Hashish and the Order of Assassins

Who the Nizaris actually were

The 'Order of Assassins' is the European name for the Nizari Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam that split from the Fatimid Caliphate in 1094 over a succession dispute. Under Hassan-i Sabbah, the Nizaris seized the mountain fortress of Alamut in 1090 and built a network of strongholds across Persia and Syria ^[1][2].

Surrounded by hostile Sunni Seljuk powers, they adopted a strategy of targeted political assassination — killing viziers, generals, and caliphs rather than fighting open battles they could not win. Their operatives were called fida'i ('those who sacrifice themselves'). This was a real, documented military doctrine ^[1][3]. The sect was finally destroyed when Mongol forces under Hülegü Khan took Alamut in 1256 and burned its famous library, taking with it most of the Nizaris' own account of themselves ^[1].

Where the hashish story comes from

The drug story has a specific, traceable origin. Marco Polo's Travels, dictated around 1298 — more than forty years after Alamut had been destroyed and which Polo himself never visited during its existence — describes an 'Old Man of the Mountain' who allegedly drugged young recruits, brought them unconscious into a hidden garden full of wine and women, and convinced them it was paradise. They would then kill on command to return there ^[4].

Polo does not actually name the drug. The connection to hashish was made later by European commentators, most influentially the French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy in an 1809 lecture to the Institut de France, where he argued that Hashishiyya (the Arabic term applied to the sect by their enemies) derived from hashish and explained Polo's story ^[5].

Earlier Arabic sources do call the Nizaris Hashishiyya or Hashishin — but as a term of abuse. In the polemical writing of contemporaries like the Sunni historian Ibn Muyassar and others, it carried the sense of 'lowlifes,' 'rabble,' or 'people of bad character,' similar to how 'stoner' functions as a slur today. It was not a literal claim that the sect used cannabis ^[2][3].

What the evidence actually shows

Several things weigh against the drugged-killer story Strong evidence:

• No Nizari source mentions hashish. What survives of Ismaili literature — including Hassan-i Sabbah's doctrinal works and later Nizari histories like those compiled at Alamut — does not describe drug use, secret gardens, or paradise-simulation rituals ^[1][2].
• No contemporary Sunni chronicler claims the fida'i were drugged before missions. Ibn al-Athir, Juvayni (who actually visited Alamut after its fall and read its archives before they were destroyed), and Rashid al-Din all describe the Nizaris in detail without this element ^[3][6].
• Hassan-i Sabbah was an ascetic. Juvayni records that he had one of his own sons executed for drinking wine. A sect run on that kind of discipline is an awkward fit for a drug-cult narrative ^[6].
• Hashish was widely available and unremarkable in the medieval Islamic world by this period. It would not have functioned as a secret tool of indoctrination ^[7].

What the fida'i likely had instead was ideological commitment, kinship loyalty, and the promise of religious reward — the same motivations that drive committed actors in any insurgency. Historians from Bernard Lewis to Farhad Daftary have converged on this reading ^[1][2].

How the myth spread into cannabis culture

After de Sacy's 1809 lecture, the hashish-Assassins link became a fixture of 19th-century European writing on the Orient. It appeared in Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall's History of the Assassins (1818), which was widely translated and shaped popular understanding for a century ^[8].

The story then jumped into French Romantic drug culture. The Club des Hashischins (1844–1849), a Paris circle that included Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, and Gérard de Nerval, took its name directly from the myth. Gautier's essay Le Club des Hachichins (1846) explicitly invokes the Old Man of the Mountain ^[9]. From there it flowed into Fitz Hugh Ludlow's The Hasheesh Eater (1857) and into the foundational texts of American cannabis literature.

In the 20th century the story was recycled by William S. Burroughs, Hakim Bey, and countless head-shop posters. It remains a popular bit of stoner lore — repeated in documentaries, strain names ('Hashashin,' 'Old Man of the Mountain'), and casual histories of cannabis — despite being rejected by every serious historian of the Nizaris for the better part of a century.

The etymology question

Does 'assassin' come from 'hashish'? Probably yes, in a narrow linguistic sense Disputed. Most etymological dictionaries trace English assassin through medieval Latin and Italian back to Arabic hashishi/hashishiyya, the slur applied to the Nizaris ^[10].

But this is a story about a name, not about pharmacology. The sect was called 'hashish-users' as an insult by its enemies; Europeans heard the name and, centuries later, invented a backstory to explain it. The etymology is real. The drugged killers are not. Conflating the two is the core mistake.

See also: Hashish, Club des Hashischins, Cannabis in the Medieval Islamic World.

Sources

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