In my medieval Muslim murder mystery, The Thread of Reason, I recount the violent death of one “ben El the tax collector,” a protégé of the sultan’s vizier (i.e. prime minister) Nizam al-Mulk. “Despite his unfortunate choice of profession,” one of the characters tells us, “and despite being Jewish, he was well-loved in Basra.”
Ben El was a real-life figure, known to the history books as ibn Allah. Here’s an account of his demise from a medieval source, ibn al-Athir (1160-1233). The episode has some bearing on the debate between my left- and right-of-center friends as to how Jews were treated in medieval Islam. It shows that despite being second class citizens, they could nevertheless rise to prominent positions in the Islamic world and that when they came into conflict with Muslims, sometimes even the most highly-placed Muslim officials would take their side. With the possible exception of the sultan himself, there was none higher than Nizam al-Mulk:
Sultan Malikshah arrived in Khuzistan this year [1079-80] to go hunting. With him was Khumartegin and Gohara’in. They were both working to secure the death of Ibn Allah the Jew, the tax farmer of Basra, who was under the protection of Nizam al-Mulk and that was the reason why they were hostile to the Jew. The sultan ordered him drowned and this was done. For three days Nizam al-Mulk withdrew from public appearance and locked his door. Later he was advised to appear at the ceremonial parade, which he did. He gave a great feast for the sultan, during which he presented him with many things, but he criticized him for what he had done. The sultan made his excuses.
The position of the Jew had grown so great that when his wife died everyone in Basra, except the cadi, walked behind her bier. He had lived in great style and vast wealth.
From The Annals of the Seljuq Turks: Selections from al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh of ‘Izz al-Din Ibn al-Athir, London: RoutledgeCurzon (2002), D.S.Richards, tr.
According to the text, Khumartegin and Gohara’in were motivated more by court politics than by any overarching hatred for Jews. About ten years after the death of ibn Allah, Gohara'in was involved in another incident involving a Jewish official which confirms that. But the later incident also shows that the Chosen People did have plenty of enemies in Islamic circles, despite their wealth and prominence (or more likely, because of it). I’ll recount that episode in a future post.
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
“The power of ideas—Allah’s ideas—was all I ever needed.”
Thus spake the Sheikh of the Mountain, the leader of the medieval Assassin cult in real life, and one of the principal villains in my novel The Thread of Reason. In the book, the sheikh captures and imprisons the hero, Omar Khayyam, along with Omar’s assistant, Muhammad Baghdadi. At a confrontation in the sheikh’s study, Omar was characteristically skeptical about the sheikh’s grandiose claims of his power—basically it was the scene from every James Bond movie where 007 confronts the bad guy bent on world domination. But unlike Omar, Baghdadi was intrigued. He wanted to know how the sheikh commanded such unwavering loyalty from his Assassins, who were all too eager to die for their master on a suicide mission. In response, the sheikh offered Baghdadi a demonstration. “Let me prove how powerful an idea can be,” he said. “When it comes from Allah.”
He rose from his cushion and gestured for Baghdadi to follow him to the window. Putting one arm around Baghdadi’s shoulders, he pointed out to the courtyard, where dozens of men were working by torchlight. “Every one of my Assassins is completely dedicated to our cause,” [he] said. “Pick one of them out—any one—and I’ll show you how much.”
Still at the table, Omar was absorbed in extracting the pit from a date when suddenly he jerked his head upward. He had just remembered something: a story from the history books. It gave him a bad feeling about where this was going. He scrambled to get to his feet and join the others at the window.
Baghdadi had made his selection. “That one,” he said. He pointed to a young man stripped to the waist who was hustling across the courtyard at a good clip despite the two baskets of bricks hanging from a pole across his shoulders.
“You there,” the Sheikh of the Mountain shouted. The porter dropped his burden and prostrated himself in the dust. “What is your bidding, O Sheikh of the Mountain?” he shouted back.
“I want you to climb the ramparts and—”
“Stop this right now,” Omar said firmly…
“Why do you say stop? You don’t even know what I’m going to tell him.”
“You mean you’re not planning to order him to jump off the castle wall?”
“Now you spoiled the surprise.”
If the scene seems familiar, it’s probably because you saw something similar in the 1982 sword and sorcery flick Conan the Barbarian. In explaining how he made the transition from warlord to cult leader, the villain Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) tells Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger), “There was a time, boy, when I searched for steel, when steel meant more to me than gold or jewels.”
“The riddle...of steel,” Conan replies.
