Muzaffar relented. Then Abu Ali proposed that they solemnly proclaim Hasan as the founder and supreme leader of the new regime, which would continue to have its seat at Alamut. The proposal was adopted unanimously. They composed a formal document in which they proclaimed the complete independence of the Ismaili realm and named Hasan as its leader. Everyone present signed it.
Hasan rose. He thanked them for their confidence in him and named Abu Ali and Buzurg Ummid as his deputies and successors. He entrusted internal control to the former and external control to the latter.
“So,” Hasan began, “now we have clarified the relationship between ourselves and the rest of the world. We still need to think about how to increase and extend our power. Because any institution that intends to stay vital and tough can never rest. It has to remain constantly in motion and flux to preserve its agility. I know of many fine castles which are now in foreign hands but which could serve us as important footholds if we appropriated them. You’re all familiar with the fortress of Lamasar. Truly a strong, solid bastion. But the garrison that’s in it now is weak and tired of the monotony of fortress life. Buzurg Ummid, you will take as many men as you need to seize the castle. You’re to attack it without delay. Abdul Malik, with your courage and youth, you are to set out with a force of our best warriors and attack the magnificent castle of Shahdiz outside of Isfahan, which the sultan built practically to order for us before he died. You must take the castle. This way we will have any future ruler of Iran in our hands. Abu Ali, I have saved the most difficult but also the most glorious task for you. You are from Syria. There is an impregnable fortress there, Masyaf, a second Alamut, as you yourself have told me. Take as many soldiers and fedayeen as you need. With things in Iran as unstable as they are now, you should be able to fight your way there. Remember, Masyaf must fall into your hands. I want you to establish a school for fedayeen there on the model of Alamut. You will control it as you see fit, keeping me constantly informed of your initiatives. Ibn Atash, I am appointing you grand dai. You are to return to Khuzestan and take back command of Gonbadan. You will fortify the city of Girdkuh. Seize all of the fortresses in the region. If you should need a feday for any particular task, I will send you one … All of you dais who command individual forts are to be promoted from this day forward to regional dais. You will report directly to the grand dai whose seat is closest to you. This takes care of the external aspect of the hierarchy. Once you return to your castles, you will receive its internal structure in the form of a set of regulations, once those are completed. Now go join the men. Abu Ali, you will explain the action we’ve taken here and announce my arrival. Today they’ll see me for the last time.”
The Ismailis cheered enthusiastically at the news that Alamut had become a sovereign state. Abu Ali promised them new military campaigns and new victories. They whooped with joy and battle fervor. They all felt that the fortress of Alamut had long since gotten too small for them.
The supreme leader appeared on the upper terrace. A hush descended. In a voice that reached all the way down to the last horseman on the lower terrace, he proclaimed, “Faithful Ismailis! My grand dai has just announced the decisions that our council of leaders adopted today. We have truly grown powerful. But this power of ours depends completely on you and all of us being obedient. You carry out the orders of your immediate superiors, and they carry out my orders. I, in turn, remain obedient to the direction of the All-Highest who sent me here. Directly or indirectly, all of us fulfill His commands. Now go back to your duties, and quit waiting for the Mahdi. Because al-Mahdi has come!”
He didn’t wait for the cheering to subside. He withdrew with the leaders to the assembly hall and bade each of them farewell there. Then he and the grand dais withdrew to his chambers.
“So, now the fifth and final chapter of our tragedy is over,” he said with an almost melancholy smile. “There’s no one left over us, except for Allah and the unknown heavens. But we know incredibly little about either of them. So we might as well close the book of unsolved riddles once and for all.
“I’ve had enough of the world for the time being. While I wait in this retreat for the solution to the final riddle, I can’t think of a better way to occupy my time than by filling in the last details of the fairy tales for our faithful children. It’s fitting for an old man who knows the world to reveal it to the people in the form of tales and parables. There’s so much work still ahead of me! For the simplest believers I have to invent a thousand and one tales about the origins and beginning of the world, heaven and hell, the prophets, Mohammed, Ali and the Mahdi. The second grade, the fighting faithful, will need more than anything a clear rule book giving them all the commandments and prohibitions. I’ll have to embed the fairy tales into basic principles and provide them with a whole catechism. For the fedayeen I will have to reveal the first great Ismaili mysteries: the Koran is a complicated book and requires a special key to interpret it. Still higher up, those who advance to the level of dais will learn that even the Koran doesn’t contain the ultimate mysteries, and that those are equally distributed among all the different faiths. Those worthy enough to become regional dais will learn the awful supreme Ismaili principle: that nothing is true, and everything is permitted. But those of us who hold all the threads of this mechanism in our hands will save our ultimate thoughts for ourselves.”
“What a pity that you plan to shut yourself off from the world!” Buzurg Ummid exclaimed. “Now, of all times, when you’ve reached the zenith of your life’s path.”
“A man who fulfills a great mission only really comes to life once he’s dead. Especially a prophet. I’ve fulfilled mine and now it’s time to start thinking of myself. I’m going to die to other people so that I can come to life for myself. This way I’ll be able to see what will endure after me. Do you understand?”
