HASHING OUT THE AXIS OF EVIL:

Everybody Loves the Assassins: Set loose in the land that invented terrorism ten centuries ago, Tim Cahill finds crumbling castles, legends of hash-smoking hit men, and Iranians who won't stop being nice. You call this the axis of evil? (Tim Cahill, October 2002, Outside)

SO THERE'S THIS IRANIAN farmer, a great big strapping bodybuilder guy who lives in a tiny village high in the Elburz Mountains, and he's working out in a makeshift gym, hoisting homemade weights made from five-gallon jerry cans filled with cement. I'm the first American Parviz Kiai has ever met, and he wants to shake my hand, despite the fact that my mission in Iran is to visit the castles of the Assassins, a radical Islamic sect that was, arguably, the first terrorist group in history. This is an endeavor some think unlikely to redound to Iran's acclaim or glory. No matter. Parviz motions to the wall of his gym, where there are several photos taped up on the adobe. Affixed highest is the grim and glowering countenance of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose death in 1989 is mourned each year on an official national holiday called The Heart-Rending Departure of the Great Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Below the defunct ayatollah are dozens of photos clipped from American muscle magazines: huge, freakish steroidal monsters festooned with enormous and appalling dirigibles of muscles. It was, I thought, a wall of dueling Great Satans, an arresting graphic representation of Iran's current identity crisis. It's true that angry demonstrators in Iran's capital, Tehran, had just been out in the street chanting "Death to America." On the other hand, this is the same city that held a candlelight vigil after the September 11 attacks to express its sympathy and support for America. It's the same nation that has voted overwhelmingly for political and economic reform in the past two presidential elections. But it's also a place with a theocratic government that President Bush says is part of an "axis of evil," a place where—according to a U.S. National Security Council spokesman—"hard-line unaccountable elements...facilitated the movement of Al Qaeda terrorists escaping from Afghanistan," and where "an unelected few...have used terrorism as an instrument of policy."

It was the Assassins who pioneered the concept of terrorism as an instrument of policy back between the 11th and 13th centuries. Murdering prominent officials and clerics, of course, was nothing new. People have been whacking kings and emperors since the dawn of recorded history. But early-day assassination had usually been a one-time deal: a Brutus and some conspirators taking out a Caesar. The Assassins repeatedly and systematically killed their enemies with guile and stealth, striking them inside their own strongholds, and used the threat of imminent assassination to bend officials to their will.

In fact, the English word assassin is rooted in the name of the sect, and the Assassins, or so the legends would have us believe, committed their murders under the influence of hashish. They were called hashishiyyin, the Arabic word for hash smokers. The cannabis suggestion invariably generates skepticism among the ranks of those who have inhaled. Ruthless killers, honed to razor-sharp perfection, taking big hits off the bong? Kind of hard to picture.

If you've never read the very amusing travel writer Tim Cahill, here's a topical way to get started. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 18, 2002 3:03 PM