Samarkand (20 page)

When Hassan died, at almost eighty years old, the lieutenant he had designated to succeed him did not dare install himself
in the master’s den and even less did he dare open the mysterious grate. For a long time after the disappearance of the founder,
the inhabitants of Alamut were terrified by the mere sight of the walls which had sheltered him; they avoided venturing toward
this previously inhabited quarter lest they come across his shade. The order was still subjected to the rules which Hassan
had decreed; the community member’s permanent lot was one of the strictest asceticism. There was no deviation, no pleasure,
and only more violence against the outside world, more assassinations than ever, most probably to prove that the leader’s
death had in no way weakened his adherents’ resolve.

And did these adherents accept this strictness good-naturedly? Less and less. Murmurs started to be heard. Not so much amongst
the veterans who had won Alamut while Hassan was alive; they still lived with the memory of the persecutions they had undergone
in their countries of origin and feared lest the slightest relaxation make them more vulnerable. However, these men were becoming
less numerous every day and the fortress was more and more inhabited by their sons and grandsons. From the cradle, all of
them had been accorded the most rigorous indoctrination which forced them to learn and respect Hassan’s onerous directives
as if they were divine
revelation. But most of them were becoming more resistant. Life was staking its claim on them again.

Some dared one day to ask why they were forced to spend their whole youth in that barracks-type convent from which all joy
had been banished. They were so thoroughly repressed that henceforth they guarded against uttering the slightest discordant
opinion. That is, in public, for meetings started to be held secretly indoors. The young conspirators were encouraged by all
those women who had seen a son, brother or a husband depart on a secret mission from which he had not returned.

One man made himself the spokesman for this stifled and suppressed longing. No one else would allow himself to be put forward:
he was the grandson of the man Hassan had designated as his successor and he himself was named to become the fourth Grand
Master of the order upon the death of his father.

He had a distinct advantage over his predecessors. Having been born a little after the death of the founder, he had never
had to live under his terror. He observed his home with curiosity, and naturally with a certain amount of apprehension, but
without that morbid fascination which paralysed all the others.

He had even gone into the forbidden room once, at the age of seventeen, had walked around it, gone up to the magic basin and
dipped his hand into the icy water then stopped in front of the niche which enclosed the manuscript. He almost opened it,
but changed his mind, took a step back and then walked backwards out of the room. He did not want to go any further on his
first visit.

When the heir wandered, in pensive mood, through the alleyways of Alamut, people gathered around while not getting too close
and uttered curious formulae in blessing. He was also called Hassan, like Sabbah, but another name was already being whispered
around him: ‘The Redeemer! The Long-Awaited!’ Only one thing was feared: that the old guard of the Assassins, who knew his
feelings and who had already heard him rashly censure the prevailing atmosphere of severity, would prevent him from acceding
to power. In fact his father did try to impose silence upon him, even accusing him of being an atheist and of betraying the
teachings of the Founder. It was even said that he had two hundred and fifty of his partisans
put to death and expelled two hundred and fifty others, forcing them to carry the corpses of their executed friends on their
backs down to the foot of the mountain. However, due to a trace of paternal feeling, the Grand Master did not dare follow
Hassan Sabbah’s tradition of infanticide.

When the father died, in 1162, the rebellious son succeeded him without the slightest hitch. For the first time in a long
while real joy broke out in the grey alleyways of Alamut.

But was it really a question of a long-awaited Redeemer, the adherents asked themselves. Was it really this man who was to
put an end to put an end to their suffering? He himself said nothing. He continued to walk around distractedly in the alleyways
of Alamut or he spent long hours in the library under the protective eye of the copyist who was in charge of it, a man originally
from Kirman.

One day he was seen walking decisively toward Hassan Sabbah’s former residence. He threw the door open, walked up to the niche
and shook the grate with such violence that it came away from the wall letting a stream of sand and bits of stone pour on
to the floor. He lifted out Khayyam’s manuscript, tapped the dust off it, and carried it away with him under his arms.

