Muslim prisoners from their Christian captors.
Later in the Middle Ages, the fedayeen were the
dedicated followers of Hasan-i Sabbah (d. 1124),
the leader of the Nizari branch of the Ismaili Shia
in iran, iraq, and syria. Known to the West as
the assassins, the fedayeen would infiltrate enemy
towns in order to publicly assassinate prominent
leaders, even at the risk of their own lives. One
of their most important victims was the Seljuk
vizier Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092), the political head
of the Abbasid Empire at the time. Such actions
earned them the hatred of many Muslims, who
called them heretics and hashish smokers (thus
the name Assassin).
In more recent times, several groups of guer-
rilla fighters have been called fedayeen. These
include Arab volunteers from egypt, Jordan, and
Syria who fought on behalf of the Palestinians
against the Israelis between 1948 and 1967. They
became the dominant elements in the formation
of the palestine liberation organization in the
1960s. In Iraq, the Fedayeen Saddam was created
in 1995 to serve as saddam hUsayn’s paramilitary
force. When Anglo-American forces invaded and
occupied Iraq in 2003, it constituted the core of
the resistance the coalition forces encountered.
The most overtly religious fedayeen in the mod-
ern period were the Fedaiyan-i Islam, a radical
Shii terrorist group in Iran. Formed during the
1940s in close association with Shii clerics, it was
composed mostly of young men living on the
margins of Iran’s major cities. Through assassina-
tions of secular government officials, they sought
to bring about a new political system based on the
sharia. Violently suppressed by the shah’s govern-
ment in the 1950s, the organization reemerged
after the 1978–79 revolution, only to dissolve
when the Khomeini government was formed and
most of the radicals’ objectives were achieved.
The secular counterpart to the Fedaiyan-i Islam
was the Fedaiyan-i Khalq (the people’s fedayeen),
a Marxist movement that sought to overthrow the
Shah’s government during the 1970s.
See also ismaili shiism; Jihad; sUicide.
Further reading: Farhad Daftary, The Ismailis: Their His-
tory and Doctrines (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Farhad Kazemi, “The Fadaiyan-e Islam:
Fanaticism, Politics, and Terror.” In From Nationalism
to Revolutionary Islam, edited by Said Amir Arjomand
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984);
Yezid Sayegh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State:
The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997).fiqh (Arabic: understanding)
Fiqh is a term for Islamic law, particularly as it is
interpreted and implemented by legal experts from
among the Ulama. Whereas the sharia is ideally
the comprehensive body of law ordained by God,
fiqh involves Muslims’ commitment to understand
God’s law and make it relevant to their lives. As
such, it is a religious form of what is called “juris-
prudence” in the West, and it extends its reach
from matters of worship to detailed aspects of
everyday conduct. A member of the ulama who is
trained in fiqh is called a faqih (jurist).
When the first Arab-Muslim empires arose
during the eras of the Umayyad caliphate (661–
750) and the abbasid caliphate (750–1258),
Muslims were compelled to create a legal sys-
tem for the conduct of their own affairs and
their relations with their non-Muslim subjects.
Administering new territories from Spain and
North Africa to northwest India with their
diverse peoples presented challenges to Muslims
that Muhammad and the first Muslims had not
contemplated in seventh-century Mecca and
Medina. The Umayyads and Abbasids looked to
the preexisting legal traditions of the Byzantine
and Persian Empires, Jewish and Christian laws,
and local custom. Religiously minded Muslim
jurists used the qUran, community customs,
and their individual opinions to arrive at legal
decisions during this early period. Many held
that Muslim laws should be based as much as
possible on the Quran and the sUnna (authentic
practice) of Muhammad and his CompanionsK 238 fiqh