Karolina

The World of Darkness is a product of its time and place — America in the 1990s, written by people whose understanding of the Islamic world rarely extended beyond Orientalist tropes and headlines about Gulf War oil. The Ashirra, as presented in canon, is a monolithic, ahistorical, theological mess that exists primarily to be "the Camarilla but with turbans", and I would like to fix that.

But before we can fix the Ashirra, we need to understand when and why the Camarilla and Sabbat (as global phenomena) would actually emerge, because the writers are either illiterate when it comes to history or prefer to ignore it for the sake of the rule of cool.

The canon claims the Camarilla formed in the aftermath of the Anarch Revolt, in the 15th century. This is anachronistic nonsense.

In the 15th century, there was no concept of "Europe" as a political or cultural unit, travel between regions was slow, dangerous, and rare, communication across the continent took months and the idea of a continental vampire government would have been literally unimaginable. Not a single one of these points can get negated with the help of vampire powers.

The Camarilla cannot be a medieval or Renaissance institution. It is clearly a modern one, born of the same forces that produced the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union. Think of what it requires: it needs reliable long-distance communication like telegraph or telephone, standardized travel like railroads and steamships, a shared political vocabulary (nationalism, international law, human rights), a common enemy to unite against (the Sabbat, mortal governments, the Inquisition).

These conditions did not exist until the 19th century. The 19th century was the age of:

Nationalism: The idea that people sharing a language and culture should have their own state.

Revolution: Liberal, nationalist, and socialist uprisings across Europe and the Americas.

Ideology: The birth of systematic political worldviews (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism).

Colonialism: The formal division of most of the world into European spheres of influence.

Communication: The telegraph, the railroad, the steamship, the mass-circulation newspaper.

This is the world that could produce something like the Camarilla: a bureaucratic, hierarchical, international institution designed to protect the interests of established powers against revolutionary threats. Camarilla's values include stability over justice, hierarchy over merit, secrecy over accountability, gradual reform over revolution. This is just 19th century conservatism dressed in gothic drag.

The Sabbat cannot be an ancient cult of Caine-worshippers, because it looks like a product of the age of revolution, born from the same ferment that produced:

Marxism: The idea that the existing order is irredeemably corrupt and must be destroyed.

Anarchism: The rejection of all hierarchical authority.

Nationalism: The belief that your people have been wronged and must reclaim their destiny.

Fascism: The cult of violence, the beloved leader, and the glorious mythical past.

The Sabbat should be a salad of extremist ideologies, not a unified sect. So, a Sabbat cell in St. Petersburg might be Marxist-Leninists who believe that vampire politics are class warfare, a Sabbat cell in the Caucasus might be Armenian ultranationalists who want to purge all Turkic vampires (or the other way around), a Sabbat cell in the American South might be a death cult that worships Caine as the first revolutionary.

If the Camarilla is a 19th-century product, the Ashirra is older — not because vampires are more traditional in the East, but because the Islamic world developed concepts of international law and transregional governance centuries before Europe.

Let me be clear about why the canon "Camarilla but with turbans" Ashirra doesn't work:

The Islamic world has never been politically unified. For most of its history, it has been divided into competing empires, dynasties, and caliphates. The Umayyads fought the Abbasids, the Abbasids fought the Fatimids, the Ottomans fought the Safavids, the Mughals did their own thing. Each claimed to be the true inheritor of the Prophet's authority and each despised the others. The idea that vampires from Morocco to Indonesia would share the same political structure, the same legal traditions, the same loyalties, is absurd.

A vampire sect that pretends to unify all of these is an American fantasy. There could be, like, at least three Ashirras at the same time: Ottoman (Sunni, Hanafi), Safavid (Shia, Ja'fari), and Mughal (Sunni, Hanafi but with heavy local syncretism). They would hate each other, compete for influence and issue fatwas declaring each other's leaders heretics. And this is only one specific historical period I mentioned (16th-18th centuries), there would be even MORE Ashirras throughout history.

West Asia is not and has never been exclusively Muslim. Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and others have lived in the region for centuries. They should have their own vampire traditions, their own legal frameworks and alliances. They would not create a separate sect for themselves, instead, they would exist within the same political structures as Muslim vampires, as dhimmis (protected peoples) with limited rights. A historically conscious Ashirra should have a millet system, different religious communities governed by their own laws, under the overall authority of the Muslim majority.

The "assassin from the sands" Banu Haqim stereotype is so obvious and so tiresome, but the deeper problem is the conflation of judicial authority with executive violence. A qadi does not execute his own judgments. He does not hunt the guilty or sneak through shadows with a poisoned dagger. He sits in a court, hears testimony, and issues a ruling. Then somebody else enforces it.

The Banu Haqim should not be assassins. They should be jurists, scholars, and judges— the spiritual heart of the Ashirra, the ones who write the fatwas, who interpret the law, who struggle with the question of what justice and faith mean in a cursed existence.

Some of them can be vigilantes who take the law into their own hands when the system fails. Some of them can be corrupt and issue fatwas for money or favor. Some of them can be mystics who see the law as a veil over a deeper truth. But the core of the clan, imo, should be judicial, not martial. Islam is a religion of civil order, it has lawmen instead of priests, and the lesser jihad is only a small part of it, not the core.

