A thousand years ago, a breakaway Islamic sect invented terrorism. Meet the man who begat Osama, says political scientist SALIM MANSUR

By SALIM MANSUR Thursday, October 11, 2001 – Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun

There is no example from modern history of a great superpower and its allies launching their flotilla of war machines against an individual for "waging war against civilization." But if we are to understand Osama bin Laden and his fanaticism, we have to reach back a thousand years to when the Arab-Islamic civilization was at its apogee.

In 1092, Nizam al-Mulk, the influential chief minister of the Seljuq ruler, was assassinated. The assassin, dressed as a Sufi or Islamic mystic, dealt his blow in public and serenely accepted his own death.

This assassination sent a shiver down the spine of the Seljuq realm. At its height, under Nizam al-Mulk's direction, the Seljuq kingdom stretched from the Anatolian plateau to the edge of the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan, and from the River Oxus south to the Persian Gulf.

The Seljuq rulers were of Turkish origin; their great rivals were the Cairo-based Fatimid rulers. The Fatimids claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed through his only surviving daughter, Fatima. Within a few decades of the Prophet's death in 632, political quarrels and fratricide split the Muslims into two groups, the Sunni and the Shia. The majority Sunni, horrified by violence, preferred political order over anarchy. They recognized as legitimate any dynasty of rulers adhering to Islamic laws based on the consensus of the majority of religious scholars and jurists.

The Sunni scholars (Sunni derived from the word sunnah, "traditions of the Prophet") viewed the corporate unity of the Muslim world as henceforth resting on adherence to the Islamic laws, the sharia. The Shia minority insisted that the only legitimate ruler could come from the Prophet's family, and their religious scholars developed an alternative political theory of the just ruler.

The Fatimids, who were Shia, established their kingdom in North Africa at the beginning of the 10th century. Their power began to disintegrate around the time Nizam al-Mulk was murdered, but generated subsects of Shia extremists ready to wage a secret war against Sunni authority. One such subsect was an extremist Ismaili movement led by Hasan Sabbah.

Sabbah, a contemporary of Nizam al-Mulk and Omar Khayyam, the great Persian poet and mathematician, traveled widely, studied philosophy and esoteric sciences; as a Shia, he was appalled by the growth of Sunni power under Seljuq rulers. He saw himself as the incarnation of the just ruler, and gathered around him loyal followers sworn to secrecy and committed to ignite a revolution by subverting existing authority. His preferred strategy was to strike fear in his enemies' hearts through selected assassinations.

From his castle in a mountain fortress known as Alamut ("Eagle's Lesson"), on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, Sabbah directed his war against the Muslim world.

To kill authority figures, he set out hand-picked martyrs or assassins, the word according to some authorities derived from the Arabic hashishi (plural, hashishiyyin),meaning those who smoked hemp, cannabis sativa, for narcotic effects.

This was, in effect, Sabbah's invention of "terrorism" -- of a political program of subversion and fear conducted by an organization with limited means, but inspired by a large-scale utopian program.

Hasan Sabbah died in 1124. His Order survived until Alamut was destroyed by Mongol invaders a century later. During this period, his fanatical movement of extreme deviants from mainstream Islam terrorized opponents far and wide. One of their most daring assassinations was that of Conrad of Montferrat, the Crusader king of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in 1192. In the end, however, Sabbah and his followers failed in their mission. The Sunni authorities survived and the Arab-Islamic civilization flourished again under the Mongols and the Turks.

Osama bin Laden and his band of fanatical warriors are a contemporary version of Hasan Sabbah and his Order of Assassins. Mr. bin Laden's hideout in the mountains of Afghanistan is a reminder of Sabbah's mountain stronghold. Like Sabbah, Mr. bin Laden has raised his warriors from boyhood to accept death for a political program dressed in religious slogans that set him apart from mainstream Islam.

Mr. bin Laden's beliefs, drawn from Wahhabi teachings, reflect the most narrow, bigoted deviation from the catholicity of Sunni Islam. The puritanical Wahhabi version of Islam is a sectarian movement that emerged from a remote region of Arabia in the 18th century; it resurfaced at the beginning of the 20th century with the foundation of the Saudi kingdom.

According to Ibn Khaldun, the great 14th-century, Arab-Muslim historian, a recurring theme in Muslim history is the periodic assault on civilization by primitive nomads of the desert. Wahhabism illustrates this history. Its extreme practitioners -- such as Mr. bin Laden -- in breaking ranks with their Saudi patrons confirm Ibn Khaldun's theory of the cyclical struggle between inhabitants of the desert and those who have settled into a sedentary culture of cities.

Mr. bin Laden's views are primitivism writ large, and have done immense harm to Islam and to civilization. But in Sabbah's case, the failure of his program did not extinguish the fanaticism of his followers for 100 years after his death. Mr. bin Laden and his organization are also doomed -- but sadly, civilization may have to remain on guard indefinitely to contain the fanaticism of his hidden warriors. Salim Mansur is an associate professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.