130 DESTINY DISRUPTED
an army. How Sabbah conquered it, no one knows. Some legends say
trickery was involved, some that he used supernatural means, some that he
converted the staff of the fortress and then simply bought the place from
its master for a small sum. Whatever the case, there at Alamut, Sabbah got
busy organizing the Assassins.
Did his cult adopt this name because they were devoted to political
murder? Quite the opposite: political murder is now called assassination
because it was a tactic practiced by this cult. Centuries later, Marco Polo
would claim that Sabbah's agents smoked hashish in order to hop them-
selves up for murder and were thus called hashishin, from which derived
the word assassin. I doubt this etymology, and I'll tell you why.
Sabbah was the archetypal prototerrorist, using murder largely for its
propaganda value. Since he lacked the resources and troops to fight battles
or conquer cities, he sent individuals, or at most small groups, to assassi-
nate carefully targeted figures chosen for the shock their death would
spark. The Assassins plotted their killings for months or even years, some-
times contriving to make friends with the victim or enter his service and
work their way up to a position of trust.
Where in this long process was the hashish smoking supposed to take
place? It doesn't add up. The Lebanese writer Amin Malouf suggests that
actually the word assassin probably derives from the Persian word assas,
which means "foundation." Like most religious schismatics, Sabbah
taught that the revelations had been corrupted and that he was taking his
followers back to the foundation, the original. Of course, every schismatic
has a different idea about what the founding revelation was. Sabbah's doc-
trine strayed pretty far from anything most scholars recognize as Islam.
For one thing, he taught that while Mohammed was indeed the messen-
ger of Allah, Ali was an actual incarnation of Allah-as were the succeed-
ing imams.
Sabbah further taught that the Qur'an had a surface or exterior meaning
but many levels of esoteric or interior meanings. The surface meaning pre-
scribed the rituals of religion, the outward show, the rules of conduct, the
ethical and moral mandates; all of this was for the brutal masses who
couldn't aspire to deeper knowledge. The esoteric Qur'an-and every verse,
every line, every letter had an esoteric meaning-provided a secret code that
allowed cognoscenti to unlock the cryptogram of the created universe.