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History’s Out of the Ordinary Radicals

Khalid Elhassan June 29, 2020 33 min

Lebensborn - Schutzstaffel — Kidnapping of Polish children for the Lebensborn association. Wikimedia

12. Founding the Assassins Cult

The architect of the Fatimids’ assassination campaign was Sheik Hassan al Sabah (1034 – 1124). A shadowy and exotic Islamic scholar, the Sheik led a radical Shiite faction, the Nizari Ismailis, and founded the Assassins cult. In 1090, with Fatimid funding, he seized Alamut Castle in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea in Persia.

Al Sabah expanded his operations from Alamut, and established a series of remote mountain fortresses in the highlands of Persia and Syria. That earned him the nickname Old Man of the Mountain, a title passed on to his successors. From those holdfasts, the Sheik sent suicide squads of killers known as fida’is (“self-sacrificers”) against prominent leaders throughout the Middle East.

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.