“Yes! You know what it is, don't you, boy? Shall I tell you? It's the least I can do. Steel isn't strong, boy, flesh is stronger! Look around you. There, on the rocks.” He beckons to one of his followers standing above them on a ridge. “A beautiful girl. Come to me, my child...” The girl calmly steps off the edge of the cliff and plummets to her death.
“That is strength, boy!” says Thulsa. “That is power! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”
But lest you think the Sheikh of the Mountain plagiarized Thulsa Doom, it was in fact the other way around. The story has been associated with the Assassin cult ever since the Crusaders returned to Europe with tales of their adventures. Bernard Lewis, in The Assassins: a Radical Sect in Islam, relates “a somewhat questionable story” of one of the later Assassin leaders:
Count Henry of Champagne, returning from Armenia in 1198, was entertained in his castle by the Old Man, who ordered a number of his henchmen to leap to their deaths from the ramparts for the edification of his guest, and then hospitably offered to provide others for his requirements: and if there was any man who had done him an injury, he should let him know, and he would have him killed.
(From the “continuation” of William of Tyre’s History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea.)
But even in 1198, the story was already old. An earlier version occurred during the Qarmatian Rebellion. The Qarmatians were one of the strangest sects in the history of Islam. They were communists. A dissident Shiite offshoot, dedicated to the brotherhood of mankind, they threw off the authority of the caliphs and established their own egalitarian utopia in the early 900s, with their capital at Lahsa, near Bahrain. Naser-e Khosraw, who visited the Qarmatians around the year 1050, described what he found:
They neither pray nor fast, but they do believe in Mohammad and his mission…They take no tax from the peasantry, and whenever anyone is stricken by poverty or contracts a debt they take care of his needs until the debtor’s affairs should be cleared up. And if anyone is in debt to another, the creditor cannot claim more than the amount of the debt. Any stranger to the city who possesses a craft by which to earn his livelihood is given enough money to buy the tools of his trade and establish himself. If anyone’s property or implements suffer loss and the owner is unable to undertake necessary repairs, they appoint their own slaves to make the repairs and charge the owner nothing. The rulers have several gristmills in Lahsa where the citizenry can have their meal ground into flour for free, and the maintenance of the buildings and the wages of the miller are paid by the rulers.
[From Naser-e Khosraw, Book of Travels (Safarnama), W. M Thackston, Jr., tr. (1986)]
You may wonder how a communist state can afford to be so generous and survive, let alone prosper for 150 years, when every other experiment in communism that litters the pages of history collapsed under the weight of its own poverty. The answer is buried in the passage above: slavery. “At the time I was there,” Khosraw writes, “they had thirty thousand Zanzibar and Abyssinian slaves working in the fields and gardens.”
The Qarmatians supplemented the stolen product of their slaves' labor with plunder from neighboring communities. In 930, for example, under the command of Abu Tahir Suleiman Janabi, they sacked Mecca, killed several pilgrims in the holy precincts of the Kaaba, stole the sacred Black Stone that was kept there, and brought it back to their capital. According to Khosraw, “They said that the stone was a ‘human magnet’ that attracted people, not knowing that it was the nobility and magnificence of Mohammad that drew people [to Mecca].” After Janabi’s death his successors returned it for a ransom. At some point during its theft and captivity it got shattered—to this day a silver frame is used to hold the pieces together.
The raid on Mecca was not the Qarmatians’ only attack on Muslim cities. Two years earlier, Abu Tahir Suleiman Janabi and his men had marched on Baghdad, capital of the Commander of the Faithful, the Caliph al-Muqtadir. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, tells us what happened next:
Baghdad was filled with consternation; and the caliph trembled behind the veils of his palace. In a daring inroad beyond the Tigris, Abu Tahir advanced to the gates of the capital with no more than five hundred horse. By the special order of Muqtadir the bridges had been broken down, and the person or head of the rebels was expected every hour by the commander of the faithful. His lieutenant, from a motive of fear or pity, apprised Abu Tahir of his danger, and recommended speedy escape. “Your master,” said the intrepid Qarmatian to the messenger, “is at the head of thirty thousand soldiers: three such men as these are wanting in his host:” at the same instant, turning to three of his companions, he commanded the first to plunge a dagger into his breast, the second to leap into the Tigris, and the third to cast himself headlong from down a precipice. They obeyed without a murmur. “Relate,” continued the imam, “what you have seen: before the evening your general shall be chained among my dogs.”
