THE "OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN" IN COURT.
AT the commencement of the last term, Sir Joseph Arnould, Judge of the Supreme Court of Bombay, delivered judg- ment in a case which has been proceeding for years, and which is, we believe, almost without exception, the most extraordinary suit ever instituted before a British tribunal. In the strange irony of history, it fell to the lot of a British judge, sitting in Western India, to decree that a refugee in a British dependency, previously unknown to Europe, was the lineal heir of the "Old Man of the Mountain," who is believed to have ordered the assassination of Coeur de Lion, and to hand over to him in virtue of such heirship a revenue of 10,0001. a year, which but for British justice he could never have obtained. In order to be sure of his decision, Sir Joseph Arnould, who, if we mistake not, is a Catholic, who holds, that is, precisely the same faith as Cceur de Lion, phis the Immaculate pathy is the sympathy of a prepared mind. So, were our Conception, had to rake up the whole history of the Assassins, to knowledge wide enough, there would be no dramatic effects, describe the most secret dogmas of Mussulman sects older
—no unprecedented crowding of usually separated trains of than the Crusades, and to decide formally one of the greatest emotion into a single instant, in which they jostle each other religious controversies of the Mohammedan world—whether and strive for the pre-eminence, but simply the quiet, large an Ismailee can be anything but a Sheeah. Stranger task sympathy of minds that can feel at many pores at once never fell to British barrister, and it was admirably performed. for as many forms of suffering. The intensest and perhaps the In a judgment which would make a small volume, Sir worst, but also the most limited element in such scenic horrors Joseph Arnould relates the history of the Assassins, traces the as that of Tuesday, is the surprise, the confusion, the revulsion of pedigree of the defendant, Aga Khan, once a leader of Persian feeling, —elements which give them their chief dramatic effect. rebels, now a Mussulman resident of Bombay, and known there The pity, the sympathy, the eagerness to alleviate, might all have chiefly for his addiction to horse-racing and kindred amusements, been felt without the bitterest and yet least noble element of all, back through ages to the Fatimite Caliphs of Egypt, lays bare —the collapse and complete upset of moral breathlessness. Dr. the secret tenets of a sect which for ages has made a profound Chalmers used to say that it was very false to conceive the mystery of its creed, and finally, decides that the turfite noble Divine mind solely as an infinite calm,—that high and deep before him is heir of a dynasty older than the Crusades, and en- emotion being one of the highest elements in man, must be infi- titled to a supreme pontificate over some ten thousand families of nitely higher and deeper in Gel. And this is true if we shut out Her Majesty's subjects. A case which so strangely links to-day with from emotion all that belongs to mere perturbation and gustiness the remote past alike of Asia and of Europe deserves more than of feeling. But if we include in emotion that artificial enhance- a passing comment, and we will try to make it intelligible as a meat of feeling caused by the suddenness and abruptness of the narrative. In so doing, however, we must premise that we accept -changes in our limited horizon, of course nothing can be falser. Sir Joseph Arnould's carefully considered statement of facts as All the catastrophes not only of one place, or one country, or one substantially accurate, though many of them are open doubtless sent, with their distinct contributions of pathos or passion, in In the year 1090, then, twenty-four years after the Norman the Omniscient mind, and to it therefore there is no such thing Conquest, Hassan bin Saba, a Persian Sheeah, who had imbibed as an effect produced by the special concentration or distri- at Cairo the Ismailee tenets popular under the Fatimite Caliphs, bution of human pangs. Thirty-five persons drowning with settled himself at Alamut, or the Vulture's Nest, a commanding leagues between each of them, and thirty-five persons drown- crag of the Elburz Mountains, and thence for thirty-five years
ing within sight and call of each other, are most different events organized a sect which, after eight hundred years of warfare with to us men,—not different in themselves, but excessively dif- surrounding mankind, is still alive, still proselytizes, still threatens
ferent in the moral effect they produce ; just as thirty-five differ- the security of the Persian throne. Mohammedan so far as belief
eat notes of music played in the same instant to the same ear are in Mohammed was concerned, the sect of the Assassins held the not different in themselves, but excessively different in their results doctrine that the heirs of Ali, through Ismail, his seventh descend-
Jews of Spain, and inculcated, it is believed, among the Druses of the Lebanon—the assumption in every country of the external forms of that country's faith. The succession of the Imams was unbroken, the Imam was reverenced almost as a god, missionaries were rayed out incessantly from his side throughout the Mussul- man world ; but the sect apparently dropped from beneath the eyes of men, the fanatic "Assassin," with no morality and an allegiance due only to an individual usually resident in Persia, appearing to Indian and Arab Mohammedans an ordinary co- religionist of respectable habits and unimpeached political sym- pathies. That the succession of Imams was never broken appears to Sir Joseph Arnould proved by the documents before him, and as the descendants of Mohammed are undoubtedly alive, so also may be the descendants of Ismail, his grandson in the eighth degree. As Persia became Sheeah, and infected with the negative ideas which, down to the present day, honeycomb its orthodoxy, the persecution of the Ismailees became less severe, and the Imam
seems to have been regarded simply as a great and dangerous noble, to whom Shahs might give, and did give, their daughters in marriage ; and in or about the year 1460 the fourteenth Pontiff was able to send out a missionary, Fir Surdordin, into Scinde, where, availing himself of the elastic tenets of his creed, he converted some thousands of Hindoo families. He published a book which is still the Bible of the Indian branch of the sect, who call themselves Khojahs, which declares that there have been ten incarnations of the Deity, the first nine of which were incarnations of Vishnoo, the Hindoo Preserver, and the tenth, that .of Ali, Mohammed's son-in-law—the coolest jump from a Pagan foundation to a monotheistic superstructure perhaps ever made in history. The sect, of course, kept up its habit of secrecy, its members professing to be ordinary Soonees of the Scindian sort, but it multiplied, spread out of Scinde, grew rich, and on the estab- lishment of British power emigrated in great numbers to Bom- bay. Exclusive of the Persian and Arab Ismailees, there are now 1,400 "Assassin" families in Bombay, 2,800 in Scinde, .5,000 in Cutch, 400 in Zanzibar, smaller communities throughout Western India, and occasional households as far east as Dacca, all of whom have for ages paid and do now pay tribute to the hereditary Imam, reverence his orders as divine, and hold that he is the incarnation of the Almighty. They are not accused of the degrading practices of the " Maharaj " sect, who hold in the bosom of Hindooism similar opinions, but they are accused, with probable justice, of disbelieving in any morality whatever superior to the will of the Imam, in any law save their eewn interest and that of the "Order of Assassins."
