Encyclopedia of Islam

fidai

  

237  J

---

Muslim prisoners from their Christian captors. 

Later in the Middle Ages, the fedayeen were the 

dedicated followers of Hasan-i Sabbah (d. 1124), 

the leader of the Nizari branch of the Ismaili Shia 

in  i

ran

,  i

raq

, and s

yria

. Known to the West as 

the a

ssassins

, the fedayeen would infiltrate enemy 

towns in order to publicly assassinate prominent 

leaders, even at the risk of their own lives. One 

of their most important victims was the Seljuk 

vizier Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092), the political head 

of the Abbasid Empire at the time. Such actions 

earned them the hatred of many Muslims, who 

called them heretics and hashish smokers (thus 

the name Assassin).

In more recent times, several groups of guer-

rilla fighters have been called fedayeen. These 

include Arab volunteers from e

gypt

, J

ordan

, and 

Syria who fought on behalf of the Palestinians 

against the Israelis between 1948 and 1967. They 

became the dominant elements in the formation 

of the p

alestine

 l

iberation

 o

rganization

 in the 

1960s. In Iraq, the Fedayeen Saddam was created 

in 1995 to serve as s

addam

 h

Usayn

’s paramilitary 

force. When Anglo-American forces invaded and 

occupied Iraq in 2003, it constituted the core of 

the resistance the coalition forces encountered. 

The most overtly religious fedayeen in the mod-

ern period were the Fedaiyan-i Islam, a radical 

Shii terrorist group in Iran. Formed during the 

1940s in close association with Shii clerics, it was 

composed mostly of young men living on the 

margins of Iran’s major cities. Through assassina-

tions of secular government officials, they sought 

to bring about a new political system based on the 

sharia

. Violently suppressed by the shah’s govern-

ment in the 1950s, the organization reemerged 

after the 1978–79 revolution, only to dissolve 

when the Khomeini government was formed and 

most of the radicals’ objectives were achieved. 

The secular counterpart to the Fedaiyan-i Islam 

was the Fedaiyan-i Khalq (the people’s fedayeen), 

a Marxist movement that sought to overthrow the 

Shah’s government during the 1970s.

See also i

smaili

 s

hiism

; 

Jihad

; 

sUicide

.