[Spelling updated for consistency with modern use]
Abu Tahir Suleiman Janabi's boastful prediction was not to be. The Qarmatians were driven away from Baghdad and al-Muqtadir, despite a turbulent reign, remained unchained.
I put the “Riddle of Steel” scene in The Thread of Reason because I wanted to make a serious point about the power of ideas and because the book is about the Assassins and the scene is a timed-honored part of Assassin lore. But I couldn't resist poking fun a little at how often it has appeared, not only in Conan the Barbarian and The Thread of Reason, but in many other works as well (1964’s The Long Ships and 2005’s The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam come to mind). And so, when the Sheikh of the Mountain accuses Omar of ruining his surprise, I have Omar reply, “When Suleiman Janabi performed that demonstration—a century and a half ago—it was a surprise. Now it’s just a cliché.”
As for whether the porter actually jumps, you’ll just have to read the book.
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
Some readers of The Thread of Reason have asked me what rules I followed for transliteration of Arabic words.
Many sounds exist in Arabic that are nowhere to be found in English. For example, in their book Teach Yourself Arabic, Jack Smart and Frances Altorfer explain how to pronounce the letter ع as follows: “We have a muscle in our throat which is never used except in vomiting. Think about that and pretend you are about to be sick.”
Needless to say, rendering such sounds in the Roman alphabet is a challenge. To do so, scholars have devised elaborate systems which entail doubled vowels, dots in unexpected places, apostrophes whose direction changes the pronunciation and meaning, and capital letters in the middle of words.
However, rather than use these systems, I found it best to follow the advice that Richard Burton gave in the preface to his definitive and erotic translation of the Thousand and One Nights. That’s Richard Burton the nineteenth century Arabic scholar and adventurer, whose scandalous life would make an interesting post on this blog someday. Not Richard Burton the twentieth century actor, whose scandalous life is also interesting, but off topic:
As regards the transliteration of Arabic words I deliberately reject the artful and complicated system, ugly and clumsy withal, affected by scientific modern Orientalists….[T]his Roman hand bewitched may have its use in purely scientific and literary works; but it would be wholly out of place in one whose purpose is that of the novel, to amuse rather than to instruct. Moreover these devices perplex the simple and teach nothing to the learned. Either the reader knows Arabic, in which case Greek letters, italics and "upper case," diacritical points and similar typographic oddities are, as a rule with some exceptions unnecessary; or he does not know Arabic, when none of these expedients will be of the least use to him....As words are the embodiment of ideas and writing is of words, so the word is the spoken word; and we should write it as pronounced.
In keeping with this philosophy, I devised the following rules for myself:
1. If a word has a common spelling in English, use it. This is especially the case with names of historical figures who are well-known in the West. For example, the hero of my novel is “Omar Khayyam,” the common English spelling, and not the more precise “Umar Khayyam.”
2. For all other words, I use a simplified alphabet which makes no attempt to distinguish between emphatic and non-emphatic consonants or long and short vowels. Thus, س and ص are both rendered s; ا and َ as a. ع is represented by an apostrophe as in shari’ah. Doubled-consonants are shown as doubled as in hajj. I confess that on the last two points, pedantry may have gotten the better of me, at the expense of simplicity, but at least I was pedantic consistently.
3. Where the definite article al- appears before a “sun letter,” I spell it as pronounced, not as written. So the common greeting, “Peace to you, friend,” appears as “as-salamu alaykum,” not “al-salamu alaykum.”
By following these rules in The Thread of Reason, I hope I succeeded in amusing my readers, rather than perplexing them with “typographic oddities.”
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
Let me start by expressing my appreciation to everyone who participated in yesterday’s launch of my novel, The Thread of Reason. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
The Thread of Reason is a mystery concerning the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk, who was the vizier (prime minister) of the Seljuq Empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to the borders of India. He served the sultans Alp Arslan and Malik-shah. According to some accounts, Malik-shah had little interest in anything other than hunting and war, which left Nizam al-Mulk with the power and responsibility of day-to-day governing. His assassination was widely reported in the chronicles of the time (or near the time, anyway). For example, here’s what Al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh (The Complete History) by Izz ad-Din ibn al-Athir (1160-1232/33) had to say,
On 10 Ramadan of this year [15 October 1092] the Vizier Nizam al-Mulk Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Ishaq was killed near Nihavand. He and the sultan had been in Isfahan and had set out to return to Baghdad. After having arrived at this place and having finished his fast-breaking meal, he left in his litter to go to the womenfolk’s tent, when a Daylami youth, one of the Assassins, came to him in the guise of a suppliant or petitioner. He struck him with a dagger he had with him, and fled, leaving him dead. He stumbled over a tent guy-rope, which allowed men to catch up with him and kill him.
