240 ISLAM AT WAR
people. After many interviews with them, Yves le Breton wrote to his
king, reporting these words of the Old Man of the Mountains:
Know that one of the rules of the law of Ali [Ali is more revered by the
Shia sect than Muhammad] is that when a man is killed in the service of
his lord, his soul enters a more pleasant body than it had before; and there-
fore the Assassins do not hesitate to get themselves killed when their lord
commands because they believe they will be in more pleasant circumstances
after they are dead.
And there is another rule: they believe that no one dies except on the day
appointed for him; and no one should hold this belief for God can prolong
or shorten our lives. But the Bedouins support this rule of the law of Ali,
and thus they refuse to put on armor when they go into battle, for otherwise
they believe they would be acting against the commandment of their law.
And when they curse their children, they tell them: “May you be cursed
like the Franks, who put on armor for fear of death.”It is reported, in legend, that the Assassins had a particular method by
which they recruited their members. Of course, they were all Muslims, so
the seeds of the recruiting methodology were already planted in the po-
tential recruits.
Legend claims that it was at Alamut that the leader of the sect [Assassins]
had a private garden of infinite beauty, with the sparkling fountains so
precious to the desert dweller and a selection of the most beautiful and most
sexually accomplished young women in the land. A young member of the
sect would be given hashish to numb his mind to the point of unconscious-
ness. When he awoke, he found himself in the fabled garden, where the
beautiful young ladies fed him morsels of the most delicious foods. They
treated him to every sexual delight he had ever heard of, and to some he
had never even imagined. As the day progressed, more and more hashish
would be pressed upon him until he passed out again.
When he awoke the next morning to his usual surroundings he was en-
couraged to recount his drug-induced adventure. After he had spelled out
the unbelievable delights, he was told that he had been favored by Allah
by being given a tiny glimpse of the highest level of heaven reserved for
those martyrs who “die for their faith” [italics added]. For such loyalty and
devotion to God, the delights he had experienced so briefly were available
for all eternity. Now he longed for nothing more in this world than the
chance to die in the service of Allah.
In answer to his plea, he was given intense training to kill an enemy of
God, who would be identified for him by the leader of the sect, called by
chroniclers the grand master. Thus would he earn eternal bliss in paradise,