But for what? Hasan-i-Sabbah seems to have implied that he and his successors were the representatives of the absent Imam, who would one day appear to claim his inheritance and lead his people to victory. That was probably enough for the Nizaris of Hasan's day, but as the years passed it ceased to be so. Besides, Hasan's successors, though able enough as military and political leaders, lacked Hasan's intellectual gifts; they don't appear to have written anything and there is little evidence of any great spiritual ferment during their reigns. At first, no doubt, the Nizaris had little time to think about such matters, being too preoccupied with ensuring their own survival; but once this seemed assured they began to yearn to return to the old Ismaili habit of metaphysical speculation.
A further source of dissatisfaction was the strict discipline imposed by the first three Masters of Alamut. Hasan-i-Sabbah had set the tone in this respect, and both Bozorg-Ummid and Muhammad I followed his lead; the Islamic ritual law was enforced in its full rigour by all three. This was nothing new for the Ismailis; in Cairo, too, the Fatimids had emphasized the need to observe the outward forms of religion as well as the importance of understanding its hidden depths. But by the time Muhammad I came to power in Alamut the emphasis seems to have come to be on the outward aspects at the partial expense of inner truth.
All this was reversed, however, by Muhammad I's son, Hasan II.
During his father's lifetime Hasan concealed his ideas as far as possible, but his eloquence and personality gave him a strong influence among the younger Nizaris, and this excited his father's suspicions. It is also said that he drank wine in secret. It's interesting how often this theme emerges in the accounts of the Ismaili rulers, and one can never be sure if it is to be understood literally or metaphorically. The same is true of much classical Persian poetry, notably that of Hafiz, and it seems that wine, the forbidden gateway to altered states of consciousness, had a symbolic significance for Muslims that it lacked for Christians. For Hasan's contemporaries, the idea that he drank wine implied that he was above the law, and from this it was but a short step to think that he might be the Imam.
In an effort to counteract these dangerous ideas, Muhammad called a public meeting, at which he pointed out that the Imamate was hereditary; since he himself was not the Imam, his son could not be either. Hasan publicly denied that he was the Imam, but the Ismailis were accustomed to the idea of `dissimulation' of truth and many of them refused to accept the denial. Muhammad had 250 of these dissidents executed and made a further 250 carry the corpses away on their backs as they went into exile.
But Hasan was merely biding his time. When his father died in 1162 Hasan was about 35 years old; in his brief life he was to to bring about an almost complete change in the pattern of Nizari development, not merely in Alamut but throughout all the Nizari territories, including Syria.
It was an astonishingly bold coup that Hasan had in mind, and he took his time in preparing for it. For the first two and a half years of his reign he did little; he merely relaxed the oppressive restrictions at Alamut and refrained from punishing those who broke the ritual law. He also released a number of captives who had been held at Alamut.
Then, in 1164, he acted. It was the 17th day of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. He summoned his people from all the Nizari territories in Iran and assembled them at the foot of the Rock. It was a grand occasion. The people were arranged in groups according to the districts from which they came and a pulpit had been set up; this faced towards Mecca, so that the audience had their backs towards Mecca. (Normally in a mosque the arrangement is reversed.) At each corner of the pulpit a flag was set: white, red, yellow (the Fatimid colour), and green (the colour of the Prophet).
At about noon, when all the people were assembled, Hasan came down from the fortress. He was dressed in white and wore a white turban. He ascended the pulpit and addressed the audience.
Speaking first in Persian, he announced that someone had come to him in secret from the Imam and had brought him a message, which he proceeded to deliver. We don't have the text of this but we know its general sense. "The Imam of our time," Hasan proclaimed, "sends you blessings and compassion, for you are his special servants. And therefore he has lifted from you the burden of obeying the ritual law and has brought you the Resurrection (qiyama)."
Hasan now changed from Persian to Arabic, which was of course unknown to most of his audience; but an interpreter had been placed at the foot of the pulpit to give a running translation. Apparently the audience took the Arabic speech for the direct word of the Imam. Its essence was that Hasan was the Imam's representative and mouthpiece, and all Nizaris must obey him in everything, for his word and the Imam's were one.
At the conclusion of his address Hasan came down from the pulpit, performed the two ritual prostrations that signified the Day of Festival ('Id) that marks the end of Ramadan, and announced that the fast was over. Food, possibly accompanied by the forbidden wine, was brought; musicians appeared and the people were invited to celebrate. In this way Hasan proclaimed the Resurrection; subsequently the same ceremony was enacted in the other Nizari territories, including Syria.
