That the Nizari Ishmaeli, better known to westerners as the Assassins, encouraged the rumors that they were in fact Djinn is something that most Islamic scholars pay little mind. The Ninja clans of feudal Japan encouraged similar rumors about their own magical heritage, derived from the powerful forest demons known as Tengu. The Thugee Cult of India made claims that many of their members were actually Bengal Tigers, transformed by the Goddess Kali into men as to better pursue and punish those whom their Goddess found to be wicked. Historians are quick to acknowledge the psychological power that these groups derived from their enemies’ belief in these stories, but of course, such creatures only populate the nightmares of primitive peoples and of children. In the latter two instances, I cannot say whether or not the Ninja or the Thugee were more than human, but in Alamut, not far from the place where the first humans were created, the religion of Islam was adapted to meet the needs of the Djinn.
Diogenis Druj, the Djinn who inspired and guarded the work of Hassan I Sabbah, is remembered, at least in a few obscure circles, as one of the most successful Djinn to have ever attempted to rekindle the Djinn's dreams of a Magocracy since perhaps the fall of the Ahd al Jann itself. It is even believed that he was one of the many prophetic authors of the Book of the Wanderer, or at least that he obtained an intact copy of it from somewhere, but that's another story.
It was Druj’s plan to raise a shadow empire that would exist in a network of autonomous castle-states and in the hearts of those that answered the call of his preachers, the Dai. Wearing the external threads of Islam, they would bring men to the slow realization of their lost heritage and disseminate the alchemical science that could transform a human, who is no less than a defeated Djinn anyway, back into his or her proper state. At Alamut, and in the many strongholds that rose to accommodate the growing sect, the process was quite successful. An army of Djinn was growing.
Unfortunatly, there are other forces in this world, forces that do no wish to see the completion of an army such as the one that was being raised in the training halls of the Assassins. These are the Archons, and it is believed that they were the ones responsible for the invading hordes from the East that flooded into the lands of the Assassins and decimated their sect. Though their Mongols were careful to burn all written records of the Djinn’s science, many of the Djinn themselves endured. Perhaps, if you are lucky, and the Revealers find you to be deserving, an old Djinn will take you into his or her confidence, and you too can learn the secret science of transmuting the clay in which you are encased into the Black Flame of the Eternals.
So, you scrolled down, did ya? I guess your expecting that this is where I'll just begin spilling my guts and handing out secrets that professional scholars and archeologists spend their whole lives digging through ancient texts and sand dunes hoping in vain to be the first to rediscover. Well, since you were observant enough to scroll down…
After the flood, the Djinn who reawoke in this world lived many different lives and regained many different conceptions of the Truth. One of the most interesting was the secret Ishmaeli theology of Diogenes Druj.
The Djinn theology relied heavily on the Ishmeali tradition of Tawil, or "interpretation.” The Ishmaeli believe that knowledge could be divided into two categories, the Zahir, which was the exoteric surface knowledge, and the Batin, the esoteric kernel of truth hidden beneath the surface. Another way to say this is to say that the Ishmaeli were taught to look for the Truth that lay beyond the surface of the merely Real.
Tawil was important to the Djinn’s goals for mankind for many reasons. To begin with, it allowed those who could be persuaded to employ it the freedom to ignore the literal in favor of their “spiritual” (i.e. personal) interpretation. Since any interpretation will most likely relate to the reality of the interpreter more than to the facts interpreted, this was fundamental to the Djinn’s need to return each mortal’s focus to their own desires, and away from the desires impressed upon them by the illusory world. Secondly, the arabic word for Djinn translates as "the hidden," because for obvious reasons, the satanic nature of the Djinn revolution was not well received in a world that only had room for One God. Tawil was a practice that allowed the Djinn to produce works that could both avoid the notice of the uninitiated and still provide inspiration to those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Also, Tawil was a good way to appropriate the fanatic’s credulousness toward Koranic authority and direct it toward the Djinn’s otherwise "unsupported" claims that this world was Allah’s prison camp for other conquered gods, as well as toward other beliefs and practices that served the Djinn’s cause better than orthodoxy did.
