Alamut (36 page)

“I’ve heard about your dispute with the grand vizier,” Abu Ali said. “But the story takes on a whole different aspect when you learn all its details. Now I understand why Nizam al-Mulk is such a mortal enemy of the Ismailis.”

“I encountered more favorable conditions in Egypt. Caliph Mustansir Billah dispatched Badr al-Jamali, the commander of his bodyguard, to meet me at the border. In Cairo I was greeted with highest honors as a martyr for the cause of Ali. Soon the whole situation was clear to me. Two parties had formed around the caliph’s two sons, each wanting to secure the succession for its protégé. The elder son, Nizar, was also the weaker one, like the caliph himself. The law was in his favor. I soon managed to get both him and his father under my influence. But I didn’t reckon with the determination of Badr al-Jamali. He was champion of the younger son, al-Mustali. When he realized I was beginning to overshadow him, he had me arrested. The caliph was frightened. I quickly realized this was no joking matter. I cast aside all the high-flying dreams I’d been nurturing for Egypt and agreed to board some Frankish ship. My fate was finally sealed on that boat. Out at sea I noticed that we weren’t sailing for Syria, as Badr al-Jamali had promised, but far out west along the coast of Africa. I knew everything would be lost if they put me ashore anyplace near Kairouan. Then one of the storms that are typical for that part of the ocean started up. I had secretly received several bags of gold pieces from the caliph. I offered one of them to the captain if he would
change course and put me ashore on the coast of Syria. He would have the perfect excuse that the storm had carried him off course. The gold tempted him. The storm kept getting worse and worse. The passengers, almost all of them Franks, began to despair. They prayed out loud and commended their souls to God. I, on the other hand, was so satisfied with the deal I’d made that I sat down in a corner and calmly ate some dried figs. They were amazed at my composure. They didn’t know we’d turned about and were heading in the other direction. In response to their questions I told them that Allah had told me we were going to land on the coast of Syria and nothing bad would happen to us along the way. That ‘prophecy’ came to pass, and overnight they saw me as a great prophet. They all wanted me to accept them as adherents of my faith. I was terrified by that unexpected success. I had just vividly demonstrated to myself what a tremendous force faith is, and how easy it is to awaken. You just need to know a little bit more than the ones who are supposed to believe. Then it’s easy to work miracles. These are the fertile grounds out of which the noble blossom of faith grows. Suddenly, everything was clear to me. Like Archimedes, in order to carry out my plan I would need a single fixed point, and the world would come unhinged. No honors, no influence over the masters of the world! Just a fortified castle and the means to alter it according to my concept. Then the grand vizier and the mighty of the world had better look out!”

Hasan’s eyes flashed in a strangely threatening way. Abu Ali had the feeling that he was in the presence of a dangerous beast that could strike at any instant.

“Now you have that fixed point,” he said somewhat reassuringly, yet with faint distrust.

“Yes,” Hasan replied. He stepped away from the battlements and lay down on some pillows spread out on the roof. He invited his friends to join him. Pieces of cold roast and platters and jugs full of wine were waiting for them. They started eating.

“I have no hesitation about deceiving an enemy. But I don’t like to trick a friend,” Buzurg Ummid suddenly spoke up. He had been quiet and thoughtful the entire time. Now the thoughts unexpectedly poured out of him.

“If I understood you right, ibn Sabbah,” he continued, “the strength of your institution would be built on our deception of the fedayeen, our most exceptional and devoted followers. We would be responsible for that deception in the most cold-blooded and premeditated way. To achieve it, we would have to make use of unprecedented trickery. Your concept is magnificent, indeed, but the means for realizing it are living human beings, our friends.”

As though expecting this objection, Hasan calmly responded.

