Isma'ilism

The Ismailis are presented as a branch of Shiism that developed in the Fatimid sphere and later took shape in Persia under Hasan as-Sabbah. In the novel’s recursive history of secret societies, they are both a real religious and political movement and material for the characters’ increasingly elaborate Plan: their association with Alamut, covert action, and a spiritual knighthood makes them appear to fit a wider pattern, even as the story shows how such patterns are assembled from analogy and suspicion.

Origins and Schism

The account begins with the division within Islam after Muhammad’s death. The Shiites, described as supporters of Ali, held that religious authority continued in the person of the Imam, understood as leader and manifestation of the divine. Shiism itself later divided: the Twelvers awaited a lost future Imam, while the Ismailis arose in the Fatimid realm in Cairo and subsequently developed in Persia.

The narrative acknowledges the difficulty of reconstructing this history through numerous authors and names, and treats the broader passage of esoteric teachings across the Mediterranean as difficult to disentangle. That uncertainty matters to the Plan’s method: a complicated history becomes a field in which disparate traditions can be connected, sometimes through genuine historical succession and sometimes through the characters’ own associative leaps.

Hasan as-Sabbah and Alamut

The Ismailis’ Persian development is associated with Hasan as-Sabbah, presented as both mystical and politically formidable. He established his headquarters at Alamut, the “Nest of the Raptor,” where he gathered the fidai, or fedayeen, described as devotees faithful unto death. He used them for political assassinations as instruments of a secret holy war.

The followers later became known as the Assassins. The characters’ account recasts that name as an emblem of a warrior-monastic order, making the group resemble the Templars in the Plan’s imagined genealogy. The comparison is not simply a statement about the Ismailis’ own identity: it is one of the analogies by which the characters connect separate organizations into a supposed continuous tradition of spiritual knighthood.

Alamut’s inaccessibility reinforces its place in this narrative. The fortress is described as a stronghold reached by a concealed stairway cut into the rock, with a single archer able to defend it. This secluded headquarters gives the historical group a setting readily assimilated to the Plan’s imagery of hidden power, while the text’s attention to the fortress also distinguishes a concrete place from the much larger connections the characters build around it.

Survival and Historical Afterlife

Alamut eventually fell under Mongol pressure, but the account does not equate the fortress’s fall with the disappearance of the Ismailis. The sect survived across the East, mingled with non-Shiite Sufism, gave rise to the Druzes, and continued among the Indian Khojas, followers of the Aga Khan. This survival becomes part of the characters’ speculation about how a secret tradition might persist across centuries and changing institutions.

The discussion then extends the chain of resemblance beyond the Ismailis themselves. The narrator wonders whether Hermetic ideas recovered in Cairo under the Fatimids, through the Academy of Heliopolis and a house of sciences, inspired Francis Bacon’s House of Solomon and, through it, the Conservatoire. Belbo eagerly accepts the proposed link and asks how the cabalists fit. The exchange shows the Plan at work: historical survival, transmission of ideas, and resemblance between institutions are made to seem like evidence of one connected design, although the connection remains an inference within the characters’ speculative reconstruction.

From History to Conspiracy

The Ismailis’ place in the novel is clarified by the larger account of how the Plan acquires apparent reality. The characters begin by joining materials through associations they recognize as unwarranted, telling themselves that they are parodying the reasoning of their imagined enemies. But the repeated practice of connecting everything gradually becomes a habit, and the narrator distinguishes the three men’s changes: he becomes addicted to the game, Diotallevi corrupted by it, and Belbo converted to it. Their capacity to distinguish metaphorical resemblance from literal identity begins to weaken.

The same interpretive machinery is applied elsewhere to anti-Semitic conspiracy literature. The discussion traces how political accusations and texts are attributed, copied, altered, and repurposed, including the claim that the Protocols draw on earlier material. These episodes expose a crucial difference between documented historical fragments and the supposed unified plot: the characters repeatedly treat borrowings, coincidences, and hostile inventions as confirmation of a single hidden agency. The Ismailis, like the Templars and other groups, become nodes in that constructed network rather than proof that the network exists.

The characters eventually acknowledge that they invented a nonexistent Plan, yet those who encounter it identify their own confused mythologies with its fragments and accept its web of analogy as an explanation of their past. Once people believe in the invented design and act through it, the Plan begins to exist in its consequences. The Ismailis’ historical story thus serves two purposes: it preserves the outline of a distinct movement, while demonstrating how real groups can be recruited into an all-explaining conspiracy through the characters’ compulsion to make every fact disclose a mystery.