Alamut: A Novel
Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut certainly has curiosity value: a novel about Hasan-I Sabbah and the Assasins written in 1938 in Slovenian. An international best-seller now translated into English, the book is advertised as the “inspiration for several video games” and as an eerie prediction of today’s Islamic terrorism (“the training manual” for “al-Qaeda’s martyrs”). Luckily none of this need deter anyone from reading the book as an enjoyable historical romance swashbuckler, with plenty of exotic orientalismo and fast action.
Bartol obviously knew no sources on Ismailism other than the usual, such as De Sacy and Von Hammer-Purgstall, from whom he (like William Burroughs) learned the so-called “Assassin motto”, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, and the basic Marco Polo myth of the Old Man of the Mountain and his garden of hashish. In other words Bartol’s picture of Alamut is based almost entirely on the accounts of the Ismailis’ enemies. (Bartol may have seen some pre-Ismaili scholarship by Vladimir Ivanov, but interpreted it in light of the Mythos.) In other words, this novel is almost sheer fantasy, and certainly has nothing to teach anyone about al-Qaeda, who are hyper-orthodox Sunnis, not heterodox Shiites, and who do not use hashish, and do not trick their suicide bombers with gardens full of Hollywood houris. Any link between Hasan-I Sabbah and Osama bin Laden is not historical or theological, but archetypical. If any political allegory was intended by Bartol it was Italian Fascism, his own bête noir.
Having said that, it must be added that Alamut is not merely a fun adventure novel. Like Burroughs, Bartol makes interesting philosophical use of the Mythos to comment on important issues of freedom and authoritarianism. His Hasan-i Sabbah, like Burroughs’s, is neither a cardboard cut-out villain nor a hero, but a complex tragic figure.
Highly entertaining.
***
Alamut: A Novel
Vladimir Bartol, translated from the Slovenian by Michael Biggins
North Atlantic Books, 1988/2007
ISBN 978-1556436819
Peter Lamborn Wilson is a writer, essayist, translator and poet who formerly taught at Naropa University’s “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics” and has published numerous books and articles on hermeticism, anarchism, Sufism, pirate utopias, and neopaganism. His books include Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry (with N. Pourjavady) and Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology.
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