“Essentially, the power of any institution is predicated on followers who have been deceived. People vary according to their powers of perception.
Whoever wants to lead them has to take this range of abilities into consideration. The masses wanted miracles from the prophets. They had to perform them if they wanted to keep their respect. The lower the level of consciousness, the greater the fervor. So I divide humanity into two fundamentally different layers: the handful that knows what really is, and the vast multitudes that don’t know. The former are called to lead, the latter to be led. The former are like parents, the latter like children. The former know that truth is unattainable, while the latter reach their arms out for it. What else can the former do, but feed them fairy tales and fabrications? What else are those but lies and deceptions? And yet, they’re moved to do this out of pity. So if deception and trickery are inevitable for leading the masses toward some goal that you see and they don’t understand, then why shouldn’t you be able to use that deception and trickery to build a deliberate system? As an example I could name the Greek philosopher Empedocles, who during his lifetime enjoyed the practically divine veneration of his students. When he sensed his last hour approaching, he climbed to the top of a volcano and threw himself into its jaws. You see, he had predicted he would be taken up into heaven alive. But by accident he lost a sandal at the edge of the chasm. If they hadn’t discovered it, the world might still believe today that he had passed into the beyond alive. If we think about this carefully, he couldn’t have committed this act out of self-interest. What use would it have been to him if when he was dead his students believed in his divine assumption? Let’s rather assume that he was so sensitive that he didn’t want to smash his faithful students’ vision of his immortality. He sensed they expected lies from him, and he didn’t want to disappoint them.”

“That kind of lie is essentially innocent,” Buzurg Ummid replied after some consideration. “But this trick that you’re setting out for the fedayeen is a matter of life and death.”

“Earlier I promised I would share the philosophical basis of my plan in detail with both of you,” Hasan resumed. “For that we need to be completely clear about what’s in fact happening in the gardens. Let’s separate this anticipated event into its elements. We have three youths who might believe that we’ve opened the gates to paradise for them. If they were really convinced of that, what would they experience? Are you aware of that, friends? A bliss, the likes of which no mortal has ever known.”

“But how totally wrong they’d be,” Abu Ali laughed, “is something only the three of us would know.”

“And what do they care if we know?” Hasan replied. “Do you perhaps know what will happen to you tomorrow? Do I perhaps know what fate has in store for me? Does Buzurg Ummid know when he will die? And yet these things have been decided for millennia in the composition of the universe. Protagoras said that man was the measure of everything. What he perceives, is; what he doesn’t perceive, is not. The threesome down there are going to
experience and know paradise with their souls, their bodies and all of their senses. So it becomes paradise for them. You, Buzurg Ummid, were shocked by the delusion I’ve drawn the fedayeen into. But you forget that we ourselves are the victims of the delusions of our own senses every day. In that sense I would be no worse than that supposed being above us, which various faiths claim has created us. That we were given undependable senses in the process is something that Democritus already recognized. For him there are no colors, no sounds, no sweetness or bitterness, no cold or warmth, just atoms and space. Empedocles guessed that all our knowledge is channeled to us by our senses. What isn’t contained in them isn’t contained in our thoughts. So if our senses lie, how can our knowledge be accurate if it has its origins in them? Look at those eunuchs in the gardens. We’ve given them the most beautiful girls to guard. They have the same eyes as we do, the same ears and the same senses. And yet! A small incision in their bodies was all it took for their image of the world to be changed entirely. What is the intoxicating scent of a young girl’s skin to them? The repulsive evaporation of sweat. And the touch of firm, maidenly breasts? Unpleasant contact with an alien, fatty body part. And the hidden entrance to the summit of human desire? A dirty waste passage. So much, then, for the reliability of our senses. A blind man doesn’t care about the radiance of a garden in bloom. A deaf man is impervious to a nightingale’s song. A eunuch is indifferent to the charms of a maiden, and an idiot thumbs his nose at all the wisdom of the world.”

Abu Ali and Buzurg Ummid couldn’t help laughing. They felt as though Hasan had taken them by the arm and was leading them down a steep, winding stairway into a deep, dark abyss which they had never even dared look into before. They sensed that he must have thoroughly thought through everything he was telling them now.

