Authors: Vladimir Bartol
Bartol, himself an ethnic Slovene from Trieste, studied in Paris and Ljubljana, eventually settling in the Slovenian capital to pursue a literary career. During his studies in Paris in 1927, a fellow Slovene who knew of
Bartol’s ambitions as a writer recommended that he draw on the episode of the “Old Man of the Mountain” from
The Travels of Marco Polo
as material for a short story or novel. This tale, recounted to Marco Polo as he progressed along the Silk Road through Iran, had to do with a powerful local sectarian warlord who supposedly used hashish and a secret bower of kept maidens to dupe young men into believing that he had the power to transport them to paradise and bring them back to earth at will. Thus winning the youths’ fanatic loyalty, he was able to dispatch them to any corner of the world on suicidal missions of political assassinations that served to extend his power and influence. Bartol took the subject matter to heart and during the next ten years did extensive research into the broader historical background of the tale while inventing a novelistic plot and structure of his own. Completing the novel became his passion, his reason for being. In his diary he pleaded with the fates to let him live to finish the book and deliver it safely into the printer’s hands. After a long gestation of ten years, the novel finally took shape on paper in the course of four successive drafts during those intense, secluded months that Bartol spent in the town of Kamnik. By all accounts, Bartol was radiantly happy during this period, just as we might imagine a person who knows he’s creating a masterpiece should be.
Unfortunately, the timing of this masterpiece’s appearance in the world was less than perfect.
Alamut’s
trajectory was interrupted first by the German and Italian annexation of Slovenia from 1941 to 1945, then by the literary ideologies of Tito-led Communist Yugoslavia, where for some years the book was seen as a threat. What’s more, its subject matter and style were completely at variance with the dominant trends in Slovenian literature both before and after World War II. Writers of small, linguistically isolated nations often have an overwhelming need to write about life in that particular small nation, perhaps as a way of helping to validate and reinforce the nation’s very existence. Because there was nothing identifiably Slovenian about
Alamut
, except for its language, his fellow writers took to characterizing Bartol as “a mistake in the Slovenian genetic code.” Here was an adventure novel set in northwestern Iran, written in places to resemble
Thousand and One Nights
, and centered around the deep tensions between the indigenous Pahlavi-speaking Shiite Muslim inhabitants of the region and their Seljuk Turkish Sunni Muslim overlords—a thoroughly readable and well-researched novel that used a simple prose style to depict colorful settings and develop a suspenseful plot, rather than the usual tale of tensions among Slovenian peasants, landowners and townspeople. Bartol himself told of being approached on the street years later by one of his old schoolmates, who told him, “I read your translation and really enjoyed it.” “What translation?” Bartol replied. “That fat novel, the one that was written by some English or Indian author,” the man explained. “Do you mean
Alamut
?” Bartol asked. “I wrote that.”
The man laughed at this and waved dismissively, “Go on, get out of here. You can’t fool me.” And then he walked away. Ordinary readers found it inconceivable that a Slovenian could develop a story so completely outside of their own historical experience—it had to have been written by a foreigner. Bartol himself saw the guild of Slovenian writers as divided into two categories: the nationalists, who were in the majority and expressed what he called “the anguished lament of their own time,” and the cosmopolitans, who had a broader sense of history but were in the minority. Needless to say, Bartol saw himself in the second, generally misunderstood, group.
One of Bartol’s strengths in
Alamut
is his ability to virtually disappear as a perceptible agent of the novel and let his characters carry the story. There is no authorial voice passing judgment or instructing readers which characters to favor and which to condemn. In fact, readers may find their allegiances shifting in the course of the story, becoming confused and ambivalent. Bartol certainly intended to write an enigmatic book. Literary historians have looked to Bartol’s biography, personality and other work for keys to understanding
Alamut
, but much in the author’s life still remains hidden from view. Its very openness to a variety of interpretations is one of the things that continue to make
Alamut
a rewarding experience.
