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The Lion, the Sun and the Eternal Blue Sky
(1) INTRODUCTION
(1) INTRODUCTION
‘… States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world …’
With these words, the President of the United States of America addressed the people of his country in 2002. The states he was referring to - Iran, Iraq and North Korea - were, he said, manufacturing, or trying to manufacture, so-called weapons of mass destruction. Their agents were engaged in subversive activities against the West, which included sponsoring suicide missions in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Mr Bush’s State of the Union message might have gone unnoticed outside his own country, or at least forgotten within a few days, had it not been for the one phrase - Axis of Evil.
The speech as a whole drew both support and outrage from around the world. However, these much-quoted three words provoked criticism from friend and foe alike. They antagonised the moderates along with the extremists; they arguably influenced the result of an Iranian presidential election and threatened world peace by the venom with which they were uttered.
Three years later, Iran was still the great enemy, though the President added, perhaps as an afterthought, a few glib words addressed to the Iranian people:
‘… As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.’
Glib certainly - are not all politicians’ words so? - but probably also insincere, because by the middle of 2007, the same president was as good as threatening that same people with bombing and invasion. And even with a new president, relations are not of the best today.
There are surely some unpleasant rulers in the world. There are even a few who go beyond the pale of civilised behaviour. But since when is a country defined by its rulers?
No country can be truly said to be evil. Countries are composed of people. They may be ruled wisely and justly, by monarchs or presidents, by democratic assemblies or by autocratic tyrants, but people are just people. Each has its share of good and bad, of wise and foolish, of tolerant and bigoted, of cultured and ignorant .... [CONTINUE READING THIS CHAPTER] [BACK TO TOP OF PAGE]
(2) HULEGU AND THE FALL OF BAGHDAD
In the year 1255 of the Christian Era, 653 in the Muslim calendar, Prince Hulegu, the grandson of Temuchin, was sent by his elder brother, the Great Khan Mangke, to subdue Persia.
Much of that country was already part of the Mongols’ empire, had Mongol-appointed governors and paid Mongol taxes. However, there were pockets of resistance to foreign rule. The hot and, in Mongol eyes, inhospitable south was almost untouched by the earlier invasion, as was Baghdad. The Abbasid Caliph, whose father had refused help to the resistance in 1227, though he had later chalked up some minor successes against the Mongol generals, was still lording it there in all his glory.
Hulegu’s first major campaign, in the winter of 1256, was against the Islamic sect known as the Nizaris, or Assassins, under their leader Rukn ad-Din, who were entrenched in fortresses high in the Alburz Mountains, not far from present day Teheran. The Nizaris were not exactly popular with orthodox Muslims, who did not greatly mourn their humiliation.
After defeating Rukn ad-Din and destroying his fortresses, Hulegu marched on Baghdad, ousted the Caliph, and later took the title Il-khan. Within a few years, the whole country was occupied. Persian men were conscripted into the Mongol army and their women forced into marriage with the conquerors. Much of the Persian infrastructure was destroyed, or such as had survived the first onslaught, and a period of economic stagnation followed. Christianity, Judaism and especially Buddhism flourished at the expense of Islam.
The scene was set for events that were ultimately to change Persia forever.
The defeat of the Assassins in the winter of 1256 and the subsequent destruction of Baghdad were the climax of a military adventure that had begun forty years earlier.
In 1218, the armies of Temuchin arrived at the eastern borders of the Muslim empire. In front of them lay Transoxiana, Kwarazm, the Iranian province of Khorasan and ultimately the Persian heartland that included the realm of the Caliph. The World Conqueror had come a long way, both politically and geographically, since his days as an ambitious Mongol clansman.
By 1209, at the age of forty-three, he had succeeded in uniting the Steppes clans into a new Mongol nation, with lands the size of Mongolia today. His people had proclaimed him its leader, with the title Genghis Khan. He was in command of an army of more than 50,000 unique fighting horsemen .... [CONTINUE READING THIS CHAPTER] [BACK TO TOP OF PAGE]
(3) WOMEN BEHIND THE THRONE
In Mongolia, where Temuchin is honoured today as a national hero, women enjoy a remarkable degree of economic and social independence compared to their counterparts in other Asian countries. That is not to say freedom and equality have progressed as far as in Western societies. However, when studying the Mongol Empire in the days of Genghis Khan and his successors, one cannot help but conclude that the emancipation of women in those days had proceeded far beyond anything existing in Christian Europe.
