Islam. 87went, the ulama, with the backing of the Shariah, became the
only stable authority, and as Sufism became more popular,
the piety of the people deepened and acquired an interior
dimension.
Sunni Islam now seemed in the ascendant almost every-
where. Some of the more radical Ismailis, who had become
disillusioned with the Fatimid Empire, which had so
signally failed to impose the true faith on the ummah, set up
an underground network of guerrillas, dedicated to the
overthrow of the Seljuks and the destruction of the Sunnis.
From 1090 they conducted raids from their mountain
fortress in Alamut, north of Qazvin, seizing Seljuk
strongholds and murdering leading amirs. By 1092 this had
become a full-scale revolt. The rebels became known by
their enemies as the hashishin (which gives us our word "as-
sassin"), because they were said to use hashish to give them
the courage to take part in attacks that often resulted in their
own death. The Ismailis believed that they were the cham-
pions of the ordinary people, who were themselves often
harassed by the amirs, but this campaign of terror turned
most Muslims against the Ismailis. The ulama spread wild
and inaccurate stories about them (the hashish legend being
one of these myths), people who were suspected of being Is-
mailis were rounded up and killed and these massacres led
to fresh Ismaili attacks. But despite this opposition, the Is-
mailis managed to build a state around Alamut, which lasted
150 years and which only the Mongol invaders were able to
destroy. The immediate effect of their jihad, however, was
not, as they had hoped, the advent of the Mahdi, but the dis-
crediting of the whole of the Shiah. The Twelvers, who had
taken no part in the Ismaili revolt, were careful to appease
the Sunni authorities and to abstain from any political in-
volvement. For their part, Sunnis were ready to respond to a
theologian who was able to give magisterial definition of