The full boldness of Hasan's coup may be lost on modern readers, especially those with a Christian background. For Muslims, Church and State are indivisible, and the ritual law is the civil law. Hasan had therefore abrogated the religious law and the civil law simultaneously, and had done so in the most dramatic manner possible, by publicly breaking the fast of Ramadan. From now on, the only law the Nizaris were to acknowledge was the word of the Imam, which in practice meant the word of Hasan himself.
At this stage Hasan does not seem to have claimed that he himself was the Imam, though he apparently did so later, or at least allowed it to be tacitly assumed. Even if he did not make the claim, his devoted followers doubtless soon made it for him; after all, this idea had been current among them even during the lifetime of Muhammad I.
So great was Hasan's authority that his reform was accepted with little question throughout his territories. He allowed no hesitation on this score, and it said that he at least proposed the death penalty for anyone who refused the new dispensation. But there don't seem to have been many such, and Hasan was so loved by his people that he came to be known simply as Ala Dhikri-Salam (On His Mention Peace).
But he was not loved by everyone. Among those who rejected the new ideas, in their hearts at least, was Hasan's own brother-in-law, Husayn-i-Namavar. Jealousy may have played a part, for Husayn came from a family which at one time had been locally powerful. Eighteen months after the proclamation of the Resurrection he murdered Hasan at the castle of Lamasar. Probably he intended to reverse Hasan's reforms and return the Nizaris to Islamic orthodoxy, but he was given no chance to do so. Muhammad II, Hasan's son, though only nineteen at his father's death, was capable and determined and fully in sympathy with the ideas of the Resurrection. He took power, executed Husayn-i-Namavar and all his family, and over the subsequent 44 years devoted himself to working out the philosophical and doctrinal implications of the Resurrection.
The boldest step taken by the new ruler was to claim to be the Imam. Hasan II, as we have seen, had probably also claimed to be the Imam, but only spiritually. Certainly there was nothing impossible about the idea of such a spiritual descent from an Ismaili point of view. But Muhammad's position was more extreme, for he claimed that his father was actually descended physically from Nizar.
The official version of how this came about seems to have been that Nizar's grandson had been brought to Hasan-i-Sabbah secretly and had grown up under his protection in the village of Qasir Khan at the foot of the Rock. Hasan II was supposed to be a descendant of this grandson, though the exact details of how he came to appear to be the son of Muhammad I were left vague. They are filled in, somewhat scandalously, by the violently anti-Ismaili historian Juvaini, who gives two alternative versions which he says were current in Alamut.
The first version is that the Imam was living incognito in Qasir Khan; he had a son at the same time as the Lord of Alamut and an old woman exchanged the babies secretly, hiding them under her chador (veil). Apart from the fact that women in Qasir Khan don't wear chadors today and probably didn't then, the story derives from a well-known folkore motif and is obviously legendary. It may well have been current among the people of the valley.
The alternative version is less edifying. It is that the Imam committed adultery with Muhammad's wife. Muhammad found out and killed the Imam, but the Imam's son was born. In support of this story Juvaini says that the people used to dishonour the grave of Muhammad I. Although the Imam would doubtless be regarded as above the law and therefore entitled to behave in this manner, it seems possible that this version is a later fabrication by the Nizaris' enemies.
Is it conceivable that Hasan II was really descended from Nizar? It seems extremely unlikely, yet, as we have seen, a rather similar sequence of events may have led to the founding of the Fatimid dynasty; it is therefore just possible that history repeated itself at Alamut. On the other hand, we do know that the Ismailis recognized the possibility of a spiritual succession of the Imamate, and on the whole this is the more likely explanation for what happened at Alamut. The whole emphasis of Nizari thought at the time of the Resurrection was on inner, esoteric interpretation; probably all the rather literal-minded attempts to produce a Fatimid genealogy for Hasan II were intended mainly for the less sophisticated among the faithful, while the more esoteric conception of a spiritual descent was reserved for the more intellectual members of the community.
The essence of the Resurrection (qiyama) is that it was the fulfillment of the long-established Ismaili expectation of the Millennium. Ismaili eschatology had always predicted that the Imam of the Resurrection would come to usher in the rule of righteousness, when Ismailis would no longer have to `dissimulate' by obeying the ritual law; now that longed-for day had finally dawned.
Clearly, however, it had not done so in quite the way that the older Ismaili authors had expected. The Resurrection was supposed to be a cataclysmic event on a world scale, but now the world went on just as before; indeed, outside the Ismaili territories the great proclamation was almost unknown. But for the Nizaris themselves everything had changed; they were now living in a new age. But since everything on the physical level went on just as before, the change must be internal and spiritual. The Resurrection meant, in fact, the dawning of a new phase of consciousness. (These ideas are developed at greater length in the Appendices, to which you should refer if interested.)
