1. Similarities between Osama Bin Laden/Hassan i Sabbah ?

So Bin Laden compares himself to Hassan Sabbah ? Here is my point of view about it :

Rather than similarities, I rather see a number of differences :

1 Hassan never made any terrorism
2 He never killed innocent people
3 He never preached any narrow minded Islam
4 He never talked about starting a "holly war"
5 He never worked for any CIA
6 He never earned money on death with weapons and hard drugs trade
(not exhaustive list)

Hassan never attacked anybody who had not threatened himself first. He only attacked individuals who had decided to kill him : he did not have any army, was not a man of war, did not want to waste the lives of his fellows in stupid conflicts. Only one warrior was used instead of a whole army, to kill only one man : the troublemaker, not his soldiers.

The whole legend of the garden, of the drugged assassins, and of Alamut gang as the precursors of terrorism IS A FAKE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It comes from a book by Marco Polo, who heard about this story in prison. Marco Polo's accounts of his travels did not pretend to be "true" : they were picaresque accounts dedicated to amuse the French wealthy readers of the time.

Now Hassan was known to use this method. The fact is that assassinations were very common at the time, and that a number of them might have been attributed to the Old Man without him to be involved. But this reputation also had a protective side : when someone had bad intentions about Alamut, he was confronted at the same time to the eventuality of his own disappearing, which was rather dissuasive, so he were feeling threatenned without Hassan to do anything, nor even know about him. :)

Now the commune of Alamut did use hashish, but not as a "drug" (this concept as it is used nowadays in the West is very new, dating from the XXth century, though hashish has been prohibited since the XIVth century, but as a religious crime : in the East, people who smoke hashish are mystics, in most of traditional cultures : the saddhus in Hinduism, the shaman of Siberia, of America, of Africa, the Rastamen in Jamaica, etc..), who use it as a link to the spiritual dimension.

The legend has been spread related to the affair of the templars : the templars got connected with Alamut during the crusades : both were monk warriors, and had no reason to fight : they fought together the Mongol invaders , and St Louis and the Old Man concluded an alliance against them. (See about it the account by Joinville, St Louis biographer, of the meeting between the men of the Old man and St Louis at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/9445/proces.html and "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco ).

So both orders started to work together and to share their respective cultures and knowledge :
the templars learnt the Arabic numbers, astrology, algebra, which the Roman numbers in Europe did not allow to access to, and they got to a higher level of evolution than the French authorities of the time.

The king Philippe le Bel was scared of them, because the order escaped his authority, and he wanted to get its money, for his wars.
So as the pope Boniface VIII, whom the Temple depended on, did not want to arrest the templars by lack of reason, Philippe le Bel sent Guillaume de Nogaret, chief of the police, to arrest him and put him in jail on September 7th1903, and put at his place a far cousin of his, Clement V, who was at his orders. Clement V made a reform of the dogmas of church and invented new religious crimes, victimless crimes, which did not exist before, and allowed to condemn the templars , in the name of God , for things which did not harm anybody, related to the rule of initiation of the Temple :

Actually it seems that their initiation had similarities with Alamut's one. As a result, they were condemned for witchcraft (use of hash : the Templars introduced it to Europe coming back from the crusades), sodomy (which actually allows to open the lower chakra of kundalini, and in this context has a specific function), and heresy (they did not have respect for the cross on which Jesus was supposed to have been murdered). The function of those rules of initiation was to open energy centers in human body, which leads to a kind of mutation in human organism : what Jung calls "process of unification", which binds the physical and subtle bodies as a whole.

And this is what Philippe le Bel and Clement V wanted to forbid and condemn. This is what scared them.

After the process of the temple, a legend was spread on the templars saying that they had hidden a treasure, on the ground of Philippe le Bel's rumors against of stealing the money of the Temple. They did have a hidden treasure: it was not money, but the knowledge.