They nodded.
“But if you were to ask me what the purpose of all this has been and why it’s been necessary, I wouldn’t be able to answer you,” he continued. “We just grow because there’s strength in us to do that. Like a seed that germinates in the earth and shoots up out of the ground, that blooms and bears fruit. Suddenly we’re here, and suddenly we’ll be gone.”
“Let’s go have a last look at the gardens!” he at last invited them.
They entered the lift and descended to the base of the tower. A eunuch lowered the bridge and Adi ferried them over to the central garden.
The deciduous trees were bare and the flower beds were deserted. There was no fresh greenery, no flowers. Only a cypress grove darkly withstood the winter.
“If you sent somebody to the gardens now,” Abu Ali said, “he’d have a hard time believing he was in paradise.”
“The world consists of color, light and warmth,” Hasan replied. “They are the food for our senses. A ray of light on the landscape, and it’s completely transformed in our eyes! With its transformation our feelings, thoughts and moods are also transformed. This, you see, is the eternally self-renewing miracle of all life.”
Apama joined them.
“How are the girls doing?” Hasan asked.
“They talk a lot, and they work a lot, they laugh a lot and they even cry a lot. They just don’t think very much.”
“That’s for the best. Otherwise they might realize they’re in prison. It can’t be helped. You women are used to harems and prison. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn’t think or feel that he’s a prisoner, then he’s not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.”
They walked silently down the deserted paths.
“Is there anything new here?”
“No, except that we’re expecting a few babies.”
“That’s fine. We’ll need them. Make sure that everything goes well.”
r /> Then he turned to his grand dais and said, “Those will be the only creatures in the world who were conceived by their fathers in the firm belief that their mothers were heavenly maidens, unearthly beings.”
They walked around the pond.
“Spring will come again, and then summer after it,” Hasan continued. “Stay as warm as you can through the winter, so you can experience the luxury of nature renewing itself again in the gardens. And we should withdraw to our chambers too, because the sky has clouded over ominously and it might even snow tomorrow. It’s going to get colder.”
When they returned to the castle, Hasan bade his grand dais farewell with these words:
“The earth has barely made half a circuit around the sun, just half of one of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands it has made until now. And yet we can say that a fair amount has changed on its surface in that time. The empire of Iran no longer exists. Our institution has emerged from the night. What course will it take from here? We call for an answer in vain. The stars above us are silent.”
For the last time he embraced both of his friends. Then he entered the lift. They felt a strange sadness as they watched him ascend.
He locked himself inside his chambers and died to the world.
And legend enfolded him in its wings.
AFTERWORD
AGAINST IDEOLOGIES:
VLADIMIR BARTOL AND ALAMUT
Vladimir Bartol (1903–1967) wrote Alamut, which remains his only book of any significant renown, in the peaceful seclusion of a small, baroque town nestled in the foothills of the Slovenian Alps, over the course of about nine months in 1938. As he worked on an early draft, barely thirty miles to the north Austria was forcibly annexed to Nazi Germany. Fifty miles to the west, just over another border, Italy’s Fascists regularly hounded the large ethnic Slovenian minority of the Adriatic seacoast town of Trieste, and were already looking to extend their holdings into the Slovenian and Croatian regions of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. A few hundred miles to the north and east, in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s bloodiest purges had reached their high tide, claiming hundreds of thousands of victims, most of whom met their fate in dank cellars with a single bullet to the back of the head. Amidst this turmoil and menace, Slovenia and its parent country of Yugoslavia were, for the time being, an island of relative tranquility. If the book that Bartol wrote in these circumstances proved to be an escape from the mass political movements, charismatic leaders, and manipulative ideologies that were then coming to rule Europe, it was also a profound meditation on them.
Most of all, Alamut was and is simply a great read—imaginative, erudite, dynamic and humorous, a well-told tale set in an exotic time and place, yet populated by characters with universally recognizable ambitions, dreams and imperfections. Both at home and abroad, it continues to be perhaps the most popular book that Slovenia has ever produced, with recent translations of Alamut having become bestsellers in Germany, France and Spain. But despite its surface appearance as popular literature, Alamut is also a finely wrought, undiscovered minor masterpiece which offers the reader a wealth of meticulously planned and executed detail and broad potential for symbolic, intertextual and philosophical interpretation.
Bartol, himself an ethnic Slovene from Trieste, studied in Paris and Ljubljana, eventually settling in the Slovenian capital to pursue a literary career. During his studies in Paris in 1927, a fellow Slovene who knew of Bartol’s ambitions as a writer recommended that he draw on the episode of the “Old Man of the Mountain” from The Travels of Marco Polo as material for a short story or novel. This tale, recounted to Marco Polo as he progressed along the Silk Road through Iran, had to do with a powerful local sectarian warlord who supposedly used hashish and a secret bower of kept maidens to dupe young men into believing that he had the power to transport them to paradise and bring them back to earth at will. Thus winning the youths’ fanatic loyalty, he was able to dispatch them to any corner of the world on suicidal missions of political assassinations that served to extend his power and influence. Bartol took the subject matter to heart and during the next ten years did extensive research into the broader historical background of the tale while inventing a novelistic plot and structure of his own. Completing the novel became his passion, his reason for being. In his diary he pleaded with the fates to let him live to finish the book and deliver it safely into the printer’s hands. After a long gestation of ten years, the novel finally took shape on paper in the course of four successive drafts during those intense, secluded months that Bartol spent in the town of Kamnik. By all accounts, Bartol was radiantly happy during this period, just as we might imagine a person who knows he’s creating a masterpiece should be.