The killing of the assassin on the spot is what makes the murder such a ripe subject for a mystery novel: no one had the opportunity to question him and learn who, if anyone, he was working for. Historians have pondered this mystery for centuries, but as far as I know, the solution I came up with in The Thread of Reason is completely original. Check it out on Amazon.com.
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam.
The quotation from ibn al-Athir comes from The Annals of the Seljuq Turks: Selections from al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh of ‘Izz al-Din ibn al-Athir, London: RoutledgeCurzon (2002), tr. D.S.Richards, p. 253.
Photo credit: “The Assassination of Nizam al-Mulk” in Rashid ad-Din Tabib, Jami al-tavarikh, Topkapi Museum, Istanbul, Hazine Library Manuscript #1653, folio 360b (14th/15th century).
Tomorrow marks Nowruz, the Persian New Year, so it seemed like a good time to put together a few notes on the history of the holiday. Its celebration goes back some 3,000 years, its origins lost in the mists of time.
I suppose the version which attributes it to the mythical king Jamshid is as good as any. A Promethean figure, legend tells us Jamshid blessed humankind with metalworking, textiles, bricklaying, mining, perfume, medicine, shipbuilding, and (on the downside) the caste system. Then, according to Abu’l-Qasim Ferdowsi’s epic poem, the Shah-nameh (The Book of Kings, ca. 1000 AD),
Although Jamshid had accomplished all these things, he strove to climb even higher. With his royal farr* he constructed a throne studded with gems, and had demons raise him aloft from the earth into the heavens; there he sat on his throne like the sun shining in the sky. The world’s creatures gathered in wonder about him and scattered jewels on him, and called this day the New Day, or No-Ruz. This was the first day of the month of Farvardin, at the beginning of the year, when Jamshid rested from his labors and put aside all rancor. His nobles made a great feast, calling for wine and musicians, and this splendid festival has been passed down to us, as a memorial to Jamshid.
(The Shah-nameh is a fascinating work in its own right. One of these days I’ll have to post an entry about it).
In any case, over time the Persian calendar drifted out of synch with the seasons, just like the Julian calendar that was used in the west. There was need of someone like Pope Gregory to institute reforms. In his Al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh (Complete History), the historian ibn al-Athir (1160-1232/33) tells us,
In this year [467 AH/1074-75 AD] Nizam al-Mulk and Sultan Malikshah assembled several leading astronomers, who fixed the start of the new year (Nayruz) at the starting point of (the House of) Aries (i.e. the vernal equinox). Previously the new year had been when the sun was halfway through Pisces. This initiative of the sultan provided the starting point for yearly calendars.
At the same time astronomical observations were undertaken for Sultan Malikshah. A group of astronomers gathered to carry this out, including Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyami, Abu’l-Muzaffar al-Asfizari, Maymun ibn al-Najib al-Wasiti and others. A large sum of money was expended and observations lasted until the sultan died.
The leader of the team, “Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyami,” is of course Omar Khayyam, known in the west as the poet who composed the Rubaiyat (And who’s also the hero of my new novel, The Thread of Reason, which, in honor of his calendar, launches tomorrow on Amazon.com!) Omar’s calendar, called the Jalali calendar, after one of the titles of Malikshah, is, with some modifications, still in use in Iran today. It is accurate to one day every 5,000 years—beating out the Gregorian calendar, which is “only” accurate to one day every 3,000 years.
So best wishes for a happy Nowruz. Celebrate with wine and musicians. I’ll leave you with some of the latter—some traditional Persian music. This is a recording I made on Saturday, at the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s annual Nowruz celebration. The violin-like instrument that Mr. Dehghan is playing is called a kamancheh. Descriptions of them are found as early as the il-Khanid (Mongol) dynasty (13th-14th century).
Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092.
*-The royal farr is the power that God bestows upon a king, provided he’s worthy. It’s something like a cross between magic, glory, luck, and the Mandate of Heaven.
The quotation from Ferdowsi comes from Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, New York: Penguin Books (2006), tr. Dick Davis, p. 7.
The quotation from ibn al-Athir comes from The Annals of the Seljuq Turks: Selections from al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh of ‘Izz al-Din ibn al-Athir, London: RoutledgeCurzon (2002), tr. D.S.Richards, p. 189.
Photo credit: “Jamshid’s throne borne by divs,” illustration from the Shah-nameh, 15th century, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 22-1948, fol. 11v.