“You see, if someone—like me, for instance—has truly realized,” Hasan continued, “that nothing he sees, feels or perceives around him is dependable; if he’s had that flash of awareness that he’s surrounded on all sides by nothing but uncertainties and obscurity, and that he’s constantly the victim of delusions, then he no longer feels these to be anything inimical to man, but more like a kind of life necessity that sooner or later he’ll have to make peace with. Delusion as one of the elements of all life, as something that’s not our enemy, as one of a number of means by which we can still act and push forward at all—I see this is as the only possible view of those who have attained some higher knowledge. Heraclitus saw the universe as a sort of dumping ground heaped up without any plan and regulated by time. Time is like a child playing with colored pebbles, stacking them up and then scattering them again. What a lofty simile! Time is like a ruler, like an artist. Their passion for building and creating mirrors the purposeless will that governs worlds. It calls them to life and then shoves them back into nothingness. But while they last, they are unique and self-contained and submissive to their
own strict laws. That’s the kind of world we’re in. We’re subject to the laws that rule in it. We’re part of it and we can’t get out. It’s a world in which error and delusion are important factors.”

“All-merciful Allah!” Abu Ali exclaimed. “I’d say you’ve also built a world ruled by unique laws, Hasan! You’ve built your own world, colorful, strange and awful. Alamut, that’s your creation, ibn Sabbah.”

He laughed and forced a smile from Hasan too. Buzurg Ummid looked at the commander and listened to him, thinking about the things he said and being amazed. He was gradually sliding into areas that were completely unknown and alien to him.

“There’s a fair amount of truth in your joke, Abu Ali,” Hasan continued, with his earlier smile. “I told you down below already that I had crept into the creator’s workshop and watched him at work. Supposedly out of pity he has concealed our future and the day of our deaths from us. We do the same thing. Where the devil is it written that our life on this planet isn’t just such a delusion?! Only our consciousness decides whether something is ‘for real’ or just a dream. When the fedayeen wake up again, if they learn that they’ve been in paradise, then they’ll have been in paradise! Because there’s no difference between a real and an unreal paradise, in effect. Wherever you’re aware of having been, that’s where you’ve been! Won’t their pleasures, their joys be just as great as if they’d been in the real heaven? Epicurus wisely said that the avoidance of pain and suffering and the quest for pleasure and personal comfort were the only models for human life. Who will have experienced a greater share of happiness than our fedayeen, whom we’ve transported to paradise? Seriously! What I’d give to be in their place! To be conscious just once of enjoying the delights of heaven!”

“What a sophist!” Abu Ali exclaimed. “If you put me on a rack and tried to persuade me, as you’re doing now, that I was cozier there than if I were lying on a soft feather bed, by the beard of Ismail, I’d laugh myself silly.”

Hasan and Buzurg Ummid burst out laughing.

“It’s time to have a look at what our heroes are doing,” Hasan said at last.

They rose and stepped up to the battlements.

“Everything is still quiet,” Buzurg Ummid summed up. “Let’s get back to our conversation. Ibn Sabbah, you said you would like to be conscious of having been in paradise. What will the fedayeen experience out of the ordinary, even if they do have that awareness? They’ll eat food they could have elsewhere and enjoy girls like thousands of others under the sun.”

“Don’t!” Hasan replied. “It isn’t all the same to an ordinary mortal whether he’s a guest in a king’s palace or in a simple caravanserai, even if they serve him the same food in both places. He also knows how to distinguish between a princess and a milkmaid, however much alike they may look otherwise. Because our pleasures don’t just depend on our physical senses.
They’re a highly complex phenomenon, influenced by a whole range of circumstances. The maiden you see as a perpetually virginal houri will give you a completely different kind of pleasure than one you see as a bought slave.”

“Just now you’ve reminded me of a certain detail,” Abu Ali said, interrupting him. “It’s written in the Koran that the maidens of paradise will never lose their innocence. Have you accounted for that? Be careful that your entire plan doesn’t collapse over a detail like that.”

Hasan laughed uproariously.

“There’s not all that much virginity down there to begin with,” he replied, “which is part of the reason why I sent for Apama to come from Kabul. Believe me, her reputation as the finest lover from Kabul to Samarkand was well deserved. Let me tell you, after a dozen lovers she was still just as delicate as a sixteen-year-old maiden. She knew a secret of love which seems perfectly simple when it’s explained to you. But if you don’t know about it, you could well believe in perpetual, self-renewing virginity. It’s a mineral compound which, when properly applied in solution, contracts the skin and could easily lead a beginner to the wrong assumption that he’s dealing with an untouched virgin.”