The most notorious of the violent Islamic sects known to Christendom was the Assassin (Hashshash or hashish smoker) sect. They were derived from the Ismailite Shiite sect in 1094 CE during a leadership dispute over the true successor of Muhammad in Shiite theology. The Assassins were professional killers and were the terror of Middle East Christians and of the Abbasid Islamic Caliphate whose generals, statesmen, and even Caliphs they regularly assassinated. They reputedly drugged themselves in order to induce ecstatic trances before they set off to murder their enemies as a religious duty. If an Assassin died in the course of this duty of murdering a fellow human being, he was believed to go to heaven. They killed efficiently, amorally, without any compunction, and were highly skilled in the art of murder. More peaceful Muslims must have tried for 200 years to teach them the error of their ways. Ominously, they remained as vicious as ever and still at the peak of their military prowess until the very end. It took violence to end their violence, or if we are to be Buddhist or Hindu about it, their violence reaped a karma of violence. Abruptly, in 1258 CE, the Mongol army, then the most powerful military in the world, led by Hulagu Khan, one of Genghis Khans grandsons, wiped them out. The Mongols gave them no quarter. The Assassin sect has left its very name as a legacy to the world, an apt description of the cold-blooded, amoral, efficient, and highly skilled professional killer. The existence of angry passages urging believers to commit acts of physical violence in the Koran makes Islam susceptible to violent sectarianism, much more so than say Buddhism or Christianity. Although it sounds offensive and disturbing, history has clearly shown that ever since the inception of Islam there have always been Muslims who did violence in the name of religion, and no doubt there will be more in the future for as long as Muslims take the angry passages of the Koran literally. The fact that the United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world is an undisputed truth. There is a phenomenon of prison Islam. This consists of small gang-like cliques that use cut-and-paste versions of the Koran to give a religious patina to violent and criminal activities. Prisoners convert to Islam to win perks and get protection from powerful Muslim gangs. Across the United States, tens of thousands of Muslims are practicing their faith behind bars. Islam is most likely to win American converts there. Prisons continue to be fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoners conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socio-economic status and placement in the community upon their release.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 18:35:49 +0000
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