REVIEW

FARHAD DAFTARY, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma'ilis(I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd: London, 1994), 213 pp.

Farhad Daftary's The Assassin Legends offers the reader a brief yet provocative history of the history of the Nizari Isma'ilis, an important Shi'a minority sect whose exotic and sinister presence as the "Assassins" in the cultural imagination of the West extends from the time of the first crusades to the nineteenth century and beyond. By tracing the shifting triangular relations between Sunni Muslims, Isma'ilis, and the Christian West as they evolve through eight centuries of intercultural and intertextual contact, conflict, and collaboration, Daftary charts the evolution and dissemination of a series of 'black' legends that feature the politically significant Persian and Syrian Isma'ili Muslim communities. Drawing on the findings of modern Islamic studies (the pioneering work of Wladimir Ivanow, Marshall G. Hodgson, Bernard Lewis, Norman Daniel, R. W. Southern, and others) and previously unpublished, untranslated, and untapped Isma'ili texts, Daftary outlines a history of distortion and mystification, and critiques the collaborative invention of a tradition of terror that continues to surround, albeit to a far lesser extent, even modern-day Isma'ilis, who today "account for about ten percent of the entire Muslim society of around one billion persons" (2).

In The Assassins, published in 1968, Bernard Lewis proposes that the Isma'ili Shi'as "may well be the first terrorists."

http://ismaili.net/Source/fd0328d.html

An early stronghold of the Ismaili was Yemen. Now do you understand the constant war in that area?

Also, Justin Trudeau is intimately connected with the current Ismaili leader, Aga Khan.