New York Diary (Books)

Assassin!

I recently read Bernard Lewis's The Assassins, a reasonably scholarly account of the Ismailis generally (they being the second largest Shi'a community after the Twelvers) and the Assassins in particular (they being a particular Ismaili sect, now pretty much defunct). Their historical story is gripping, and it kind of surprises me that we don't have more references to it in popular culture.

Reading about the Assassins in a post-9/11 world must be a very different experience than doing so just 5 years ago, I realize. While it doesn't seem prudent to make the claim that the Assassins were the first terrorists (history is long, and I'm hardly an expert on such things), they certainly do seem to prefigure terrorism today--a point that Lewis makes abundantly clear in his (new?) final chapter. The assassins sent people out to murder political and religious enemies; they privileged martyrdom and promised paradisal rewards to those who died while carrying out a mission; they appeared cult-like and secretive to those around them; they followed even self-destructive orders with uncanny devotion; they performed their killings in public, apparently in order to inspire fear; they didn't often control territory, and didn't particularly appear to want to do so (that is, they weren't fighting for land--which is part of what made them so frightening to their contemporaries); they infiltrated governments and killed heads of state routinely.

But there are important differences, which, perhaps, are not played up enough. The Assassins were Shi'a; most of their murderous efforts were directed against the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate. For most of their history, their disagreements were over the correct succession of power after Mohammad--a political problem, to be sure, but also a religious problem set squarely within a shared Islamic context, and buttressed, at the beginning at least, with significant amounts of religious scholarship and well-drafted theological philosophies. This was not interreligious terrorism as we know it now, then (even if, later on, the Assassins were occasionally thought by their neighbors not to practice Islam; and they allied with Crusaders from time to time; and they eventually practiced a kind of populist, millenialist, firebrand religion in which Islamic law was sometimes suspended).

Moreover, it's worth noting that the Assassins didn't kill innocents. While they publicly murdered numerous heads of state, political advisers, and Sunni religious leaders, they were painfully careful to do so in a well-ordered manner (usually leading to their own capture) in order to avoid harming others. They almost always killed with a knife, from close quarters; they wouldn't shoot arrows or use poison to attack their victims. They didn't wreak havoc, but sometimes spent years gaining the confidence of the intended target in order to get close enough to attack. Assassins never chose to attack large numbers of people ("all the people at the Sunni court," for example), instead focusing on carefully chosen individuals whose names they recorded and whose death they prepared for with a kind of single-minded devotion. This is scary and indeed caused great fear among the enemies of the Assassins, but is hardly equivalent to today's terrorism.

And finally, the Assassins were recognized as a (sometimes quite powerful) government unto themselves. They certainly sponsored terror-like practices, and horrific killings, but they also entered into alliances with other, clearly legitimate powers. They had serious negotiating power (as evidenced, for example, by their ultimate truce with Saladin after he had been bent on destroying them). To be sure, the Assassins were recognized as odd, frightening, and disturbingly obedient to their leaders--but they were also recognized.

It's easy to fall into the post-9/11 trap of viewing those who consistently use murderous means to achieve their ends as terrorists. The parallel between terrorist and Assassin seems even stronger, I posit, because of the Islamic character that we give to each of them these days (though that's hardly fair these days; we would do well to remember the IRA, for example). We should be careful here, though. While the history of the Assassins may indeed shed some light on terrorism, it cannot, I think, correctly be called terrorism itself.

posted by Skay @ 11:51 AM

How do you write a limit in html?

A couple days ago, I finished reading The Infinite Book, by John D. Barrow. Though I think overall the book was hit-and-miss, some parts were thought-provoking indeed. The two most fun games that Barrow gives us follow.

1. The problem of infinite numbers of actions in a finite amount of time. We know that the infinite sum 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... + 1/(2^n) approaches 1 as n approaches infinity. But concieve of it this way (Barrow's way): a demon switches a light on after half a minute, then off 1/4 of a minute later, then on 1/8 of a minute later still, and so on and so forth (literally ad infinitum). After 1 minute has passed, will the demon have done an infinite number of tasks? And will the light be on or off (or both, or neither)?

2. The problem of infinite size in a random universe. If the universe is infinitely big (or, as an alternative statement of roughly the same problem, if it has been around for an infinitely long time), and if we don't presume that some larger intelligence is conspiring to make earth special, then must we presume there to be an infinite number of earths with an infinite number of people who are exactly like ourselves (or, in the formulation instead of the infinite age of the universe, must we presume that those people did and will exist)? This is the same idea as the monkeys on the typewriters: enough random combinations of atoms in space (letters on the page) and you will get other Earths (other copies of Shakespeare's plays). Of course, the probability of any sufficiently large number of atoms combining to form another you on another Earth around another sun in another spiral galaxy is extremely low. But if you have infinite numbers of atoms combining in infinite numbers of random ways, then even an extraordinarily low probability translates into an infinite number of instances.

There are ways around these mind-benders, to be sure. #1 doesn't take into account the relativistic effects of moving very, very fast. Eventually, you've got to be turning the light on and off at speeds that are appreciably close to c (the speed of light). In fact, the way this problem is set up now, you eventually would be turning the light on and off at speeds faster than the speed of light. This is of course impossible; as you approach c, time slows down so you're never able to exceed the speed of light (or, perhaps, reach the end of the minute?). Even if you could transend c theoretically, though (which you can't), it may not be trivial that no person could ever do this practically: you'd run out of energy from all the work and die first (or, if it wasn't a person, then whatever the power source was would run eventually out of energy), and anyhow you'd be going faster than any known body would be able to go. Maybe the universe is set up not to let us dabble in infinities in any practical way, ever. Maybe infinity has no real, non-mathematical meaning.

The ways around # 2 are rather different. We could of course posit some sort of divine selection that makes our world unique, thereby avoiding the problem of infinite earth-worlds (since the infinity-hypothesis only works if we assume that the creation of our earth was not special). Or we could presume that the universe is neither spatially nor temporally infinite. This kind of makes sense, too, even though we don't have a clue what that would mean we'd see if we looked out from the "edges" of the universe: it would not be absurd to posit that time began with the big bang, that space did too and is merely a function of our universe (or our experience thereof), and that the universe is "closed" and so will not continue to expand infinitely long and far. All these things are at least plausible. The big question here, though, is why # 2 is paradoxical or problematic in the first place. To be sure, it's a little weird to think that not only might we not be special cosmologically, but we might not even be unique (instead, living the exact same lives, with the exact same motivations, and in the exact same observable world, as someone somewhere else in an infinitely large universe). But let's say it's true. Is there anything logically wrong with that?

posted by Skay @ 9:07 PM