It was then said that he shut himself up to read, to read and to meditate, until the seventh day, when he gave the order that
everyone in Alamut, men, women, and children, should assemble in the
maydan
, the only place large enough to hold them all.

It was 8 August 1164. The sun of Alamut was beating down on their heads and faces but no one thought of protecting himself.
Toward the west there rose a wooden dais, decked out with a huge standard, one red, one green, one yellow and one white, at
each of the four corners. It was in this direction that everyone’s gaze was directed.

Suddenly he appeared, dressed all in dazzling white, with his slight young wife behind him, her face unveiled, her eyes cast
to the ground and her cheeks flushed with confusion. In the crowd it seemed that this apparition dispelled the last doubts;
people were boldly murmuring: ‘It is He. It is the Redeemer!’

Solemnly he climbed the few steps to the platform, and gave his faithful a warm gesture of welcome, intended to silence the
murmurings. Then he went on to pronounce one of the most astonishing speeches ever heard on our planet:

‘To all the inhabitants of the world, jinns, men and angels!’ he said. ‘The Mahdi offers you his blessing and pardons all
your sins, both past and future.

‘He announces to you that the sacred Law is abolished for the hour of the Resurrection has sounded. God imposed on you his
Law to make you earn Paradise and indeed you now deserve it. From today on, Paradise is yours. You are thus free of the yoke
of the Law.

‘Everything that was forbidden is permitted, and everything that was obligatory is forbidden!

‘The five daily prayers are forbidden,’ the Redeemer continued. ‘Since we are now in Paradise and in permanent contact with
the Creator, we no have any need to address Him at fixed times; those who persist in making the five prayers show thereby
how little they believe in the Resurrection. Prayer has become an act of unbelief.’

On the other hand, wine, considered by the Quran to be the drink of Paradise, was from now authorized; not to drink it was
considered to be a manifest sign of a lack of faith.

‘When this was proclaimed,’ a Persian historian of the time related, ‘the assembly started to rejoice on the harp and the
flute and to drink wine conspicuously on the very steps of the dais.’

It was an excessive reaction, in proportion to the excesses practised by Hassan Sabbah in the name of Quranic Law. Soon the
successors of the redeemer would set themselves to diminishing his messianic ardour, but Alamut would never again be this
reservoir of martyrs desired by the Supreme Preacher. Life would henceforth be sweet and the long series of murders which
had terrorized the cities of Islam would be interrupted. The Ismailis, as radical a sect as there ever was, would change into
a community of exemplary tolerance.

In fact, after having announced the good news to the people of Alamut and its surroundings, the Redeemer sent emissaries off
to the other Ismaili communities of Asia and Egypt. They were provided
with documents signed by his hand, and asked everyone to celebrate the day of redemption whose date they gave according to
three different calenders; that of the Hijra of the Prophet, that of Alexander the Greek and that of the ‘most eminent man
of both worlds, Omar Khayyam of Nishapur’.

At Alamut the Redeemer gave orders that the
Samarkand Manuscript
be venerated as a great book of wisdom. Artists were commissioned to ornament it with pictures, to illuminate it and to make
for it a casket of chased gold encrusted with precious stones. No one had the right to copy its contents but it was placed
permanently on a low cedar table in the small inner room where the librarian worked. There, under his suspicious surveyance
some privileged members would come to consult it.

Until then, people knew only a few of Khayyam’s quatrains, which had been composed in his impetuous youth; now many others
were learnt, quoted and repeated – some with serious alterations. This period also saw one of the strangest phenomena: whenever
a poet composed a quatrain which might cause trouble for him, he would attribute it to Omar; hundreds of false
rubaiyaat
came to be intermixed with those of Khayyam, to the extent that, in the absence of the manuscript, it was impossible to discern
which were truly his.