Once the authority of the book was rendered harmless, to a large extent, so was God. With God’s socialogical reality invested almost completely in the messages of the Koran, that external part of divinity would soon become meaningless and dead to the new initiate. From here, the Djinn would attempt to lead them to the unnourished spark that they carried within. If this was a success, then that spark would soon become a fire, and that fire would be supplied with the knowledge (air) and wisdom (water) it needed to maintain itself for the rest of its existence. If it wasn’t a success, then the Djinn within the Order continued to feed these lost souls from their own flames, and they were used as foot soldiers in the Djinn’s Great Gnostic War.
One important belief that the Djinn adopted from Islam was in regard to the sinfulness of Idolatry. Of course, the Djinn encouraged this belief in a slightly different manner. The reasoning goes that if one is an Idolater for placing any master before their one true Lord and Creator, then this prohibition must be applied against those who claim to be His ministers, and against the heads of state, and against any and all authority that would seek to master the individual that has made this promise to serve only “God.” For many of those initiated into the secret teachings, this came to be interpreted as a veiled demand for unwavering autonomy through antinomianism. Yet as the Jann al Jabal's immersion in religion continued over the years, these warriors against the oppressive creator of this world began to develop their own sincere "Islamic" beliefs more befitting of captive Gods.
With God as their immortal enemy, many within the Jann al Jabal completely dismissed the entire notion of a worshipable deity other than themselves. Yet, as stated, a large number of the Djinn who participated in this religious masquerade formed some fairly defensible theological beliefs. These will be examined more thoroughly in a latter essay, but the core of this worshipful reverence so unusual in the Djinn, came from the belief that the Real God, as well as His Archons, who the Djinn have battled on this world since it was created with their blood, was not the True God (who is often referred to as the “Transcendental” God, as opposed to the “Actual” God currently existing in this reality). It was after realizing this point that Diogenes Druj latter succeeded in drawing down the Book of the Wanderer once again, and reestablished the Djinn’s long severed link to the Fallen Angels.
Anyway, if one were to interpret the above to mean that they worshiped a God that does not really exist, they would not be entirely wrong. However, one should be mindful that dreams are not real and yet they can foretell the future. A blueprint is a picture of a building that has not been built, yet faith in that image makes felled trees into beautiful homes. The actual value of money does not exist at all, but man’s faith in it gives it the power to encourage the release of numerous gifts. To those few Jann al Jabal that eventually found the perfect One, Idolatry cam to be seen as your submission to the cold reality that oppresses you instead of to the dream that will set you free. As mundane dreamers worship Gods, Gods worship their dreams of the Divine.
But the real mystic break through of Jann al Jabal Islam came later. From one way of looking at it, Idolotry is putting anything in reality before the true God. But Idolotry is also the actual worship of false gods. Once they learned to worship, a few within the Jann al Jabal saw that the power of the "cruel" God that ruled humanity was nothing more than an unconscious conjuration of the conquered divinities that sleep in mankind, and this Holy Specter was fully invested in the continued sleep of the Djinn's fallen brothers and sisters because He was indeed NOT True, but merely a conjured phantom of their most potent dreams made reality. All the magic of the awakened Djinn could never overcome the tremendous power that the great masses of sleeping humans were abdicating to their God. The few within the Jann al Jabal who reached this level of understanding believed that to win the war against the Demiurge and His Archons, they had to fully restore all of the remaining sleeping Djinn to their original divine state, Djinn who were, and still are, living as mere humans and endlessly fueling the Archonic powers with their unconscious magicks. This proved to be a goal that the army of Heaven oppossed with everything it had, for, indeed, its very existence depended on it.
At first these few pious Jann al Jabal largely amused their fellow inmates, but in time many more were drawn to the passion and conviction with which they carried the battle, and the arguement that even the Djinn were partially responsible for fueling the prision that they invested so much energy and belief in began to slowly take hold among them. Which of course brings us to Jihad, another concept that many initiates of the Jann al Jabal took a great viscous pleasure in at first, yet that eventualy took on a much more significant meaning then just a mere war cry. With the gates now open to the wisdom of the sincere believers, and the focus moving from the external problem to the internal one, it could be said that the spiritually valuable tenets of the faith that they were subverting began to subvert them.
