The first episode of the Egyptian television series Al-Hashshashin aired on the first day of the Holy Month of Ramadan and provides viewers with a general overview of Islamic history after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
The narrator starts the story with the Umayyad Dynasty and continues until the 11th century, when “esoteric cults" emerged. One infamous cult was the Hashshashin, or the Order of the Assassins, founded by Hasan i-Sabbagh.
Egyptian actor Karim Abdul Aziz plays the mysterious leader.
The series describes Sabbah as one of the “most dangerous and strangest” phenomena in Islamic history, adding, right at the start of the second episode: “In darkness lies a great secret, and Hasan i-Sabbah affiliated himself, his soul, and body, with darkness.”
The series has been lauded for its production and craft, but critics say the plot lacks historical credibility.
What word came first?
The Al-Hashshashin series was shot in Malta and Kazakhstan, rather than Persia (modern-day Iran), where its story unfolds and where Sabbah was born sometime in 1037.
During his lifetime, Sabbah was an acclaimed mathematician and philosopher, but he is better known to history today as a preacher of the Nizari Ismaili sect, from which a militia emerged calling itself fedayeen (like the word self-used by Yasser Arafat to describe his fighters back in the 1970s).
Its adherents swore absolute and unwavering loyalty to Sabbah and would carry out a series of high-profile assassinations, earning them the title “assassins.”
The word itself was popularised in the Western world, based on the term “hashish” in Arabic, which can mean either grass or opium.
Many accused Sabbah of drugging his followers and then exposing them to all the pleasures of life, showing them heaven on earth before sending them to the battlefield to seek it in the afterlife.
Italian traveller Marco Polo used another title, Sheikh al-Jabal, or Old Man of the Mountain, but others claim that this was attributed to an Ismaili chief in Syria and not Hasan i-Sabbah.
Other Europeans tried unravelling the mystery surrounding him, and the first serious attempt was made by Denis Lebey de Batilly of France, who prepared a study in 1603.
Then came Barthalemy de’Herbelot, another French Orientalist, who wrote about the Order of the Assassins in his Oriental encyclopedia, followed by Sylvester de Sacy in 1809, who argued that the word Hashshashin originated from Arabic and not the West.
