"Alamut is...a finely wrought, undiscovered minor masterpiece that offers...a wealth of meticulously planned and executed detail and broad potential for symbolic, intertextual and philosophical interpretation."
Download PDF of Biggins' Afterword

Nevertheless, Is It Also a Machiavellian Novel?
A Review Essay of Against Ideologies: Vladimir Bartol and Alamut
by Miran Hladnik, University of Ljubljana
forthcoming in "Slovene Studies"
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"The Biggins study is an exhaustive summary...and also the first serious, detailed, and significant study of Alamut outside of Slovenia."
Download PDF of Hladnik's Review

"First published sixty years ago, Alamut is a literary classic by Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol, a deftly researched and presented historical novel about one of the world's first political terrorists, 11th century Ismaili leader Hasan ibn Sabbah, whose machinations with drugs and carnal pleasures deceived his followers into believing that he would deliver them to a paradise in the afterlife, so that they would destroy themselves in suicide missions for him. Flawlessly translated into English (and also published in eighteen other languages), Alamut portrays even the most Machiavellian individuals as human - ruthless or murderous, but also subject to human virtues, vices, and tragedies. An afterword by Michael Biggins offering context on the author's life, the juxtaposition of his writing to the rise of dictatorial conquest that would erupt into World War II, and the medly of reactions to its publication, both in the author's native Slovenia and worldwide, round out this superb masterpiece. An absolute must-have for East European literature shelves, and quite simply a thoroughly compelling novel cover to cover."
 — Midwest Book Review

"For all of its provocative ideas and sometimes eerily prescient incidents, Alamut is also successful simply as an entertaining yarn...Bartol devises a shifting collage of passions, adventure and sacrifice. The book's exotic settings are sumptuously described, and the characters are charismatic and complex — despite the fervent aims of some of them to subscribe to single-minded devotion."
 — Seattle Times

Vladimir Bartol: Prophet
by Brian J. Pozun

"In Alamut, Bartol made clear allusion to Hitler's SS and the Ustasa militias. However, when the German translation was published in 1992, reviewers saw shades of the then-current war in Bosnia in its pages. On 11 September 2001...Hassan Ibn Sabbah became the harbinger of Osama bin Laden..."
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Review of Alamut
by Marcel Štefancic, Jr

"Similar to the speech of George W. Bush, the sultan declares, 'The universe is hanging on the knife's edge.' But, alas, the Turks cannot defeat Alamut. And they cannot take Hasan ibn Sabbah. Ever. Strangely enough...with each new Turkish assault, new Ismaili forts are built, new cells appear..."
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The Decline of the American Century
by K Gajendra Singh, former ambassador of India

Published online by Al-Jazeerah, February 28, 2005

"In some ways the Saudis and Egyptians who carried out the September 11 attacks are descendents of the Assassins who emerged in the 10th century against the tyrannical caliphs, the military and civil rulers in the Middle East...Stories of martyred Assassins entering a paradise of beautiful women in gardens full of flowers and fruit trees with streams of water, honey and wine were products of fertile European imagination, a misconception that still persists in the West."
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“If Osama bin Laden did not exist, Vladimir Bartol would have invented him.”
 —  L’Express

“Alamut is an epic novel of conspiracies, love stories, and subtle religious and philosophical subtexts that bravely confronts the issue of political extremism…Like Borges, it raises questions but offers few answers…and will leave you with an inexhaustible restlessness and uncertainty.”
 —  Ricardo Arturo Ríos Torres, La Prensa

“You cannot read Alamut like an ordinary book. It is an adventure story from 1938 which transforms itself, in the course of a few hundred pages, into a nightmare novel of the new century.”
 — Olivier Maison, Journal de la Culture

"The question that Alamut keeps returning to is the following: presupposing that humans are inevitably deceived by their senses and thoughts into believing that their choices and desires correspond to truth in the outside world, should they be left to happily enjoy a life of illusion? And, if so, will their enjoyment be real enjoyment? If they have a choice between that and a life of enlightened misery, aware that there is nothing to hope for or believe in, which would they pick? And what is the responsibility towards the ignorant masses on the part of those few lonely souls who know the difference? Broadly speaking, this is the dilemma proposed much later by The Matrix with its colored pills."
 — Balkan Analysis