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Historic Groups that Started Innocent then Took an Evil Turn

Khalid Elhassan November 8, 2020 32 min

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26. An Innocent Start to the Medieval Middle East’s Scariest Cult

Today’s rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran has sectarian roots stretching back for over a thousand years. Our Politics

Those staying current with the news coming out of the Middle East are probably aware that the Muslim world is rent by rival camps, one led by Saudi Arabia, the other by Iran. Those even more up on their current news might know that a key factor driving the rivalry is a sectarian split between Muslim Sunnis and Muslim Shiites. It is a rivalry with roots going back over fourteen hundred years.

Over the centuries, the Sunni-Shiite rivalry went through many phases and took on many forms. One of the weirdest – and to contemporaries scariest – phases began in the late eleventh century, kicked off by an Islamic scholar named Hassan al Sabbah. It began innocent enough, with missionary work to proselytize Shi’ism. It soon morphed into a murderous cult of stoned fanatics, that terrorized the Middle East for the next hundred and fifty years: the Assassins.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.