The supposed suppression of the creed

which followed the Mongol destruction

did not in fact take place.

Copying each other,

historians have asserted that Assassinism died six hundred years ago.

Now and again, however, fresh facts of their continued existence still come to light.

In the eighteenth century an Englishman,

the British Consul at Aleppo in Syria,

was at pains to make this better known:

"Some authors assert," he writes,

"that these people were entirely extirpated

in the thirteenth century by the Tartars...

but I, who have lived so long in this infernal place,

will venture to affirm

that some of their spawn still exists

in the mountains that surround us;

for nothing is so cruel,

barbarous and execrable that is not acted,

and even gloried in, by these cursed Gourdins."

The Assassins were widely dispersed throughout Asia.

The rise of the Thugs,

the secret society of assassination of India,

followed the Mongol invasion of Persia.

Indeed, at least one of the Thug recognition-signals

(Ali bhai Salam!) indicates salutations to Ali,

the descendant of the Prophet most greatly revered by the Assassins.

Ismailis, not all of them recognizing the one chief,

reside in places as far apart as

Malaya, East Africa and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

They would not necessarily feel

that they are Assassins in the same sense

as the extremists who followed the old Sheikhs of the Mountains;

but at least some of them revere

the descendants of the Lords of Alamut

to the extent of deification.

The modern phase of Ismailism dates from 1810,

when the French consul at Aleppo found

that the Assassins in Persia recognized

as their divinely-inspired chief

a reputed descendant of the Fourth Grand Master of Alamut,

who then lived at Kehk,

a small village between Isfahan and Tehran.

This Shah Khalilullah

"was revered almost like a god and credited

with the power of working miracles...

the followers of Khalilullah would,

when he pared his nails,

fight for the clippings;

the water in which he washed became holy water."

The sect next appear to the public gaze

through an odd happening.

In 1866, a law case was decided in Bombay.

There is in that city a large community of commercial men

known as Khojas:

"A Persian," the record tells us,

"Aga Khan Mehalati

(i.e., a native of Mehelat, a place situated near Khek)

had sent an agent to Bombay to claim from the Khojas

the annual tribute due from them to him,

and amounting to about £ 10,000.

The claim was resisted,

and the British court was appealed to by Aga Khan.

Sir Joseph Arnold investigated his claim.

The Aga proves his pedigree,

showing that he descended in a direct line

from the fourth Grand Master of Alamut,

and Sir Joseph declared it proved;

and it was further demonstrated by the trial

that the Khojas were members of the ancient sect of the Assassins,

to which sect they had been converted

four hundred years before

by an Ishmaelite missionary,

who composed a work

which has remained the sacred book of the Khojas."

In the First Afghan War,

the then Aga Khan contributed

a force of light cavalry to the British forces.

For this he was awarded a pension.

Hitti, in his History of the Arabs,

notes (p. 448, 1951 edition)

that the Assassin sect,

known as Khojas and Malwas,

gave over a tenth of their revenues to the Aga Khan,

who

"spends most of his time as

         a sportsman between Paris and London."

The influence of the new form of organization and training,

as well as initiatory techniques,

of the Assassins upon later societies

has been remarked by a number of students.

That the Crusaders knew a good deal

about the Ismailis is shown

from the detailed descriptions

of them which survive.

S. Ameer Ali, an Orientalist of considerable repute,

goes further in his assessment:

"From the Ismailis the Crusaders borrowed

the conception which led

to the formation of all the secret societies,

religious and secular, of Europe.

The institutions of Templars and Hospitallers;

the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola,

composed by a body of men whose devotion

to their cause can hardly be surpassed in our time;

the ferocious Dominicans, the milder Franciscans

- may all be traced either to Cairo or to Alamut.

The Knights Templar especially,

with their system of grand masters,

grand priors and religious devotees,

and their degrees of initiation,

bear the strongest analogy to the Eastern Ismailis."