Well, in 1838, Aga Khan, the defendant in this suit, was residing in the Persian province of Kerman, the acknowledged Imam of the Ismailees, and as the Shah was retreating baffled from Herat, -thought the time had arrived for the public proclamation of his tenets and his authority. He accordingly seized Kerman, and stoutly supported by his followers, who gathered up from every part of Persia, and were, we believe, protected by the secret sympathy of many great Persian nobles, maintained the war for two years, but was at last defeated, and fled for help to his dis- ciples in Scinde. Here he found 3,000 families ready to receive him, and so complete was his authority, so utter their belief in his mission, that he was able to levy a new tax upon them amounting to one clear tenth of their entire possessions. Imagine that among -families living under British rule, and paying British taxes ! With the money thus obtained Aga Khan raised, chiefly from among his followers, a body of light horse, joined General Nott in the Afghan war, and received for his services a pension from the British Govern- ment. In 1845 he came to Bombay, and there he has resided ever since, ruling the Khojahs with a firm hand, strictly watched by the Persian Government, and every now and then receiving a gentle hint -from our own Foreign Office that he must not by his intrigues make the position of British Minister at Teheran quite insup- portable. Of course, as Imam, he administered the entire pro- perty of the sect, which is also an "Order," and very wealthy, -and in 1861 he thought himself strong enough to order his people throughout India to abandon their practice of secrecy and profess -openly the faith of Ismail. Accordingly he directed them by a 'decree signed 20th October to reveal themselves, and was obeyed by all except 400 families in Bombay, who, either indignant at his despotism, or, as is more probable, dreading the abhorrence with which the sect is regarded throughout the Mussulman world —the orthodox affirming that the Ismailees are still assassins and advocates of "free love "—mutinied, and demanded that the property of the Order should be managed by a lay committee. The Imam, instead of ordering their execution, as he certainly would have done out of British territory, appealed to the Supreme Court, and, after crowds of witnesses had been heard, many of whom professed blind obedience, and documents studied, many of which stretched back into the Middle Ages, it was solemnly deter- mined that the Khojahs were part of the Ismailee sect, that the first tenet of that sect is obedience to the "Hereditary Grand Master of the Order of Assassins," that Aga Khan was that Grand Master, i. e., was the lineal representative of Ali who died before Rollo conquered Normandy, and that as such he was entitled to absolute control over the whole property of the Order. The autho- rity of the "Old Man of the Mountain" has been recognized and established by British law. Verily there is an irony in history.
We have called Aga Khan the heir of the man who sanctioned the assassination of Coeur de Lion, but we must guard ourselves against a misapprehension. The order emanated directly from the chief of Massiat, a mountain in the Lebanon range, whose ruler spread the name of the sect throughout the Crusading armies; but it was given in the common interest of all Ismailees, and
must either have emanated from the Imam then residing at Alamut, or have been sanctioned from him, the cardinal principle of the sect being that the Pontificate, with its divine dispensing power, is indivisible, and can be exercised only by the hereditary repre- sentative of All through Ismail. Aga Khan is now old, but the decision of the Bombay Court will consolidate his power, and we should not wonder if his son were heard of again in Indian history. His missionaries still make converts, and if he could secure the adhesion of any tribe or sect in India, quite a possibility, he might become in India what he is considered in Persia—the most formidable of the nobles under our sway. The Order of Jesus is not better obeyed, and native society is honeycombed with societies, or, as they are called in India, sects, the principle of which is that the divine must be permanently incarnate in the flesh, that Providence must, as it were, be visible, and which, therefore, render implicit and abject obedience to their chiefs. If one of these, say the sect which bathes at liurdwar, and holds that nakedness is essential to religious purity, were to accept Ali as its incarnation, the British Government might be compelled for the second time to place limits on its otherwise universal toleration. We have had to make the worship of Bhowanee a penal offence punishable with imprisonment for life, we have passed a law intended to condemn the souls as well as the bodies of the Moplahs who seek heaven through the slaughter of Infidels, and we may yet, for the second time in history, have to declare war on an "Old Man of the Mountain."
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