The Muslim Roots of Assassination
So many historical events — from the rise of the “Dark Ages,” to why Columbus had to find a new naval route to the East, to why Vlad the Impaler was such a savage — find their origins in Islam.
Now, with the recent assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump, yet another forgotten origin — concerning the very word assassination itself — occasions an explanation.
The word and its meaning — the planned and stealthy killing of someone, usually an important political figure — are based on the Hashashin (a group whose name reached the West as assassin), and their modus operandi. Since their founding in 1090 AD, and late into the thirteenth century, this shadowy sect lived in the mountainous regions of Syria and Iran. From there, they launched countless assassination attempts on their enemies, mostly Sunni Muslims such as the Seljuk Turks, and the Christians of the Crusader states. (As a Shia sect, the Assassins saw both Sunnis and Shias as enemies.)
They were known to their contemporaries as Hashashin due to their use of hashish, a hallucinogenic cannabis plant with which they drugged their young male recruits as part of their indoctrination process. Once fully committed, these young Assassins would carefully and secretly track down their targets until the opportune moment arrived, at which point they would pounce on and ideally stab their target to death — preferably in public, for a maximum show of terror. Then they would just stand there, waiting to be cut down by their target’s guard.
While these facts are recounted in many modern (secondary) history books, what is seldom mentioned is the distinctly Islamic origins of the Assassins. Modern academics, who believe their duty is to whitewash Islam before an already suspicious Western public, tend to make the opposite argument, saying (for example) that because the Assassins targeted both Christians and Muslims, they were very obviously not religiously oriented or motivated.
In reality, there are many telling markers of their Islamic pedigree.
The first revolves around why hallucinogenic cannabinoids were employed in the first place: to give recruits a taste of Muslim paradise. The head of the order, known to contemporaries as the “Sheikh (or Old Man) of the Mountain,” would get young male recruits thoroughly “stoned,” and then, while they were dazed and confused, lead them to a beautiful garden, “where every species of sensual gratification should be found” in the company of scantily clad and “amorous” women, writes Marco Polo, a contemporary of the Assassins who left us with the best and most extant description of the group. (Needless to say, because Polo’s memoirs, based on his travels through Muslim lands, present Islam in a negative light, more than a few academics have dismissed the Venetian traveler as an “Islamophobe” and his work as a “Christian polemic.”)
At any rate, the purpose of the hashish-induced orgy the recruit experienced was to convince him that fulfilling his master’s wishes — that is, assassinating whomever the Sheikh ordered him to assassinate, and then getting killed himself afterward — the paradise he had already temporarily experienced (while drugged) would be his forever.
This entire fiasco is, of course, based on the direct teachings of Muhammad. Thus, before sending them on their mission, the Sheikh would tell young Assassins: “We have the assurances of our prophet that he who defends his lord shall inherit Paradise, and if you show yourselves devoted to the obedience of my orders, that happy lot awaits you.”
The fact is, not only did the prophet of Islam make use of and call for the assassinations of his enemies (which included elderly poets and mothers), but he promised a decidedly carnal paradise to those men who died fighting in the name of Islam. This included 72 hooris: supernatural, celestial women (“wide-eyed” and “big-bosomed,” says the Koran 56:22, 78:33) created by Allah for the express purpose of sexually gratifying his favorites in perpetuity. (Whether or not the English word “whore” is etymologically connected to the Arabic hoori in the same way “assassin” is based on hashashin is ultimately a moot point, as both seem to serve the same function.)
The damsels in the gardens of the Assassins were dressed and behaved in a manner that would make the drug-addled recruits believe them to be hooris — thus whetting their appetite for more.
Incidentally, Muslims the world over, from ISIS to “radicals” living in Europe, still cite and aspire to meet the hooris — further underscoring that this belief is not limited to some bizarre sect, but is purely Islamic in provenance.
Then there is the specific name of those Assassins who actually carried out the assassinations: they were known as Fedayeen — they who sacrifice themselves. If that Arabic word sounds familiar, it’s because numerous Muslim terror groups still use it, most notably Palestinian suicide bombers. Hence, as Bernard Lewis writes, “the Assassins may indeed be regarded as the forerunners of the suicide bombers of today.”
Finally, the Assassins were Shias (specifically Nizari Ismailis), and this explains why many of their victims were Sunni Muslims — default enemies on the same scale as Christians.
Whereas Islam endorses deception of all sorts — Muhammad personally permitted lying to one’s wife, to one’s enemy, and in order to reconcile quarreling parties —Shiasm especially perfected the art of subterfuge. Why? Because unlike their enemies, the Sunnis, the Shias were an often-weakened minority, and therefore had more reason to use deception in their struggle for mastery of the Muslim world.
As Bernard Lewis again writes in his little book on the Assassins, taqiyya, an Islamic doctrine that permits deception,
is by no means peculiar to the Shia; it was they, however, who were most frequently exposed to the dangers of persecution and repression [by the Sunni majority], and by them therefore that the principle was most frequently invoked. It was used to justify concealment of beliefs.
As such, Shias arguably remain the world’s dissimulation experts par excellence. Indeed, Iran — which is Shia — has openly boasted of employing deceptive tactics against the West (here and here).
At any rate, here, then, are the true origins of the word, and act, of assassination — to which America’s most famous man nearly succumbed recently.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum
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