Was it at the Redeemer’s request that the librarians of Alamut, from father to son, took up the chronicle of the manuscript
at the point where Vartan left it? In any case, it is from this single source that we know Khayyam’s posthumous influence
on the metamorphosis the Assassins underwent. The concise yet irreplaceable account of history was carried on in the same
way for almost a century until a new brutal interruption – the Mongol invasions.

The first wave, led by Chengiz Khan, was, beyond a shadow of doubt, the most devastating scourge ever to cross the Orient.
Important cities were razed and their population exterminated. Such was the case with Peking, Bukhara and Samarkand, whose
inhabitants were treated like cattle with the young women handed around the officers of the victorious horde, the artisans
reduced to slavery and the rest massacred with the sole exception of a minority who,
regrouping around the grand
qadi
of the time, very quickly proclaimed their allegiance to Chengiz Khan.

In spite of this apocalypse, Samarkand appeared to be almost favoured, since it would one day be reborn from its rubble to
become the capital of a world-wide empire – that of Tamerlane – in contrast to so many cities which were never to rise again,
namely the three great metropolises of Khorassan where all this world’s intellectual activity had long been concentrated:
Merv, Balkh and Nishapur – to which list must be added Rayy, the cradle of oriental medicine whose very name would be forgotten.
The world would have to wait several centuries in order to see the rebirth, on a neighbouring site, of the city of Teheran.

It was the second wave of Mongol invasions which swept over Alamut. It was a little less bloody, but more far-reaching. How
can we not share the terror of the people alive at the time, knowing that the Mongol troops were able, over a period of a
few months, to lay waste to Baghdad, Damascus, Cracow in Poland and the Chinese province of Szechuan.

The Assassin’s fortress thus opted to surrender, the fortress which had resisted so many invaders over a hundred and sixty-six
years! Prince Hulagu, grandson of Chengiz Khan, came in person to admire this masterpiece of military construction; legend
says that he found provisions which had been conserved intact from the days of Hassan Sabbah.

After inspecting the place with his lieutenants, he ordered the soldiers to destroy everything, not to leave a stone untouched,
not to spare even the library. However, before setting fire to it, he permitted a thirty-year-old historian, a certain Juvayni,
to go inside. He had been in the process of writing a
History of the Conqueror of the World
at Hulagu’s request, which book is still today our most valuable source on the Mongol invasions. He thus was able to go into
this mysterious place where tens of thousands of manuscripts were kept in rows, stacked up or rolled up; outside he was awaited
by a Mongol officer and a soldier with a wheelbarrow. What the wheelbarrow could hold would be saved, the rest was to be victim
to the flames. There was no question of reading the texts or cataloguing the titles.

A fervent Sunni, Juvayni told himself that his first task was to save the World of God from the fire. He started to pile up
as quickly as he could any copies of the Quran, recognizable by their thick binding and stored in the same place. He had a
good score of them and made three trips to carry them out to the wheelbarrow which was already almost full. Now, what to chose?
Heading toward one of the walls, against which the volumes seemed to be better ordered than elsewhere, he came across innumerable
works written by Hassan Sabbah during his thirty years of voluntary reclusion. He chose to save one of them, an autobiography
of which he would quote some fragments in his own work. He also found a chronicle of Alamut which was recent and apparently
well documented and which related in detail the history of the Redeemer. He hurried to take it away with him, since that episode
was totally unknown outside the Ismaili community.

Did the historian know of the existence of the
Samarkand Manuscript?
It seemed not. Would he have looked for it if he had heard it spoken of, and having thumbed through it, would he have saved
it? We do not know. What is told is that he stopped in front of a group of works devoted to the occult science and that he
delved into them, forgetting the time. The Mongol officer who came to remind him with a few words had his body covered with
thick red-framed armour and had as head protection a helmet which broadened out like long hair toward the neck. He was carrying
a torch in his hand and to show just how much in a hurry he was, he placed it next to a pile of dusty scrolls. The historian
gave in and gathered into his hands and up to his armpits as many as he could grab, and when the manuscript entitled
Eternal Secrets of Stars and Numbers
fell to the ground, he did not bend over to pick it up again.