Perhaps the simplest way to approach
Alamut
is as a broadly historical if highly fictionalized account of eleventh-century Iran under Seljuk rule. A reader encountering the novel from this perspective can appreciate its scrupulously researched historical background, the general absence of historical anachronisms, its account of the origins of the Shiite-Sunni conflict within Islam, and its exposition of the deep-seated resentments that the indigenous peoples of this area have had against foreign occupiers, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, for over a millennium. The author’s gift for populating this setting with sympathetic, complex, and contemporary-seeming personalities, whose aspirations and fears resonate for the reader at a level that transcends the stock expectations of the exotic scenic décor, make this historically focused reading of the novel particularly lifelike and poignant.
A second reading of
Alamut
anchors its meaning firmly in Bartol’s own time between the two World Wars, seeing it as an allegorical representation of the rise of totalitarianism in early twentieth-century Europe. In this reading, Hasan ibn Sabbah, the hyper-rationalistic leader of the Ismaili sect, becomes a composite portrait of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. In fact, Bartol originally intended to dedicate the first edition of his book “To Benito Mussolini,” and when he was dissuaded from doing this, suggested a more generic dedication “To a certain dictator,” which was similarly vetoed. Either dedication would almost certainly have been a bold exercise in high irony, but his publisher rightly saw the risks involved at that volatile time: lost readership, irate authorities. Some of the characters appear to have been drawn from real-life
models that dominated the newsreels at that time. Abu Ali, Hasan’s right-hand man, is depicted delivering inspiring oratory to the men of
Alamut
in a way reminiscent of no one so much as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The ceremonial nighttime lighting of the castle of
Alamut
could pass for an allusion to the floodlit rallies and torchlight parades of the Nazi Party. The strict organizational hierarchies of the Ismailis, the broad similarities between some characters and their corresponding types within the Fascist or National Socialist constellations, and the central role of ideology as a sop for the masses all resonate with the social and power structures then existing in Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia, as do the progressively greater levels of knowledge and critical distance from ideology that are available to Hasan’s inner circle.
More recently, yet another interpretation tries to persuade us that
Alamut
is a roman-à-clef representation of what should have been the ideal Slovenian response to the German and Italian totalitarianism then threatening Slovenia and the rest of Europe—in other words, a mirror image of the Hasan-as-Hitler reading. This interpretation looks to Bartol’s origins in the area around Trieste, and his undisputed anger at Italian domination and persecution of the ethnic Slovenes in those regions beginning in the 1920s. Bartol was indeed a close personal friend of the head of a Slovenian terrorist group, the “Tigers,” whose members conducted violent attacks on Italian institutions and individuals in the Italian-Slovenian border regions. (The group’s Slovenian designation “TIGR” was actually an acronym based on the names of four key disputed areas: Trieste, Istria, Gorizia, and Rijeka [Italian Fiume].) When his friend was captured by the Italians in 1930 and sentenced to twenty years in prison, Bartol made a laconic and ominous note in his diary, “Zorko, I will avenge you.” Hasan’s positive traits—his rationality, intelligence and wit—together with his revelatory confession late in the novel to his youthful alter ego, ibn Tahir, that his entire life’s work has been dedicated to liberating the Pahlavi-speaking population of Iran from foreign domination, would all seem to support this view of the novel as an Aesopian exhortation to oppressed Slovenes, focused around celebrating the charismatic personality and Machiavellian brilliance of the liberation movement’s leader, Hasan/Zorko.
But as tempting as this Slovenian nationalist reading of
Alamut
may be, ultimately it rings facile and flat. For one, how can Hasan’s nationalism—for which Bartol anachronistically draws on an ideology arising centuries later, out of eighteenth-century European thought—square with Hasan’s far more exhaustively articulated nihilism, his rejection of all ideology, his acceptance of power as the ruling force of the universe, and his implacable pursuit of power for its own sake? Moreover, how could any self-respecting human being, Slovene or otherwise, take to heart a manifesto based on the cynical
manipulation of human consciousness and human life in furtherance of the manipulator’s own goals? Attempts to make
Alamut
work as a veiled treatise on national liberation also run up against Bartol’s own paradoxical avowals of authorial indifference to politics. And ultimately they are reductive and self-contradictory, turning what reads and feels like a many-faceted work of literature rich with meaning into a two-dimensional ideological screed.