Another legend was spread on Alamut describing the Old Man and his community as a gang of fanatic addicts, inventors of terrorism, and incarnated devils. It has been used in the thirties by Anslinger to forbid hemp, and more recently, during the Gulf war, to discredit Islam as a whole.

Both legends were spread to make what the templars and Ismaelians were at impossible to understand. The so-called "crimes" invented then created mental barriers through the taboos they have led to. Those taboos are still there, 800 years after, and have structured and jailed the mental universe of the French society. They have locked it in a control system based upon the administration and structure put up by Philippe le Bel in the XIV° century, which have remained unchanged and have not integrated the changes of the following centuries at the political level. Those events have shaped a problematic at the scale of the nation which has been transmitted from generation to generation and from which the only way of escape is a return to the past through the understanding of the actual facts.

Now, how can we know about the activities in Alamut exactly ?
Through a book by Nasiroddin Tusi, a writer who was present when the Mongols took the fortress in 1256 : "Alamut Summons - The Garden of True Faith ", which is a description of the Ismaelian doctrine of resurrection, a map of spiritual world and its history, and map of the relations between physical et spiritual worlds. I do not know if you can get it in English, but in French, it has been translated by Christian Jambet, who publishes it at Verdier edition : http://www.inter-zone.hassan.html . Nasiroddin Tusi became then the most influent intellectual of his time.

The actual descendant of Hassan Sabbah is Karim Agha Khan, who lives in Bombay, and is the chief of the Ismaelian community. His uncle, Sadruddin, is permanent member of United Nations. He has accomplished a lot for protection of nature and animals (WWF). http://www.akdn.org/index.html

To my opinion, the users of those legends should be prosecuted for historical swindle, defamation and misinformation on human organism.

2. Last point on Ben Laden and the talibans : the identification between the talibans and Islam also is a false identification : which country has been offering a real help to Massoud until now ? Iran, who offered a refuge to the official Afghan government since the talibans invaded Afghanistan, when Europe just ignored Massoud when he recently came to ask for help.

3. Now referring to the 1000 years old bloody crusades to justify the opposition between Christianity and Islam seems to me to rest on another historical distortion : actually the crusades started after the Turks invaded Jerusalem : before Jerusalem was an Arabic place, and a meeting point for Jews, Christians and Moslems who considered they had the same God and were getting on well altogether. When the Turks came, they attacked the Arabs, and killed the pilgrims of the 3 religions.

So the three of them asked for help, and the pope Urbain II, who made a confusion between the Arabs and the Turks, and considering that Jerusalem was only belonging to the Christians, opposed Christianity and Islam and started a war against Islam. So not only the Arabs were aggressed by the Mongols, but by the Christians as well ! Hum !!! With the distance, nothing to be very proud of, really !

Now considering that no individual presently alive can be taken for responsible for the conflicts which have opposed our civilizations 1000 years ago, there is no reason why we should go on keeping them on nor suffering from them : those conflicts were bound to a context which does not exist anymore : we are in 2001, not in 1095! The concepts used then are not valid anymore, and the conflicts resting on them do not make any sense nowadays. I have the highest respect for my ancestors, but I do not feel involved in wars which involved only them, and on which they did not consult me, against people whom I do not know and who never did anything to me.

As a conclusion, rather than spoiling our money, time and energy in meaningless and groundless conflicts, we would be more inspired to follow the example of the templars and Ismaelians, and share our respective knowledge.

My feeling about those links between our past and present history, and between the Eastern and Western civilizations, is that we basically are complementary : the East has followed an inner research in the spiritual domain leading to a number of explorations of levels of reality which are not included as data by West , which are part of a vision of mankind and of the world a new map of human organism. The West has concentrated its attention and creativity on the physical world, and its evolution at human and scientific levels has led to the actualization of the modern world. Both orientations cannot be opposed, both are part of human experience and necessary.

So rather than spoiling our wealth, time and energy in meaningless and groundless conflicts, we would be more inspired to follow the example of the templars and Ismaelians, and share our respective knowledge as branches of the same research.

The next step has been written by Burroughs :

Izzy