Although at first all within the Jann al Jabal embraced the call to Jihad as a battle cry against their cosmic enemies, this external war was more and more often referred to as the Lesser Jihad, much to the ire of the less sincere Ishmaeli Djinn, who still believed that their ancient notions of the Great Gnostic War were True. As taught by even orthodox Muslims, the Greater Jihad was the internal war that each Muslim fights against his or her base nature. To the Koran observant Muslim, this was a call to subdue the part that struggled against the will of Allah, but to the Jann al Jabal, it was a struggle against the body which Allah placed them in to control them, and the false ideas that would only continue to fuel the matter against which they struggled. Djini or Orthodox Muslim, those on either side who acknowledged the Greater Jihad acknowledged the need to conquer one’s own self, if for no other reason than to rise above the state they were in. The disagreements arose simply when deciding what part should be conquered, and what was in fact wrong with the state that mankind found itself in.
Incarnation has many warping effects on the perceptions of the spirit. To the extent that we are mere animals, we cannot act or speak or believe things based on the Truth as often as on what we desire. Incarnate Djinn aware of this defect argue that the animal self must be conquered if only because it will never allow you unrestricted access to the Truth. Both orthodox Muslims and the Jann al Jabal would agree that the Greater Jihad is the war against the animal self. Yet far from taming it to be obedient to Allah's decrees, a Djinn's victory in the Greater Jihad comes through purifing and commandeering the vessel so that it no longer impedes the will of the pure Djinni within. Indeed, a victorious Djinni is no longer an animal, but merely the spirit that is controling one. Surpassing the confines of mere conscience, and rising above the bevy of equally restictive insticts which have been imparted on them by their flesh, the Jann al Jabal strive to fearlessly embody their convictions, so that the fierceness of the beast is neither sacrificed nor submitted to, but instead purposefully harnessed for the Djinni's eventual accension.
While the Greater Jyhad is a struggle against the bottle, the Lesser Jihad is waged in battles for it. This struggle is potentailly dangerous, for although one may mitigate some unfortunate aspect of the state he or she is in, these victories, though easy to attain, are impossible to hold onto unless they are somehow linked to a personal transformation within In that case, what was the Lesser Jihad becomes the Greater, but such a fortunate transferance of effort is rare. The Djinn spirit is within you, and the world's form is useful only as a place to imprint your mark as an inspiration to the others or to perfect the control of your force, but if it is believed in too much, it will steal the truth from inside you. Besides, material success without any struggle, and therefor without a victory, can be poisonous to one's spirit.
Which brings us to our final and most important tenet of Jann al Jabal Islam. The Final Judgement was to be met at the end of each Djinn's sentence here. Sadly, for most of the Jann al Jabal, this still means a return to the Sun to engage the eternal war in Heaven at the front line. Just as every Djinn who falls in that battle is incarnated here for an insidious reeducation, so can those incarnate Djinn who traverse the maze of this world with their wills intact achieve a sure return to that battle, which rages in the heavens even now. Paradise lies in the shadow of swords, and for those few Djinn who could reorient themselves after their immersion in flesh, Earth was to be appropriated as the headquarters for their renewed offensive. Only the crudest of within the Jann al Jabal claimed that the war in the heavens was even remotely martial. Indeed, just as one measures the strength of an animal by testing the limbs of its body, a spirit's strength lies solely in its heart and the control of its mind. Thus the magority of the Jann al Jabal came to understand the importance of the Greater Jihad for those who did not desire to be repelled by the fierce countenance of the Demigorgon and his Archonic Army of Concealers, whose mighty kingdom, the old stories said, lies at the core of the Sun.
Few had the ears to hear the largely rejected words of the most pious of the Jabal Imams, who continue to say to this day, "The kingdom of the Demigorgon lies at the core of your heart, and your great passion for this war, and the great passions of your brothers and sisters in arms, and the unsatisfiable needs of the sonambulated humans, are what will hold it firmly in place for an eternity. Should you slay Him, you will simply become Him to the eyes of Mankind, for their sleeping heart remains as the final bottle to break, yet it is the thickest bottle of all."
If you do actually find the Jann al Jabal, here's a little something extra that may help all you poor Ajam out there to better speak their language. Good luck.