The Other Side of Me

The reason I brought up the story of the Assassins is that as I read it in Samarkand I felt our world being exactly the same. Some drugs come in fashion and others go, but fake faith always stays. Hassan Sabbah was able to brainwash thousands under the name of religion, and this is how it still happens today. This is how El Qaeda does it, and this is how the Egyptian El Takfeer wel Hegra, and others, had done it once. You just say religion and you have people ready to believe anything you say under its name. This is how the Muslim Brotherhood does it, and in fact there is quite a resemblance between both groups..... Marx said that religion is the opium of people, and he said that religion is man made. This is what the story of the Assassins proved to me, that it is the man-made version of religion that is the opium of the people. Remember the referendum a little more than a year ago? People had voted yes because they were told that yes leads to paradise. Because green (t...

The teaching of the fida'is was done by Hassan himself, he did it with a great deal of enjoyment. Their training was not a simple one, neither were their tasks. They learned how to hide their killing instruments, they learned how to kill very quickly, they learned to make use of homing pigeons to send messages to Alamut, they learned special codes for these messages. They also sometimes had to learn new languages or dialects and how to be part of a certain community in order to watch their prey long enough to make their plan. They also had to win the trust of the community and to watch their prey's every move, to make a plan that won't fail, and to choose the right moment to kill. Once even two fida'is had to live for two months as Christian monks in order to be able to kill one of their enemies. All this cannot go with the use of drugs. Their work needed a very focused mind that was always alert, and this is the exact opposite of a drugged mind. Hashee...

Hassan chose a small village on a mountain and built his fortress there, that place was called Alamut. Hassan's fortress was one of the best secured fortresses in history. He built many barriers and had always had a huge stock of food. His only problem was water; they used the water of a stream that could easily be cut and so they engineered their own system to get water from somewhere else. Not only this, the mere choice of the location was pure genius, Alamut was over a big mountain that was very hard to reach.  For that reason, no army was ever able to go anywhere near the Assassins for a many many years. By that time Hassan's order was already becoming very big and he organized it very well. The idea was to work on two sides, the first was to convert and conquer as much as possible, and the second was to build one of the world's strongest, if not the strongest, killing-machine. They called themselves the Assasyeen , the fundamentalists; those who went b...

The original story, or at least one that seems closer to reality than the legend, was told by Amin Maalouf in his timeless book, Samarkand. It is based on what had remained of the diaries and chronicles of the Assassins at that time. Before I go on with Maalouf's version of the story, let me just tell you a little about the background of the Middle East at that time. At the turn of the millennium, some time around the 1080s, most of Persia was ruled by the Seljuks who were Sunni Turks. Most of Persia was also Sunni back then except for three cities one of which was Qom, Hassan Sabbah's hometown. So yes, Hassan was a Shiite. At that time Shiites and Sunnis were enemies; a man with a Sunni name like Omar would think twice before going to one of the Shiite cities where Omar was almost a swearword (in relation to Omar Ibn El Khattab, who is believed by Shiites to have taken the place of the great Imam Ali Ibn Aby Taleb, Prophet Mohamed's cousin, as the second Kh...

Karl Marx had once said that "religion is the opium of the people",  and since I never was one of his "followers/believers" I have never taken the time to see the context of this saying. But When I read a story that proved to me a point very close to it, I decided to look it up. His argument was that man makes religions and not vice versa. He says: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." For someone who believes that this world is unfair, the dream of a paradise after death is what keeps them going. But not just this.... I have been reading about the Assassins' Paradise, reading a different version of the story. One that made more sense. This story reminded me of Marx's saying and let me think about it again. ...

April 18, 1964, A man sits by the Nile, holding his knees close to his chest. He looks around at the village he once called home, and he can't stop his tears. He gets up and leaves the abandoned city that was forcibly abandoned. He remembers the times he did not live, through the stories he has been told, stories of four other times when his ancestors had to leave their village. He grew up knowing that someday, he too will have to abandon the only place he could call home. Some say that it's OK for them to leave their village for the greater good, and maybe this is true. But when leaving their village comes with abandoning their culture it becomes a great problem. I'll start what I have to say about Nubia with some history. The Nubian culture started evolving in the 5th millennium B.C. they were able to make a somewhat strong dynasty in South Egypt and Sudan, until later in around 1500 B.C. when the Ancient Egyptian dynasty conquered Nubia. Nubia has always been of a ...

A few years ago, back when I was a college student, I was talking about Palestine and Israel with some colleagues and a colleague, who's had most of his school education in a gulf country, says: "but Israel has always been there. Tel Aviv has always been part of Israel, not Palestine!" It's been just a bit over 60 years and many of us have forgotten. What would happen 20 years later? No one will know what Palestine is? I keep wondering how the Arabs of that time let this disaster happen, but then I remember that we were nothing but colonized countries. And whether I want to believe it or not, regretting will get us nowhere. The truth is that now, there's no country called Palestine on many maps; It's either Gaza and West Bank or Palestinian territories at best. I don't see Palestine being free anytime soon with all their political groups fighting and the people not finding a leader. But I know for sure that we shall never forget Palestine, no matter h...

First let me say that most of the extraction of lessons in this post isn't done by me, but by the person who has opened my eyes to the beautiful myth. Yet I also have to say that when I did my own research, and read it from different sources, I found even more lessons to learn. And that's the beauty of it, with every time you read it you learn something new. So to the moral of the Myth of Osiris.... It's clear that the fight between Horus and Seth is a fight between good and evil, between what's rightful and what's wrong, between what's true and what's fake. Horus had an intelligent mind that lead him to fight for the truth. Seth had an intellect mind that made him able to give excuses for his helpers, to brainwash them, or to give them fake reason to fight his fake war. Horus, with the wisdom of his mother and a father who holds the truth had the sharp vision of a hawk. But what is vision to our ancestors? What is the eye of Horus? What does it stand for...

After Isis takes Osiris's body and goes back to Egypt. She opens the chest and weeps over it, joined by her good sister (who's also Seth's wife) Nephthys. They turn into kites (the birds) and fly over the body. With their magic, they bring Osiris back to life. They hide Osiris, then Isis (who gave birth to Horus on an island on her way to Byblos and hid him there) goes to bring her son back. Isis brings back Horus, who was born to be a worrier and returns to Osiris. With the teachings of both Osiris and Isis, Horus becomes as fluent as his mother and as loved his father. They prepare him to fight the great war against Seth, the fake king. Soon enough, Seth finds the body of the resurrected Osiris in its hidden place after a lot of searching. He cuts his body into 14 pieces* and throws each piece in a different part of The Nile. Isis starts her mourning all over again, builds a ship of papyrus, takes her son, and goes in search of her husband's 14 pieces. The fierce...

Today I have been lucky enough to be told the legend of Osiris from someone who not only knows very well how to tell a story, but also knows how to tell it in a way that would make you figure out all its moral as you keep listening. So I have done my research, and will share it with you in the few coming posts. But let me warn you, if you're Egyptian, it's pretty different from the one we were taught in school. So clear your minds, and get ready to know the real Legend =). But before I start on the legend itself, let me tell you that this wonderful story was the base of the Ancient Egyptian religion. You'll the importance of that later, in the last post of lessons learned. Characters: Osiris: The king of all kings. He represents unity. Isis: His loving wife Horus: Their son, the prince who is to become king after his father. Seth: Osiris's brother who wants to take over his brother's throne. The story starts with a mother called Nut giving ...