Rock band Hawkwind/Getty Images
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
Hawkwind's ‘Hassan I Sahba’ is a cosmic trip that lives up to the band's space rock reputation. This 1977 banger dives headfirst into the legend of Hassan-i Sabbah (circa 1050–1124), the founder of the Nizari Isma'ili state (a Shia branch of Islam). He established within it a militant group of devoted Hashashin, a crew of assassins so devoted that they'd kill anyone, anywhere, without batting an eye.
Sabbah championed extreme asceticism, founding a strict commune in his mountain stronghold where all forms of luxury were banned, effectively rendering wealth meaningless. The term ‘Hashashin’, meaning ‘grass eaters’, used to describe his fearsome assassins who targeted both Christians and Muslims, likely refers to their intentional poverty. However, some nineteenth-century French scholars argued it stemmed from hashish use, which supposedly numbed them to all feeling.
Hawkwind's swirling 1977 song clearly adheres to the French view of the word's etymology. It is a heavy phantasmagoria, transitioning from the Hashashins themselves to the realities of the Middle East in the 1970s, such as the petrodollar and the Palestinian militant group Black September, and culminating in a dark mystical revelation about the desert and the oasis.