101

The Nizārī Ismā‘īlīs or Assassins in Persia

483–654/1090–1256

Various mountainous regions of Persia, with their main centre at Alamūt

As noted above concerning the Syrian Ismā‘īlīs (no. 29), the Nizārī da‘wa arose from a split within the Fāṭimid caliphate. Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ had already been spreading Ismā‘īlī teachings in Persia before the death of the caliph al-Mustanṣir in 487/1094 and the al-Musta‘lī-Nizār split over succession to the imamate of the Ismā‘īlīs. The Persian devotees acknowledged Nizār, and Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ became their leader with the title, in the absence of the Imām, of Ḥujja ‘Proof, demonstration of the truth’. Ḥasan secured the mountain fortress of Alamūt in Daylam, in north-western Persia, where there was a long tradition of heterodoxy and sympathy for Shī‘ism. From here, Ḥasan also organised the Syrian da‘wa (see above, no. 29), and within Persia, from the Caspian region fortresses and those in the Iṣfahān region, a series of attacks on the Great Seljuq state. Given the comparatively small numbers of the Ismā‘īlīs, these were necessarily more like guerilla actions than full-scale campaigns, and the weapon of religious and political assassination was also used, creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion within orthodox Sunnī circles which almost certainly exaggerated the real power of the Ismā‘īlīs. Hence these last became in the popular mind the so-called Assassins of the Crusader sources (< Ḥashīshiyyūn or Ḥashshāshūn ‘hashish eaters’, reflecting a belief that the Ismā‘īlī agents were inspired to their daring feats of assassination through the use of hallucinatory drugs).

The Fourth Grand Master in Alamūt, Ḥasan II, assumed the more exalted religious function of Imām, but in the thirteenth century Ismā‘īlī extremism began to moderate somewhat, and the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Nāṣir secured a great propaganda success in the contemporary Sunnī world by achieving the return of Ḥasan III to orthodoxy. However, the last Grand Master, Khwurshāh, was unable to withstand Hülegü’s Mongols; Alamūt was stormed in 654/1256 and Khwurshāh seems to have been killed by the victors. Ismā‘īlism survived in some of the remoter parts of Persia in a modest and diminished fashion, but the history of the continuing imamate in Persia is very obscure until the eighteenth century.

Justi, 457; Sachau, 15 no. 26; Zambaur, 217–18 (inaccurate); Album, 42.

EI² ‘Ismā‘īliyya’ (W. Madelung).

M. G. S. Hodgson, The Order of Assassins: The Struggle of Early Nizârî Ismâ‘îlîs against the Islamic World, The Hague 1955, 37–270, with a table at p. 42.

G. C. Miles, ‘Coins of the Assassins of Alamūt’, Orientalia Lovaniensia, 3 (1972), 155–62.

Farhad Daftary, The Isma‘īlīs: Their History and Doctrines, 324–434, with a table at p. 553.