ENTER THE TURKS 129gious doctrine, and the Persians would contribute all the remaining arts of
civilization-administration, philosophy, poetry, painting, architecture,
science-to elevate and beautify the world. The new ruling class would
thus consist of a Turkish sultan and his army, an Arab khalifa and the
ulama, and a Persian bureaucracy staffed by artists and thinkers.
The stability this engendered would, he hoped, let farmers and mer-
chants generate the wealth needed to ... provide the taxes needed to ...
fund the armies needed to ... keep the order needed to ... let farmers and
merchants keep generating wealth.
But Nizam al-Mulk had a sinister opponent working to unravel his fab-
ric, a ruthless genius named Hassan Sabbah, founder of the Cult of the As-
sassins. I call them a cult because "sect" seems too mainstream. They were
a branch that split away from a branch that split away from Shi'ism, itself
a branch of Islam.
Shi'is believe in a central guiding religious figure called an imam, of
whom there is always one in the world. As soon as the imam dies, his spe-
cial grace passes into one of his sons, making him the imam. The trouble
is that every time an imam passes away, disagreements can arise about
which of his sons is the next imam. Each such disagreement can lead to a
split that gives birth to a new branch of the sect.
Just such a disagreement had broken out about who was the fifth
imam, spawning the Zaidi sect, also known as the Fivers. A more serious
disagreement arose after the death of the sixth imam, giving rise to a sect
called the lsma'ilis, who became the dominant branch of Shi'ism for a
while, since the Fatimids who captured Egypt and set up a rival khalifate
were lsma'ilis.
In the late eleventh century the lsma'ilis themselves branched into two.
The minority was a revolutionary offshoot angered by the wealth and
pomp of the now-mighty Fatimid khalifate and dedicated to leveling rich
and poor, empowering the meek, and generally getting the Islamic project
back on course. The leaders of this movement sent an operative named
Hassan Sabbah to Persia to recruit adherents.
In Persia, Sabbah developed his own power base. He took control of a
fortress called Alamut {"the eagle's nest"), situated high in the Elburz
mountains of northern Iran. No one could touch him there because the
only approach to the fortress was a footpath too narrow to accommodate