Book 160: Slovenia (English) – Alamut (Vladimir BARTOL)

            “I come from al-Ghazali, Your Excellency, with this letter.”

            He held the letter out toward the old man, while calmly drawing the sharpened writing instrument out of it. He did this so naturally that none of those present was aware of the action.

            The vizier unsealed the envelope and unfolded the letter.

            ”What is my learned friend up to in Baghdad?” he asked.

            Ibn Tahir suddenly leaned forward and shoved the dagger into his throat beneath the chin. The vizier was so startled that for the first few moments he didn’t feel any pain. He just opened his eyes up wide. Then he scanned the only line of the letter one more time and grasped everything.

My Slovenian novel, which has apparently been a bestseller in many languages (seemingly not in English, though it should be) really has as little as is imaginable to do with Slovenia (which is by the way my favourite country in Europe at the moment). It is totally removed in both time and place, like my preceding Macedonian novel. It is derived from one of the more fascinating tales from Marco Polo’s generally prosaic Travels, that of the Old Man of the Mountain, but the Ismaili stronghold in modern Iran actually existed.

Bartol takes three young friends, sworn to friendship, who each choose different paths in life. One becomes a vizier, one (Omar Khayyam) a poet, and the third, the subject of the story, Hasan, becomes what we would now see as the head of a terrorist organisation. Hasan becomes so cynical that he can not believe in anything at all – his ultimate motto is “Nothing is true, everything is permitted;” he reveals it only to his most trusted confidantes, and basically applies it to no one but himself. Everyone else is treated more or less as a child, as his tool. Hasan (known to his followers as Sayyiduna ‘Our Lord’), sets out to deceive and exploit them, by creating a fairy tale and making it seem real to them. He reproduces in reality at his castle (Alamut) the Muslim paradise, and rewards his most trustworthy followers with a single night there (after drugging them with opium), so that they can be used as assassins (a word which derives from hashishim ‘opium-eaters’) against his enemies. Despite some close calls, as far as we learn from the novel his plan is successful. Yet its eternal vulnerability is obvious, throughout symbolised by the lift he uses, which his trusted eunuchs could easily use to kill him. (As generally with terrorist organisations, the success at murdering enemies was matched by abject failure at conquering them – and Alamut was to fall to the Mongols in 1256). Bartol wrote a long time before the age of Al-Qaida, but his sophisticated insight into the mindset of a terrorist warlord and what are now suicide bombers is more relevant now than ever before. Alamut can be read merely as a popular novel, but there is so much food for thought that its worth is far deeper than that.

Vladimir BARTOL (1903 – 1967), Alamut, translated from Slovenian by Michael Biggins, Berkeley, CA, North Atlantic Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-55643-681-9