Since the twelfth century fantastical tales of the Assassins, their mysterious leader and their remote mountain strongholds in Syria and northern Iran have captured the European imagination. These legends first emerged when European CrusadersA term applied to Christian invaders who carried out numerous campaigns to capture Jerusalem and Palestine from the Muslims in the 11th and 14th centuries CE. in the Levant came into contact with the Syrian branch of the Nizari Ismailis, who at the behest of their leader were sent on dangerous missions to kill their enemies. Elaborated over the years, the legends culminated in Marco Polo’s account according to which the Nizari leader, described as the Old Man of the Mountain, was said to have controlled the behaviour of his devotees through the use of hashish and a secret garden of paradise. So influential were these tales that the word assassins entered European languages as a common noun meaning murderer, and the Nizari Ismailis were depicted not only in popular mythology but also in Western scholarship as a sinister order of assassins.
In recent decades new scholarship on the history of the Ismailis , a major Shii Muslim community, has established the extent to which older Western accounts of the sect have confused fact and fantasy. In view of the very different picture of Ismaili history that has now emerged, Farhad Daftarys book considers the origins of the medieval Assassin legends and explores the historical context in which they were fabricated and transmitted. How did they persist for so long, and in what form did they come to exert such a profound influence on European scholarship? Daftarys fascinating account ultimately reveals the extent to which the emergence of such legends was symptomatic of both the complex political and cultural structures of the medieval Muslim world and of Europe’s ignorance of that world. The book will be of great interest to all those concerned with, Ismaili studies, the history of Islam and the Middle East, as well as the medieval history of Europe. Also included as an appendix is the first English translation of the French orientalist Silvestre de Sacys famous early nineteenth-century Memoir on the Assassins and the etymology of their name.
Note on Transliteration and Abbreviations
Preface
1. Introduction
2. The Isma尪ilis in History and in Mediaeval Muslim Writings
3. Mediaeval European Perceptions of Islam and the Isma尪ilis
4. Origins and Early Formation of the Legends
Appendix: Silvestre de Sacys Memoir on the Assassins
Introductory Note, by Farhad Daftary
Memoir on the Dynasty of the Assassins, and on the Etymology of their Name, by Antoine I. Silvestre de Sacy, translated by Azizeh Azodi, edited by Farhad Daftary
Select Bibliography
Index
Muslim News: “masterfully destroys [the Assassin] myth” “scholarly…easy-to-read” Journal of Semitics Studies: “Daftary’s work combines factual history with the history of a fiction in a fascinating manner.”
Farhad Daftary is Head of the Department of Academic Research and Publications at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. An authority on Ismaili history, Dr. Daftarys publications include The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines (1990), Mediaeval Ismaili History and Thought (1996), A Short History of the IsmailisAdherents of a branch of Shi’i Islam that considers Ismail, the eldest son of the Shi’i Imam Ja尪far al-廜〢diq (d. 765), as his successor. (1998), and Intellectual Traditions in Islam (2000).