Born in the Bluegrass region and reared in the shadow of Alamut Castle in the remote mountains of northwest Turkey, green-eyed Fatima bint Ali al-Wahhaj was the daughter of a forbidden union of a globehopping thoroughbred magnate sheik and a strapping but illiterate Harlan county-bred stable girl. Denied traditional schooling, she learned the art and science of assassination from the descendants of Hassan ibn Sabah's Hashishim sect, a pious and murderous offshoot of the Ismaili branch of Shi'i Islam.  Stealthy as a ninja, she learned myriad methods of death-dealing, including 157 ways to eviscerate a man with the cardboard stick from a Blowpop, how to retrofit a scrunchie for garroting and 73 lethal crush points on the human skull.  Due to her sex, her mongrel lineage, and her tender age, she was denied admittance into the inner sanctum of the Hashishim.  Livid with disappointment, she rained lethal death upon her elders, who were ultimately found dangling from the rafters, a bloody and macabre chandelier of dripping, undifferentiated flesh.  After her flight to the lowlands, she came to embrace the subtle and demanding tenets of Mevlevi Sufism.

For a spell, she continued her peaceful perambulations through the Levant under the guise of a mendicant holy man; however, the shadow of multiple death threats from enraged imams continued to dog her, compelling the spirited young girl to take advantage of her dual citizenship and emigrate. In a moment of inspiration, she synthesized the ecstatic spinning and chanting of the dervish with compulsive and meditative circumambulations of the oval track while wearing the wheeled shoes that were her American innovation.  For a time, she was fortunate to find employment as president of an Arabian horse association, but she abandoned her one bid for respectability when she discovered an isolated Melungeon enclave in Magoffin County, Kentucky, whom she took under her wing and trained in certain occult Moslem-based martial and spiritual arts.  In this way, the cult of Fatima took root.

Fearing an Appalachian-Islamic uprising in a predominately Dixiecrat state, the Department of Homeland Security turned its attention to her, threatening rendition to a remote location in Afghanistan for "vigorous extended debriefing."  Forced underground and compelled to assume a variety of aliases, notably Kentucky Dervish, she yet surfaces periodically to issue fiery fatwas against her oppressors and continues to adhere to an austere and demanding regimen of physical and spiritual discipline and skating.