Who was the most pompous jerk in history?

[_random_]

Alexander. The guy thought he was the Messiah. Granted a lot of people throughout history have claimed that, but most of them were at least Jewish.

 

[LoughlinNR]

Cicero was the first to come to my mind.

Ditto, Pompey and Crassus also spring to mind, must have been something in the water...

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Why, Cheezy? Why?

The Umayyads were famous for swimming in pools of wine to display their fantastic wealth.

The Abassids weren't so bad, but they were known for blowing vast amounts of wealth on patronages for aristocrats, or for "personal pleasures." There are records of one caliph paying 100,000 silver dirams for a dancing slave girl he rather fancied. One lucky aristocrat had a government pension roughly equal to the annual profits of the entire province of Egypt. Caliph Al-Mutawwakil, decided to build new capitals for really no reason; spent millions of dirams (estimated to be near the profits of Iraq, the wealthiest of the Empire's provinces by far) on a city that was never used. The Abassid Civil War was basically a war of personalities which permanently wrecked the agricultural system of Mesopotamia, and greatly accelerated desertification of the region; Iraq's economy never recovered from this blow.

The Qajars were Iranian aristocracy who took over after the Safavids in the 18th Century. They weren't that bad, but they acted like Persian God-Kings of Antiquity, which is rather assholish for the 18th Century AD.

The Kharijites were a sect of Islam that emerged in the 8th Century, and they basically said that everyone was a heretic, and misguided by God. They then set out to kill all those heretics. Needless to say, the Umayyads dealt with them rather harshly.

Muhammad ibn abd Al-Wahhab was a Sunni cleric in Arabia in the 18th Century. He preached a very very very very conservative and xenophobic version of Islam which said, in effect, that the Shi'a were apostates and should be destroyed before they further misled the proper Sunni Muslims. The rest of his doctrine was just standard reactionism to growing Western influence and cultural impact on the region, with all its silly secularism and whatnot. The ideological sect founded in his name is Wahhabism, and is the version of Islam to which Al-Queda perscribes, is the state-sanctioned version of Saudi Arabia, and has been since the Al-Saud clan befriended Wahhab himself way back when.

 

[carmen510]

Perfection

I'm leaning towards Churchill, de Gaulle, the usual pompous stereotypical people.