Unfortunately, the timing of this masterpiece’s appearance in the world was less than perfect. Alamut’s trajectory was interrupted first by the German and Italian annexation of Slovenia from 1941 to 1945, then by the literary ideologies of Tito-led Communist Yugoslavia, where for some years the book was seen as a threat. What’s more, its subject matter and style were completely at variance with the dominant trends in Slovenian literature both before and after World War II. Writers of small, linguistically isolated nations often have an overwhelming need to write about life in that particular small nation, perhaps as a way of helping to validate and reinforce the nation’s very existence. Because there was nothing identifiably Slovenian about Alamut, except for its language, his fellow writers took to characterizing Bartol as “a mistake in the Slovenian genetic code.” Here was an adventure novel set in northwestern Iran, written in places to resemble Thousand and One Nights, and centered around the deep tensions between the indigenous Pahlavi-speaking Shiite Muslim inhabitants of the region and their Seljuk Turkish Sunni Muslim overlords—a thoroughly readable and well-researched novel that used a simple prose style to depict colorful settings and develop a suspenseful plot, rather than the usual tale of tensions among Slovenian peasants, landowners and townspeople. Bartol himself told of being approached on the street years later by one of his old schoolmates, who told him, “I read your translation and really enjoyed it.” “What translation?” Bartol replied. “That fat novel, the one that was written by some English or Indian author,” the man explained. “Do you mean Alamut?” Bartol asked. “I wrote that.” The man laughed at this and waved dismissively, “Go on, get out of here. You can’t fool me.” And then he walked away. Ordinary readers found it inconceivable that a Slovenian could develop a story so completely outside of their own historical experience—it had to have been written by a foreigner. Bartol himself saw the guild of Slovenian writers as divided into two categories: the nationalists, who were in the majority and expressed what he called “the anguished lament of their own time,” and the cosmopolitans, who had a broader sense of history but were in the minority. Needless to say, Bartol saw himself in the second, generally misunderstood, group.
One of Bartol’s strengths in Alamut is his ability to virtually disappear as a perceptible agent of the novel and let his characters carry the story. There is no authorial voice passing judgment or instructing readers which characters to favor and which to condemn. In fact, readers may find their allegiances shifting in the course of the story, becoming confused and ambivalent. Bartol certainly intended to write an enigmatic book. Literary historians have looked to Bartol’s biography, personality and other work for keys to understanding Alamut, but much in the author’s life still remains hidden from view. Its very openness to a variety of interpretations is one of the things that continue to make Alamut a rewarding experience.
Perhaps the simplest way to approach Alamut is as a broadly historical if highly fictionalized account of eleventh-century Iran under Seljuk rule. A reader encountering the novel from this perspective can appreciate its scrupulously researched historical background, the general absence of historical anachronisms, its account of the origins of the Shiite-Sunni conflict within Islam, and its exposition of the deep-seated resentments that the indigenous peoples of this area have had a
gainst foreign occupiers, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, for over a millennium. The author’s gift for populating this setting with sympathetic, complex, and contemporary-seeming personalities, whose aspirations and fears resonate for the reader at a level that transcends the stock expectations of the exotic scenic décor, make this historically focused reading of the novel particularly lifelike and poignant.
A second reading of Alamut anchors its meaning firmly in Bartol’s own time between the two World Wars, seeing it as an allegorical representation of the rise of totalitarianism in early twentieth-century Europe. In this reading, Hasan ibn Sabbah, the hyper-rationalistic leader of the Ismaili sect, becomes a composite portrait of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. In fact, Bartol originally intended to dedicate the first edition of his book “To Benito Mussolini,” and when he was dissuaded from doing this, suggested a more generic dedication “To a certain dictator,” which was similarly vetoed. Either dedication would almost certainly have been a bold exercise in high irony, but his publisher rightly saw the risks involved at that volatile time: lost readership, irate authorities. Some of the characters appear to have been drawn from real-life models that dominated the newsreels at that time. Abu Ali, Hasan’s right-hand man, is depicted delivering inspiring oratory to the men of Alamut in a way reminiscent of no one so much as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The ceremonial nighttime lighting of the castle of Alamut could pass for an allusion to the floodlit rallies and torchlight parades of the Nazi Party. The strict organizational hierarchies of the Ismailis, the broad similarities between some characters and their corresponding types within the Fascist or National Socialist constellations, and the central role of ideology as a sop for the masses all resonate with the social and power structures then existing in Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia, as do the progressively greater levels of knowledge and critical distance from ideology that are available to Hasan’s inner circle.