How a Muslim Sect Controlled People Using Future Visions

The Assassins, a Muslim sect founded in the eleventh century, were reputed to reward their devotees with visions of heaven through the use of hashish (from which they are widely assumed to have derived their name). According to Marco Polo's account the sect's leader, the 'Old Man of the Mountain':

...used a special 'Paradise' constructed in a secluded valley. Into this Garden of Earthly Delights the selected trainee Assassins were carried while unconscious with drugs ('assassin' is derived from hashashin - 'hashish-eaters'). When they came round in the valley, they were entertained with every delightful variant of wine, women and song promised in the holy scriptures to those who would go to Paradise. Drugged again, they regained consciousness outside the valley in anguish that it had all been a dream. No, they were told, all this will be yours again on completion of your mission (reported in Humble, 1975).

The point of all this was of course to reinforce the belief that the afterlife was a paradise - achievable with certainty only through death in battle - and thus to improve the combativeness of the assassins. This well-known story from Marco Polo dates from two hundred years after the sect had been crushed.

Islamic scholars writing in English have come to regard the story as apocryphal. Even the derivation of the name 'assassin' from 'hashish' is in doubt, according to Bernard Lewis's authoritative historical account of the sect (Lewis, 1980). The term hashshash does refer to users of cannabis in Arabic, but hashish and hasbishi originally referred generically to herbage, and only later specifically meant cannabis. In addition, Lewis argues that since hashishi is particular to Syria as a term of popular abuse, it was 'in all probability the name that gave rise to the story, rather than the reverse'. Cannabis was widely used in the Middle East during this period, and it seems unlikely that the practice in itself was remarkable enough to cause any comment amongst Arabs.

The sect did use assassination as a highly effective weapon, however, against other Persian groups. Their reputation for fanaticism was widespread amongst the Crusaders, and in 1195, when King Richard Coer de Lion was at Chinon, no less than fifteen so-called Assassins were apprehended, and confessed that they had been sent by the King of France to kill him. Before long, such charges became frequent... [but] there can be little doubt that these charges are baseless. The chiefs of the Assassins, in Persia or in Syria, had no interest in the plots and intrigues of Western Europe; the European needed no help outside in the various arts of murder (ibid.)

There is no evidence that the Ismaili Assassins ever made contact with the Crusaders in the relatively short history of the sect (they were subdued by the Mongols, who destroyed their castles in 1256).

Speculation about whether the Assassins believed that their experiences in the Alamut garden, fitted out as Paradise, were really a dream, or whether the garden's compliant slaves were all too real is thus academic. This story is apparently an invention of foreigners and does not appear in Arab texts. It seems that fanaticism does not need to be fuelled by credulity about dreams. Indeed the accounts of the feuds between Middle Eastern factions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries read much like the strife between the militias in Beirut during the 1980s, and there is no suggestion that these modern protagonists had particularly mystical views about dreaming.