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