The Mongol Great Khans ruled half the world. But it often happened that their wives held the reins of power. The Mongol women of the Steppes, like the men, knew how to fight; they could handle bow and sword, often with great skill. Their responsibilities extended beyond cooking, housekeeping and caring for young children to managing the clan economy. When the military leaders were away on campaign, it was often women who made political decisions and commanded the defence of cities.
It did not end there. When a Great Khan died, his chief wife became regent. It was she who summoned the nobility to the quriltai, the assembly that would chose his successor. It was she who managed the empire until that successor was chosen. Often too, it was this woman who, openly or covertly, exerted the greatest influence on the choice of the new Khan. Moreover, her influence might extend beyond the new ruler’s enthronement into all matters of empire policy.
This is the story of two women, Sorqoqtani and Toregene, who are rarely mentioned in Western history books but who, for a time, held the fate of the world in their hands.
Sorqoqtani Beki (Queen Sorqoqtani) was born around 1190 in the Chinese province of Hsi-Hsia, where her father, named Jakha, was a prominent military commander. Though he lived among the Tangut people, Jakha belonged to the Keraits, one of the great tribes of Mongolia. His brother, Toghrul, was the Kerait chieftain and foster-father of the young Genghis Khan.
In the first decade of the 13th Century, when Mongols and Keraits were still close allies, Jakha returned to Mongolia and joined forces with Temuchin. However, Toghrul’s sons resented the favour that Temuchin enjoyed and plotted against him. In the fighting that followed, the Keraits were divided. Toghrul turned reluctantly against his former protegy. Jakha remained loyal. He supported the young Mongol leader throughout his final struggle for supremacy. When Temuchin stood finally on the pinnacle of lordship over the tribes, their friendship was cemented in two marriages. The World Conqueror took Jakha’s elder daughter for himself and gave Sorqoqtani as a bride to his youngest son, Tolui.
Together, in the years that followed, these two would have four sons whose names have resounded through the centuries almost that as much as that of Temuchin himself - Mangke, Kublai, Arik and Hulegu.
THE ASSASSINS – AN APOLOGY
In November of the year 1256, the Mongol armies of Prince Hulegu camped on a hillside in the Alburz Mountains of Iran. From all directions, the regiments of the Mongol generals converged on the encampment overlooking the Alamut Valley. Reinforced by an assortment of Muslim and Christian allies and a battery of powerful assault machinery, tens of thousands of the most efficient archers and swordsmen in the world waited for the signal to launch their attack.
Across the valley, perched on a mountain crag, lay the castle of Maymun-Diz, stronghold of Rukn ad-Din, Grand Master of the Nizari Isma’ilis, a branch of Islam regarded by the mainstream Sunni Muslims as heretics and dangerous fanatics. These people were the Assassins of later Crusader myth, their Grand Master the so-called Old Man of the Mountains.
Hulegu had demanded that Rukn ad-Din acknowledge him as his overlord and dismantle the castles. For days, Rukn had dissembled and prevaricated, evacuating castles with few or no defences and sending envoys to negotiate with the Mongol leader. Some 60 castles altogether may have existed in the 30-mile-long valley and many of these were quite small and of no strategic importance. However, three especially were vital and regarded by their occupants as virtually impregnable. These were Alamut, Lamassar and Maymun-Diz itself.
Winters in the Alburz can be severe but the winter of 1256 was relatively mild. No snow had yet fallen on the mountains. Rukn may have prayed that it would do so before long and that conditions would throw the Mongol invaders into disarray. He may have underestimated Hulegu’s strength and determination, and hoped that enough support would come from elsewhere to bolster Maymun-Diz’s formidable natural defences. It was not to be.
Too late, the Grand Master realised the hopelessness of his position and capitulated.
Surrender did not save him or his castles. Maymun-Diz was besieged, looted and burnt. Within a week, Alamut Castle suffered the same fate. Lamassar held out for almost a year, perhaps because Hulegu thought its destruction less important than the destruction of the others, or because he had more important things on his mind - such as the defeat of the Caliph of Baghdad. Rukn ad-Din was held as a prisoner, though enjoying many privileges, for several months but was eventually put to death brutally along with his family and thousands of his followers. The Mongol yasa had decreed that none of that people be spared, not even the babe in its cradle. (*1)
We are so used nowadays to religious conflict that it would be easy to dismiss Hulegu’s conquest of Persia as an anti-Muslim crusade. Having attacked and burnt the Nizari castles in the Alamut Valley, his armies moved on Baghdad, seat of the Sunni Caliph whom they overwhelmed. In the years that followed these campaigns, Jews and Christians rose to positions of importance and influence out of proportion with their numbers. Hulegu Khan, his son Abaqa and his grandson Arghun embraced Buddhism as their personal religion ....
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