The esoteric interpretation of religion had always been fundamental to Ismailism, but under the Fatimids the teaching was that both aspects, esoteric and exoteric, must be given full weight. If you remained at the exoteric level you could never hope to advance spiritually, but this didn't mean that the exoteric religious forms had no importance. In a metaphor used by Abu Firas (Chapter 4), the exoteric aspect is the shell of the egg, which protects the yolk (the delicate truths hidden within).
The Nizaris of the Resurrection, however, threw away not just the shell of the egg but the white as well, and concentrated all their attention on the yolk - the Secret of Secrets. Nizarism thus came to be pure esotericism made into a state religious doctrine.
The whole of Nizari spiritual life centred on the Imam, who was divine, a manifestation of God. In a sense, of course, this was nothing new, for the Ismailis had always regarded the Imam in this light. But for the Nizaris the Imam had been hidden for a century and a half; none of them had ever been in his presence before. Now he was once again among his devotees, and their excitement must have been almost boundless.
Moreover, the relationship of the Nizaris to their Imam was quite different from that of the inhabitants of Cairo to the Fatimid Caliph. Cairo was a large city, where the Caliph lived in a palace surrounded by officials and guards, so that few of his followers can ever have seen him or heard him speak. Alamut, on the other hand, was small and rural, and the population of all the Nizari territories put together must have been much smaller than that of Egypt; no doubt almost every Iranian Nizari, at least those living in or near the Alamut valley, could see and hear the Imam.
These things made the Nizaris' devotion to their Imam a practical and personal affair and no doubt heightened its intensity to an extraordinary degree. But there was also something else: the Nizari Imam was no ordinary Imam but was the Imam of the Resurrection. In him the whole elaborate Ismaili cosmology found its fulfillment. The Ismailis conceived of creation as composed of a number of levels, and spiritual enlightenment consisted in moving upwards from level to level. All the Imam's followers would now ascend with him to the next higher level in the cosmic hierarchy. Indeed, they were there already, without having to die first. The Resurrection was thus an event of literally world-shaking importance.
Awareness of these momentous events must in itself have been enough to bring many of the Nizaris to something like ecstasy, but was there more to it? I have already said that there are important similarities between Ismailism and Sufism, and it seems likely that the Nizaris of this period were making use of techniques for inducing altered states of consciousness like those employed by the Sufis, including chanting and the inward repetition of the name of God. Hasan II certainly, and Muhammad II very probably, were interested in Sufism.
The rumours about the Nizari's use of hashish may be relevant here. Perhaps these reflect a distorted version of their use of meditational techniques, or perhaps they really did use hashish or other drugs as a means of inducing altered states of awareness. When E.G. Browne, the nineteenth century Persian scholar, visited Iran at the end of the last century he found that hashish was held in such superstitious awe that it was seldom referred to openly but was designated by code names such as Master Seyyid or the Parrot of Mysteries (the reference in both cases being to the colour green, for Seyyids - alleged descendants of the Prophet - wear green turbans). This fear of the drug cannot plausibly be attributed to its hallucinogenic properties, since the more potent opium was widely smoked at the time and was not referred to in these oblique ways. More likely the use of code names points to a folk memory of a link between hashish and the feared Nizaris.
If I am right in supposing that the Nizaris made use of various methods for altering consciousness, we could infer that the combination of these techniques with the state of excitement caused by Hasan's announcement of the Resurrection would have had an immensely powerful psychological effect. One set of influences would reinforce the other; the meditational techniques would act like a lens, focusing the Nizaris' devotion to their Imam into a white heat that was intense enough to transmute the consciousness of some of them, at least, into a new condition. This would go far to explain the impression of enthusiasm which filters down to us even through the fragmentary records that have survived. Something important happened at Alamut, and, whatever it was, it was momentous enough to make the Nizaris believe, at least for a time, that they had indeed experienced the Resurrection that Ismaili eschatology predicted.
What I am suggesting, in short, is that under Hasan II and Muhammad II there grew up at Alamut a mystical school similar to those that were developing at the time among the Sufis, and making use of techniques like those of the Sufis. The difference, however, was that the Nizari's spiritual leader was no ordinary human sheikh but the divine Imam himself.
