Crusades Biographies | Rashid Al-Din Sinan Biography

c. 1133
Basra, Iraq

c. 1192
Masyaf, Syria

Syrian Ismaili Shiite Muslim leader

"Be assured that we do not kill any man in this way for the sake of reward or for money, but only when he has first inflicted [caused] an injury on us."

—Sinan, quoted in Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade.

Rashid al-Din Sinan was known to westerners during the Crusades (Christian holy wars against Islam from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries) as the Old Man of the Mountain, or Shaykh al-Jabal. Sinan—who was a dai, or spiritual leader and missionary of the radical Ismaili Shiite sect (subgroup) of Islam, an extreme religious group—led a community of some sixty thousand faithful from his mountain castle of...