The Qarmatians Terrorized Medieval Arabia
Late 9th century Arabia was plagued by bandits who attacked trade and pilgrimage caravans, before coming under the sway of a mystic who preached that the End Days were nigh. So they morphed into a radical millenarian cult that was deemed heretical by other Muslims. Known as Qarmatians, they gathered a large following of fanatics and captured eastern Arabia and Bahrain, where they founded a utopian religious republic in 899.
The Qarmatians believed that pilgrimage to Mecca, a pillar of Islam, was a superstition, so they attacked pilgrim caravans. In one such attack in 906, they massacred over 20,000 pilgrims. In 930, as part of their millenarian quest to speed up and usher in the End Days, the Qarmatians seized Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities, and sacked both.
They killed over 30,000 pilgrims in Mecca, desecrated religious sites, and ritually and literally polluted the holy Well of Zamzam by stuffing it full of corpses. They also seized the Black Stone, a meteorite rock affixed to the Kaaba and deemed holy by Muslims, took it back to their republic, and smashed it to pieces. They held the shards for a huge ransom, that was paid by the Abbasid Caliph, who then reassembled the bits and restored them to the Kaaba.
Pilgrimage came to a halt for nearly a decade, and only resumed after the Qarmatians were paid protection money by the region’s states, the Abbasid and Fatimid Caliphates, to stay away from the holy cities. The payments continued until the Abbasid defeated the Qarmatians in 976, which led to a steady decline in the sect’s fortunes. It continued until the 1060s, when the Seljuk Turks inflicted a decisive and final defeat upon the Qarmatians, and brought their republic to an end.