Bahram (Ismailit)

Bahram († 1128 ) was the leading missionary ( dāʿī ) of the Shia of the Nizarites ( assassins ) in Syria in the early 12th century. In this position he succeeded the executed Abu Tahir al-Sa'igh as early as 1113 .

Bahram came from Persia and had campaigned with his uncle in the underground for the religious doctrine ( daʿwa ) of their Shia in Baghdad , in the middle of the capital of the Sunni caliphate of the Abbasids . The uncle was exposed here in 1101 and was executed at the behest of the Seljuk sultan Berk-Yaruq ; Bahram was able to flee to Syria in time.

He was probably entrusted as early as 1113 by the Nizarite leader Hassan-i Sabbah († 1124), who resided in Alamut , with the leadership of the Syrian community, which was troubled that year by the execution of several of its leaders in Aleppo . The new emir of the city of Alp Arslan and especially his Atabeg Sa'id ibn Budai were declared enemies of the Nizarites as Sunnis. In order to avoid their persecution, Bahram led the community out of the underground under changing identities and locations and sought to provide them with a safe refuge by occupying fortified places. The capture of the Shaizar Castle failed in 1114, in which several hundred Nizarites were killed. In 1119 they retaliated against Sa'id ibn Budai, whom they murdered with two of his sons on the banks of the Euphrates . This act made their position in Aleppo finally impossible, whereupon the community had to give up the city after a pogrom of the angry population. In 1124, Bahram's senior subordinate was exposed and arrested here. In the following year, several hundred Nizarites were also murdered in a pogrom in Diyarbakır .

In the meantime, the Syrian Nizarites had found a new patron in the Atabeg of Damascus , Tughtigin . In the fight against the Christians, they reinforced his army by several hundred warriors in 1126, which was the first time they were involved in a warlike confrontation with the "Franks" of the Crusader states . The murder they committed of the Emir of Mosul , Aq Sunqur al-Bursuqi , which they stabbed on November 26th 1126 while going to the Friday prayer at the entrance of his mosque, they probably carried out with the agreement of Tughtigin. As a thank you for your help with weapons, he gave them a guarantee of protection in Damascus and given them permission to open a mission house (dār ad-daʿwa) . Even more important, however, was the transfer of the fortified city of Banyas to the Nizarites, who were officially recognized as having their own rule for the first time. Banyas was right on the border with the Kingdom of Jerusalem , which was to be guarded by the Nizarites. From here, Bahram intended to help his Shia gain territorial rule by occupying the neighboring Wadi-t-Taim (today in the Hasbeya district , Lebanon ). However, this valley was already held by heretical sects like the Druze , which, like the Nizarites once, emerged from a split from the Ismaili Shia . The murder of the Druze prince provoked a military confrontation in the wadi in 1128, in which the Nizarites were defeated and Bahram was killed.

Bahram's head and his severed hands were sent to Cairo to the court of the caliph al-Amir , the hated counterimam of the Mustali Ismailis , who in 1122 denounced the Nizarites' right to exist and denounced them as "hashish smokers " ( Ḥašīšiyya ) Has.

Ismail al-Ajami († 1130) followed in the leadership of the Syrian Nizarites .

literature

• Farhad Daftary , The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge University Press 1990, pp. 347-348.
• Heinz Halm , caliphs and assassins. Egypt and the Middle East at the time of the First Crusades 1074–1171. Munich 2014, pp. 174–175, 206.
• Jerzy Hauziński, Three Excerpts Quoting a Term al-ḥašīšiyya, in: Rocznik Orientalistyczny, Vol. 69, (2016), pp. 89-93.

swell

• Abū Yaʿlā ibn Asad ibn al-Qalānisī , “Continuation of the story of Damascus” (Ḏail taʾrīḫ Dimašq), ed. and translated by Hamilton AR Gibb, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, (1932), pp. 145-146, 177, 179-180, 187-191.
• ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Athīr , "The Perfect Chronicle" (Al-Kāmil fī ʾt-taʾrīḫ), in: RHC, Historiens Orientaux , Vol. 1 (1872), pp. 364, 366–368, 383–384.
• Kamāl ad-Dīn ʿUmar ibn Aḥamd ibn al-ʿAdīm, "The cream of milk from the story of Aleppo" (Zubdat al-ṭalab min taʾrīḫ Ḥalab), in: RHC, Historiens Orientaux, Vol. 3 (1884), p. 616, 640, 654-656.
• The First and Second Crusades from an Anonymous Syriac Chronicle, ed. and translated by Arthur S. Tritton and Hamilton AR Gibb in: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 92 (1933), pp. 96, 98-99.