Identity of Assassins

March 26, 2008

A key point in the multi-volume A Mediterranean Society by Shelomo Goitein is that those who lived in the Mediterranean regions from 950-1250 AD shared a fluid sense of national/ political identity. Goitein calls the Mediterranean during this period a "free trade community".. pointing out how even during wartime merchants went back and forth between antagonistic states.

At the root of all this was the concept that law was personal and not territorial. An individual was judged according to the law of his religious community, or even religious "school" or sect, rather than that of the territory in which he happened to be... [vol. 1, pg. 66]

Today we are resolute subscribers to the territorial version of law, and carefully follow the rules of whichever nation we happen to be in. This makes sense for a time in which the nation state is a primary means of identification, but for a man living in Cairo around 1000 AD, our current way of thinking would make no sense. His primary identification would be to a specific religious community that came with a specific religious law.

The Assassins, a branch of the Isma'ilis, are an example of the odd effects that can be stirred up under a more fluid political environment. Marshall Hodgson in The Order of Assassins traces the world order that surrounded this extreme branch of Islam.

The foundation of this world order was a strong view of the unifying power of the Sunni shari'a:

Their stress on the shari'a suggested a religious and military egalitarianism in which each individual could rise as high as fortune and his merits permitted, without affecting the universal legal structure. Within the forms ideally held constant across all lines of race or tongue, every adventurer could look for a throne somewhere in the Islamic world at last... [39]

So, a far-spreading cultural agreement about the nature of Islam contributed to a situation in which multiple princes and warlords could set up small states. These states could grow powerful.. and they might even have the support of the population.. but the primary identification of that population would be with the international Islamic consensus, as embodied by shari'a. Rulers could come and go, but that would not mean a whole lot to the ordinary person.

Contrast this with the situation in the United States. We have a high level of ideological variation. There is no strong religious/ethical consensus in play, so far as I can see. However we expect the political frame for this ideological shifting to stay consistent. We would be shocked and terrified, I suspect, if our American political system was overturned. In other words we have flipped the structure of medieval Islam, where the religious/ethical consensus was stable while the political frame was constantly shifting.

The Assassins (known also as the Nizaris) come up with a novel approach to this political situation. They founded a state.. but it was a state that was only tenuously connected to actual territory. They held a string of fortresses in various places from Syria to Afghanistan.. and around these fortresses they had swaths of territory. But their power was diffuse since followers were spread throughout this region—even in majority Sunni populations.

As can be gathered from the brief description of the political context, there was not a single state to be fought against, but rather a Sunni consensus that had to be undermined. It would not be enough for Hasan-i Sabbah (founder of Assassins) to establish simply another petty state.. not when he espoused such a grand vision of history. I wonder if part of the appeal to assassination (their weapon of choice) came from this need to fight with a different kind of group identity.. i.e. a non-territorial state locked in conflict with a non-territorial consensus

Following the development of a small and extreme group can give a sense of the odd possibilities for group identity formation. In the case of the Assassins we seem to find a group that functions as a state without territory within a world that has no real state, only an ideology.