The Assassins Read Online Free PDF Page A

pay their religious dues, the Aga Khan sent a special envoy from Persia to Bombay, to bring them back into the fold. With the envoy went the Aga Khan's grandmother, who `herself appears to have harangued the Bombay Khojas' in an effort to regain their allegiance. Most of the Khojas remained faithful to their chief, but a small group persisted in their opposition, maintaining that they owed no obedience to the Aga Khan and denying that the Khojas were in any way connected with him. The resulting conflicts aroused strong feelings in the community and culminated in the murders of 1850.

In the meantime the Aga Khan himself had left Persia, where he had led an unsuccessful rising against the Shah, and after a short stay in Afghanistan he had taken refuge in India. His services to the British in Afghanistan and Sind gave him some claim to British gratitude. After staying first in Sind and then in Calcutta, he finally settled in Bombay, where he established himself as effective head of the Khoja community. There were still, however, some dissidents who opposed him, and who sought to use the machinery of the law to defeat his claims. After some preliminary actions, in April 1866 a group of seceders filed information and a bill in the High Court of Bombay, asking for an injunction restraining the Aga Khan `from interfering in the management of the trust property and affairs of the Khoja community'.
The case was tried by the Chief Justice, Sir Joseph Arnould. The hearing lasted for 25 days, and involved almost the whole of the Bombay bar. Both sides brought elaborately argued and extensively documented cases, and the enquiries of the court ranged far and deep, in history and genealogy, theology and law. Among numerous witnesses, the Aga Khan himself testified before the court, and adduced evidence of his descent. On 12 November 1866 Sir Joseph Arnould delivered judgement. The Khojas of Bombay, he found, were part of the larger Khoja community of India, whose religion was that of the Ismaili wing of the Shia; they were `a sect of people whose ancestors were Hindu in origin; which was converted to and has throughout abided in the faith of the Shia Imamee Ismailis; which has always been and still is bound by ties of spiritual allegiance to the hereditary Imams of the Ismailis'. They had been converted some four hundred years previously by an Ismaili missionary from Persia, and had remained subject to the spiritual authority of the line of Ismaili Imams, the latest of whom was the Aga Khan. These Imams were descended from the Lords of Alamut, and, through them, claimed descent from the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt and, ultimately, from the Prophet Muhammad. Their followers, in mediaeval times, had become famous under the name of the Assassins.

The Arnould judgement, supported by a wealth of historical evidence and argument, thus legally established the status of the Khojas as a community of Ismailis, of the Ismailis as heirs of the Assassins, and of the Aga Khan as spiritual head of the Ismailis and heir of the Imams of Alamut. Detailed information about the community was provided for the first time in the Ga{etteer of the Bombay Presidency in 1899.18
The Arnould judgement had also drawn attention to the existence of Ismaili communities in other parts of the world, some of which did not in fact recognize the Aga Khan as their chief. These communities were usually small minorities in remote and isolated places, difficult of access in every sense, and secretive to the point of death about their beliefs and their writings. Some of these writings, in manuscript, nevertheless found their way into the hands of scholars. At first these all came from Syria - the first area of Western interest in the Ismailis, in modern as in mediaeval times. Others followed, from widely separated regions. In 1903 an Italian merchant called Caprotti brought a collection of some sixty Arabic manuscripts from San'a, in the Yemen - the first of several batches which were