At first glance it may seem puzzling that the Nizaris do not appear to have made much of the murder of Hasan II. One might have expected that he would become a Nizari martyr, as Ali's son Husayn did for the Shiites. The explanation, I think, is to be found in the way the Ismailis conceived of the Imam. They believed that the subtle body of the Imam is immune from harm even if his physical body is killed. Since Hasan was the Imam he could not really be killed, so there was no reason to be excessively despondent about his death. The Imam lived on in Muhammad II, who was in his essential nature identical with his father.
The first level is that of the People of Opposition, meaning all those who rejected the Imam and his teaching. Even in the old dispensation these had been regarded as bound for hell; now they were simply obliterated, held to be non-existent. Since God is the only reality there can be nothing outside Him or in opposition to Him, so if anyone appears to be in opposition they must merely be a kind of optical illusion. While they are supposedly alive they have a kind of provisional or illusory existence, like that of a mirage, but when they die they disappear utterly and vanish into that nothingness which they have been in all along.
The second level is occupied by the People of Order. These are the Ismailis, living and dead, who are not participants in the Resurrection. They are called People of Order because they cling to the elaborate Ismaili hierarchical scheme. They, too, it seems, are non-existent. The assignment of the dead Ismailis to non-existence seems rather harsh, though they may possibly have been saved by an old teaching that the doctrine and truth of one Imam have no necessary application to those of any other. The general idea, however, is clear: the old Ismaili hierarchy is superseded and those who cling to it are hardly better off than outright unbelievers.
Only the third group, the People of Union, is saved. They are the ones who have grasped something at least of the truth of the Imam of the Resurrection and are striving to unite themselves fully to him. It is in principle open to people in the other two groups to see the light and join the People of Union, but we don't get the impression that the Nizaris spent much time or effort in trying to convert non-Ismailis, who were presumably regarded as too non-existent to be worth troubling about. The inhabitants of the Nizari territories in Iran and Syria were expected to participate in the Resurrection, and in most cases they did so; we do not know how many old-style Ismailis there were in Iran at this time or what their reaction to the new teaching was.
The new teaching was supposed to have literally cosmic reverberations. The events at Alamut were thought to have vast significance, set against the Ismaili cosmology of cyclical time. All space and all time were focused on the Rock of Alamut on that fateful seventeenth day of Ramadan when the Resurrection was proclaimed. There was nothing accidental about the date; it was predetermined from eternity. There were elaborate esoteric teachings concerning time, which was conceived of as cyclical. (See the Appendices for more details of these ideas.)
With the Resurrection we touch the high point of the story of Alamut, and perhaps of the whole Ismaili venture. The Resurrection was to produce a fascinating offshoot in Syria, which I shall describe in the next chapter, but in Alamut the excitement dies away somewhat after the death of Muhammad II and the Nizaris begin the long decline which was to end in the general catastrophe of the Mongol invasion. Long before then, however, the original creative impulse had spent itself. Yet that there was a strong and genuine impulse at the beginning is hard to doubt. We who must perforce try to understand the Resurrection through fragmentary written descriptions, across the gulf of seven centuries, can only guess at what it meant in terms of inner experience, but there is no doubt that the inner experience was what mattered. The Nizaris were asked to shift to a new state of being, and for a time, at least, they believed that they had done so - that they were actually living in a transformed world.
This idea may seem ridiculous, if we contrast the grandiose nature of their claims with the political reality outside. The rest of the world went on as before, untroubled by the fact that it had now ceased to exist. To look at the matter in this way, however, is to miss the point as the Nizaris saw it. For them, time itself had come to an end with the proclamation of the Resurrection. It was a magnificent answer to the failure of a military undertaking: the enemy was simply annihilated.
In the end, of course, the dream could not last. Muhammad's successor Hasan III brought the community, kicking and screaming, back into the `real' world, by reinstating the Islamic ritual law; but even if he had not done so, the vision would have crumbled and dissolved at last, as has every other attempt to create the perfect society on earth. But probably the Nizari state was particularly unstable because of the basis on which it was founded.
Almost every long-lasting mystical tradition we know of seems to have existed against a background of exoteric religion. Sufi masters, for example, expected their pupils to have fulfilled the requirements of orthodox Islam before undertaking the esoteric practices of Sufism. In the case of Ismailism itself, the parent regime in Egypt always emphasized the need for observation of the exoteric aspects of Islam as well as for study of the esoteric aspects. Nizarism at the period of the Resurrection was an anomaly, in that it abandoned the exoteric forms altogether and concentrated wholly on the esoteric side of Ismailism. This may have been its undoing. The Ismaili doctrine, taken undiluted, proved in the end too strong a medicine.