Kete e kam patur si research paper ne English 101 para 100 vjetesh. Nuk e dija qe kjo ishte prejardhja e kesaj fjale. Mesuesja na kerkoi te shkruanim si per nje reviste dhe une zgjodha Esquire prandaj dhe mu desh te injektoja pak humor. Mos harroni eshte English 101 keshtu qe mos prisni ndonje perle, po mu duk teme interesante.
Alvi Islamaj
E 101-35
Stacie Lewton Rice
04/19/01
The Assassins
as·sas·sin (e-sąs-īn) noun
1. One who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.
2. Assassin. A member of a secret order of Muslim fanatics who terrorized and killed Christian Crusaders and others.
Have you ever wanted somebody dead? I dont know, your boss, landlord, or maybe even your mother-in-law. Wouldnt you like to see her gasp her last breath, witness her death spasm first hand, watch that thin wrinkled neck break from the convulsions, the look of horror and disbelief in her eyes?
Well, if you havestop it! Chances are, you wouldnt be able to stomach it. Chances are, you would have to hire a professional to do it. Even though you wouldnt think of it as such, that is an assassination. According to Oscar Jaszi (qtd in Havens, Leiden, and Schmitt 16), one of the categories of assassination is murder for personal motives, be it to get rid of somebody who beat you to a pulp at the bar, or the coed who told everybody about how you like to dress up like a woman, and be spanked while being called Susan.
The people you would seek to hire are called assassins. The word itself originated in Persia (Iran for the geographically challenged), where the Moslem cult of the assassins had its stronghold. These people used to practice assassinations much the same way Americans practice baseballit was their favorite pastime. Researching the subject ,I got the feeling that all the historians that studied the sect were amazed at how they were coerced into doing their horrendous deeds. You see, the assassins were loyal to The Old Man of the Mountain, who, they say, was so proud of his mens gullibility that when foreign dignitaries came to visit, he would arrange for displays of that loyalty by ordering them to jump off a cliff to their ugly, painful, skull--cracking death for the pleasure of the foreign guest. The bond of submission and obedience that binds this people to their Chief is so strong, that there is no task so arduous, difficult or dangerous that any of them would not undertake to perform it with the greatest zeal, as soon as the Chief has commanded (Lewis 4).
The Chief in question is whom they called The Old Man of the Mountain. Hasan Sabah, born into a Twelver ShiI family in Qumm, in central Persia, converted to IsmaIlism in his youth, and by 1072 he had been appointed to a post in Ravy in the service of the Ismaili Dawa (Daftary 31). It appears he was in charge of the Assassins and they were loyal to him. He had built a castle that was impregnable. He had been looking for his own castle but since there werent any he available he had to conquer one.
Eventually Hasans attention came to be concentrated on the Caspian provinces in northern Persia, the mediaeval region of Daylam, which had traditionally been a safe haven for the Alids and a stronghold of Zaydi Shiism. There he selected the castle of Alamut, situated on a high rock in the central Alburz mountains,to the northeast of the city of Qazwin: and it did not take him long to gain possession of that mountain fortress (Daftary 31).
The scary part is that these dopeheads were lethally serious. To them killing whoever they were told to kill was their ticket to paradise, or at least a drug induced illusion of it. In order for his people to have the aforementioned degree of loyalty, The Old Man of the Mountain had devised a scheme that seemed to have worked flawlessly for decades.
According to the stories I ran across while researching the subject, in the inside of his fortified valley, there was one of the most fanatically guarded secrets of the time: a garden, like no other on earth. It was said to have had in it every kind of fruit known to man, water fountains and of course some ancient Persian version of strippers. These women were there to provide the men with all sorts of addictive bodily pleasures, sing and dance in ways that would make the men go crazy for them. You know what I am talking about, dont you.
The Old Man of the Mountain, (later reincarnated as Hugh Heffner) would choose boys ages fourteen to twenty, handpicked for their determination and loyalty, and given the gift of The Old Mans company. During one of the wild orgies (also known as dinners in ancient Persia,) they would be given a potent potion, that would make them fall asleep, thus allowing the guards to carry the sleeping, unsuspecting boys to the garden. At their awakening they were told that they were in paradise and left to enjoy the pleasures of heaven. One of the pleasures of paradise, was the quantity of hashish (just another name for pot,) that they were being given in order to be kept in a constant state of haze. Thats where a lot of historians think the word assassin came from, Hashishin, meaning hashish user (Daftary 90,91).
They were left to enjoy the sweet life of paradise until The Old Man had a beef with somebody or maybe one of his friends wanted somebody taken out. Once The Old Man decided to have somebody killed, he would serve the same potion to the unsuspecting future assassin. The potion served pretty much the same purpose, except that this time around the assassin would wake up not in paradise, but in the desert, and probably with a huge headache, too. Of course, he would wonder why he was being denied paradise. Thats when The Old Man, being the father figure that he was, would sit down and explain to the would be assassin, that in order for him to be able to get back into Paradise, he would have to off a particular person. That was the only way to get back to paradise. So, it came down to a choice between living in the desert, deprived of The Old Mans love, or the garden and its women and drugs. You do have to admit people have killed for much less than that.
There were a few issues to be resolved however. The Moslem religion is a very ethical one, that does not condone killing, and these were the times before the invention of firearms, meaning almost certain death for the assassin. The Old Man resolved both those issues very swiftly. He would proclaim the victim a heretic, giving the mission gods stamp of approval, and than would promise the young assassin that in the event of his death, he would personally see to it that his soul went back to the paradise he yearned foreternally.
That made the assassins very dangerous, because they carried out their killings without any regard to personal safety and often without even thinking of an escape route. At the time, in order to carry out the assassination, one really had to get close to ones target, so that one were able to cut his throat while he was having dinner with his family, or be able to poison his wine, or backstab him after approaching him pretending to have a message for him. The assassins were peerless in that regard because they possessed the necessary patience and determination for the task. The lack of regard for their safety and their addiction took care of that. They would do anything to go back to their heaven, alive or dead.
They have become famous for coining the word assassins, not for inventing the art of political assassinations. They were not the first to use it, and definitely not the last. The assassinations have became so common and widespread nowadays that in a report by Amnesty International one learns that Day after day Amnesty International receives reports of deliberate killings by the army and the police, by other regular security forces, by special units created to function outside normal supervision, by death squads sanctioned by the authorities, by government assassins (Amnesty International 5).
That is proof that assassinations as a political tool, have evolved a lot from the days of the old assassins and their weird rituals, as a matter of fact, by the fourteenth century, the word assassin had come to mean murder, and no longer implied any connection with the sect to which that name had originally belonged (Lewis 9).
Work Cited Page.
Amnesty International. An Amnesty International Report: Political Killings by
Governments. Amnesty International Publications, 1983.
Daftary, Farhad. The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis. LondonNY:
Tauris, 1994.
Havens,Muray C, Leiden Carl, and Schmitt, Karl M. The Politics of Assassination.
Prentice Hall, 1970.
Lewis Bernard. The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam. NY: Basic, 1968.
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