fidais are the classic Assassins, as the word is understood in modern usage.

Fidais were dagger-wielding killers who would strike at the command of their Grand Master, embracing martyrdom without showing fear or doubt. No one knows how many fidais there were at any given time, which only made them more effective. They would spend years infiltrating the courts of regional powers, where they would simply wait for the command to strike -- no matter how long it took.

Seventh and eighth degree initiates were the elite among dais. In the seventh and eighth circles, initiates were exposed to distinctly Gnostic concepts, including a Manichean view of a universe in which God and his creation are divided into two principles.

This was a radical departure from the extraordinarily intense monotheism practiced in the outer Islam. The learnings at this level continued to become more and more esoteric, having less and less to do with the mundanities of daily life.

Importantly, at the eighth level, according to Daraul, "The proselyte is also taught that a Prophet is known as such not by miracles, but by his ability to construct and impose in a kind of system at once political, social, religious, and philosophical." The eighth degree opened the door to a level of aspiration that was fantastically blasphemous to Muslims outside the sect, the notion that one could aspire to reach the status of a Prophet.

The ninth degree, the final circle of initiation known to the outside world, was purportedly the introduction of the Antinomian heresy to the Islamic world. Those initiated to the ninth degree learned the ultimate secret -- that there is no sin -- and became pure Gnostics in the sense that all further wisdom was to be received directly from God.

It's difficult to judge how truly accurate the accounts of the inner circles of the cult might be. After all, these accounts were written by the enemies of the Nizaris. It's not at all unusual for the victors in a religious conflict to characterize their enemies as Antinomians. And only a handful of extremely devoted and loyal subjects ever reached the seventh, eighth and ninth circles.

Still, there is a powerful poetry to the quote famously attributed to the sect's founder, Hasan I-Sabbah, summing up the ultimate secret of the Nizaris' ninth circle:

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

That saying could be inscribed on the coat of arms for Al Takfir Wal Hijra, the Islamic cult that dominates the leadership of al Qaeda. (See al Qaeda as Ecumenical Outreach.)

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Darcho said:

Very interesting post. This reminds me of a book I read on Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden, called "The New Jackals." More so, your post reminds me of Yousef. He basically made himself a student at Oxford College, where he educated himself and enjoyed the student party life, seeming to fit in easily. Makes you wonder how many people in our universities and colleges, throughout North America, are actually undercover terrorists.

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tomk said:

"I was also reading an article about how the footsoldiers of modern terrorism are given drugs before being sent into battle, "

You mean American war pilots?

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Bush is as much a terrorist as Osama.