This brings us to the present day and the reading of
Alamut
that is bound to be particularly tempting, now that America has incurred Hasan-like blows from a nemesis to the east and delivered its own counterblows of incalculable destructive force in return. This reading will see
Alamut
, if not as a prophetic vision, then at least as an uncanny foreshadowing of the early twenty-first century’s fundamental conflict between a nimble, unpredictable upstart relying on a relatively small but close-woven network of self-sacrificing agents on the one hand, and a massive, lumbering empire on the other, put constantly on the defensive and very likely creating new recruits for its adversary with every poorly focused and politically motivated offensive step that it takes. The story of today’s conflict between al Qaeda and the West could be a palimpsest unwittingly obscuring the half-obliterated memory of a similar struggle from more than a thousand years ago: injured and humiliated common folk who prove susceptible to the call of a militant and avenging form of their religion; the manipulative radical ideology that promises its recruits an otherworldly reward in exchange for their making the ultimate sacrifice; the arrogant, self-satisfied occupying power whose chief goal is finding ways of extracting new profits from its possession; and the radical leader’s ominous prediction that someday “even princes on the far side of the world will live in fear” of his power. But however many parallels we may be able to find here between Bartol’s eleventh century and our twenty-first, there is nothing clairvoyant about them.
Alamut
offers no political solutions and no window on the future, other than the clarity of vision that a careful and empathetic rendering of history can provide. There is, admittedly, much for an American readership to learn from a book like
Alamut
, and better late than never: thanks to Bartol’s extensive and careful research, a rudimentary education in the historical complexities and continuities of Iraq and Iran, reaching back over a thousand years, is one of the novel’s useful by-products.
Any of these readings is possible. But all of them miss the obvious, fundamental fact that
Alamut
is a work of literature, and that as such its chief job is not to convey facts and arguments in a linear way but to do what only literature can do: provide attentive readers, in a tapestry as complex and ambiguous as life itself, with the means of discovering deeper and more universal truths about humanity, about how we conceive of ourselves and the world, and how our conceptions shape the world around us—essentially, to know
ourselves. Bartol does not overtly intervene in the narrative to guide our understanding of it in the way he wants. Instead, he sets his scenes with subtle clues and more than a few false decoys—much the way real life does—and then leaves it to us sort out truth from delusion. The most blinkered reading of
Alamut
might reinforce some stereotypical notions of the Middle East as the exclusive home of fanatics and unquestioning fundamentalists. (What, then, to make of the armies of black-shirted and leather-jacketed thugs that Europe spawned just sixty years ago?) A really perverted reading might actually find in it an apology for terrorism. That risk is there. But careful readers should come away from
Alamut
with something very different.
First and foremost,
Alamut
offers a thorough deconstruction of ideology—extending to all dogmatic ideologies that defy common sense and promise the kingdom of God in exchange for one’s life or one’s freedom to judge and make choices. Of course, there are Hasan’s long, enlightened diatribes against Islamic doctrine and the religious alternatives to it, which he organizes around the retelling of his own life experience, his search for truth as a young man, and his successive disillusionments. He tells of how he transcended his personal crisis by devoting himself exclusively to experience, science, and what can be perceived by the senses. But this positivism develops into a hyper-rationalism that, by excluding the emotional aspects of human experience as irrational and invalid, itself becomes dogmatic. At its extreme, Hasan’s rationalism proclaims the absence of absolute moral restraints, the supremacy of power as the ruling force of the world, and the imperative of manipulating lesser human beings to achieve maximum power and further his own ends—formally articulated in his sect’s supreme maxim: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”