Throne of Gold: The Lives of the Aga Khans.

• Author: Daftary, Farhad

The Isma ilis, a major community of Shi i Muslims, number several millions, and an overwhelming majority of them, representing the Nizari branch of the community, currently acknowledge Prince Karim Aga Khan IV as their forty-ninth spiritual leader, or imam. Prince Karim succeeded to the hereditary leadership of the Nizari Isma ilis in 1957 on the death of his grandfather, Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III. It was the latter's grandfather, Hasan Ali Shah (d. 1881), the forty-sixth Nizari imam, who had originally received the honorific title of Aga Khan from the contemporary Qajar monarch of Persia, Fath Ali Shah. Henceforth, this title, meaning lord and chief, remained hereditary among the Nizari imams. Anne Edwards' book aims to deal with the lives and careers of the Aga Khans, the Nizari Isma ili imams of modern times. But it does so only in a highly sensational and distorted manner.

Ever since medieval times the Nizari Isma ilis, made famous in Europe as the Assassins, have held a particular fascination for Europeans. In time, the Crusaders and their Occidental observers fabricated fanciful tales about the secret practices of this mysterious oriental sect and its leader, the Old Man of the Mountain. These legends were all concocted to provide explanations satisfactory to Europeans for the absolute devotion of the Isma ilis to their leader. The European myths of the Assassins, rooted in "imaginative ignorance," proved too sensational to be relegated to the domain of fiction by the more sober investigations of modern times. And despite modern progress in Isma ili studies, vestiges of the older fantasies and misconceptions about the Isma ilis continue to find periodic expressions in new disguises. Anne Edwards's book is the latest manifestation of what may be called modern popular orientalism on the Isma ilis.

Throne of Gold opens with a historical section on Islam and Isma ilism which is replete with errors and misconceptions and reveals the author's less than full knowledge of these matters. A few examples will suffice. The Abbasids did not descend from the Prophet's brother, but from his uncle; the author's discussion of the beliefs of the early Isma ilis reflects the stance of the medieval anti-Isma ili polemicists; the Nizari Isma ilis did not use hashish as reported in the Assassin legends of the European sources; and the term Assassin did not enter European languages via the writings of Marco Polo. The author's carelessness also finds...