In retirement I am able to enjoy entensive reading of an historical subject. Recently I read The Story of Secret Service by R. W. Rowan, which is one of definitive texts on the subject. He chronicled the talent for treachery of Hassan bin Sabah, who was a Zoroastrian from Persia.
About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin’s Guild, converted to Islam and enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers then retained their lives, and obtained support for dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Aspiring leaders needed at least an understanding of if not a fondness for murder and duplicity.
After reading that chapter, I remembered the Arab League’s website where they describe the people they are most proud of in their history of science and medical achievements. I also know from other reading that Saladin was so highly thought by everyone that even Dante assigned him to the highest level in Purgatory.
Next I discovered an interesting correlation. (Establishing an argument for causation would require a PhD thesis.) Concurrent with Sabah’s notoriety, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, Saladin’s Sufism stressing individual relationship with god that exalted individuals in society became marginalized. This expression of the Muslim faith was allowed to run off into cul-de-sac’s of reasoning that looked a lot like Unitarianism, but no one dared follow threads that could lead to an encounter with the living God and revisting the Koran. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in disciplines such as mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought. Such simultaneous extinctions of the individual over a century provide evidence of a very human and pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.
It reminds me of the co-dependent relationship of Pope Stephen and Pepin king of the Franks. In exchange for defeating Lombard incursions, Pope Stephen proclaimed Pepin’s sons, and their descendants, kings by “divine right”. Such was the accepted road to power until the French Revolution vetoed the concept for at least one country.
Never saw it that way.
My theory, admittedly simplitic, is that the Allah’s ultimate man, Mohammed, was a thief, murderer, rapist, liar and betrayer, and Islam goes to Hell from there.
incorrect, utterly, utterly incorrect
Hassan bin Sabbah was a Shia from Iran. In fact his father was supposedly an Arab from Yemen (debatable as moslems always want to pretend they are Arabs, the "pure race"
he converted to Ismailism -- a branch of the Shia's
Also, islam’s divergence from rational thought went out centuries before Salauddin. I forget the exact name — perhaps muawiyah can update you.