The diablerie question is also more interesting than canon allows, and I think the reputation of serial diablerists can get attached to Banu Haqim without any curses involved. In Islamic law, a murderer's family has three options: retribution (qisas), blood money (diyya), or forgiveness ('afw). For vampires, this should apply to diablerie as well as murder.

Qisas: The victim's lineage may diablerize a member of the killer's lineage in return.

Diyya: The killer pays a massive blood price — territory, services, childer.

'Afw: The victim's lineage forgives the killer, considered the highest spiritual act.

The evidentiary standard for hadd crimes (including murder) is impossibly high — four adult male Muslim witnesses of impeccable character. Diablerie happens in private, there are almost never four witnesses.

The result is that most diablerists walk free in the eyes of formal law. But the victim's family can still seek a fatwa permitting private retribution. This creates a system of legalized blood feuds, managed by the Banu Haqim but not controlled by them. The qadi issues the fatwa; then the feud proceeds according to understood rules. It may last centuries. I think this framework makes more sense than the clan of judges being the most notorious criminals.

I don't like the canon plot about the Camarilla-Ashirra alliance and in my personal headcanon it simply doesn't exist. It's such a lazy move that ignores the history of the region and shies away from the uncomfortable topic of colonialism in order not to hurt white player's feelings. The Ashirra should despise the Camarilla with a burning passion.

The Camarilla is a European institution, it emerged and solidified during the period of European colonialism. It would have extended its influence into the Muslim world through the same mechanisms as mortal colonialism — trade, military conquest, economic pressure.

The Ashirra would have fought back, and would have lost. Not completely, and not everywhere, but enough to be permanently scarred. The relationship between the two should be defined by resentment, collaboration, and ongoing struggle. Older vampires remember Sykes-Pico agreement, and they should dream about tearing British and French Ventrue in half, because the said agreement drew idiotic border lines across their domains.

I think that many Ashirra vampires would despise the Camarilla for what it did to their homelands — the invasions, the occupations, the extraction of wealth, the imposition of foreign laws. But at the same time, many would collaborate by selling out their own people for personal gain, adopt European titles and manners, become clients of Ventrue merchant families. Many would be ambivalent, they would recognize the Camarilla's power, hate it, but see no alternative to it.

This creates conflict within the Ashirra about how to respond to the West. Should it modernize, adopt Camarilla methods, try to compete? Should it return to its roots, reject foreign influence, purify itself? Should it find a third path, neither Western nor traditional? There is no consensus. There are only factions, constantly fighting.

The fact that Ashirra exists at all in modern nights is simple Western ignorance. The Ottoman Empire fell a century ago, the political structures that supported the Ashirra — the caliphates, the sultanates, the imperial bureaucracies — they are all gone. What remains? Nostalgic elders who remember the old days, fragmented local powers who control individual cities or regions, a few surviving institutions that have no connection to each other. The Ashirra as a unified sect is dead, it has been dead for a century. The only people who pretend otherwise are those who remember when it was alive.

The Banu Haqim qadis no longer hold the power they used to. The world has changed, because now economic power matters more than scripture. A Ventrue-backed corporation can do what a Banu Haqim judge could not. The clan has more conflicts with itself than with outsiders —qadis from different madhahib issuing contradictory rulings, elders trying to preserve traditions that the young see as obsolete, families feuding over inheritances that have lost their meaning.

There are still vampires who call themselves "Ashirra" and there are still those who follow Sharia of the Night. There are still courts where a qadi's word carries weight, but they are local, fragmented and nostalgic. The Ashirra is a memory — beautiful, sad and lost to time. There is no "Ashirra policy" on anything, only what this qadi decides, what that sheikh wants, what this elder remembers. The end.

The way all of this is written (or more like not written, lmao) in canon is stupid. I remember one of the rulebooks saying that modern Ashirra strongholds are Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. Fucking what? These countries hate each other, they are political and spiritual enemies that have nothing in common, and Afghanistan is in no condition to be a stronghold of anything.

The canon Ashirra is a fantasy, it is a product of writers who did not understand Islamic history, and were content to reproduce stereotypes.

I want to make Ashirra messy, fractured, and contradictory, like the history it emerges from. I want it to have competing empires, legal traditions, and religious communities where religion actually matters. I want to talk about how it has been shaped by colonialism and is still dealing with the trauma. The Ashirra is dying, and the Kindred who remember its glory days are bitter, nostalgic, and dangerous, and this kind of character can make a very compelling hero or villain.

There's the last issue I would like to mention: blood sorcery. For the love of God, do not use the word "sihr" for this like Whitewolf did. Sorcery is a very serious sin because it is considered disbelief (you seek powers not from God = you do not believe in God), no Muslim vampire would do "sihr". That doesn't mean they can't throw fireballs though, you just need a better name for the fireballs.

In my chronicle, Banu Haqim call their magic "Ayat" — meaning signs, verses, evidence. It is the term for the verses of the Quran, chosen because it frames vampiric powers as given by God. To Banu Haqim "sorcerers", who aren't in fact sorcerers, but scholars, the word ayat means miracles, wonders and marvels of the physical universe that point to the Creator. The birds can fly because God wills so, and a Banu Haqim can fry your ass with a fireball because God wills so as well. The word "sihr" should be instead applied to infernalism, and instead of a "sorcerer" you can simply say "mystic". An Islamic mystic is somebody who looks for intimate knowledge of God, and in this framework, the Ayat, whether a discipline or a custom path of thaumaturgy, is exactly that, a tool for understanding.