Assassin in an intriguing word, a word that conjures up a James Bond type with a shiny silver pistol, an obscured face and an impossibly sexy vintage sports car. And the word, which means essentially the same as murderer or killer, is usually reserved for only the most high profile or VIP situations. A 20-year-old black kid in Chicago gets killed by a murderer. A Russian yacht owner and oligarch gets offed by an assassin. A sex worker in rural Texas is brutally murdered by a killer. The Prime Minister of Denmark is taken from this mortal coil by an assassin. The difference in these words’ meanings tells us a lot about the power structure of our society and how some murders are taken more seriously than others, as shown through this word choice. Indeed, even the murderers themselves are placed in this power structure, from low prestige to high, depending on who and why they killed someone. Everyone knows JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s name. Almost no one knows the name of the murderer who shot two people in a California cinema a few days ago. (It’s Joseph Jimenez.)
So why do we have this vaguely Arabic sounding alternative prestige word choice for murderer? The story is an interesting one, and it starts high in the mountains of the Levant, where the precursor word for assassin — the Arabic hashishiyy (حشيشين) — meant, as defined by American Heritage Dictionary, “a member of a militant subgroup of Ismailis that in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries carried out political assassinations directed especially against Seljuk rule.”
Explore the word more deeply and you’ll find out that the rulers of the Seljuk Empire did indeed use this word to refer to the fundamentalist sect of Nizari Ismaili Shi’ite Muslims , but it’s meaning was not what the American Heritage dictionary says it was. I meant — and means — “hashish eaters, or people that consume the drug hashish.” This word choice was chosen as a slur, not as a neutral title. The word also happens to be the root for our modern “hashish.”
When stories of this hashish-eating sect spread to Europe, rumors and tall tales abounded. Europeans believed the legend spread by the Seljuks that the Nizaris were drug fueled murderers who got high and then murdered their opponents with reckless abandon. The reality was there was a complex political power struggle going on at the time within the Muslim world.
The Nizaris opposed the rule of the Seljuk dynasty and the Abbasid caliphs, who were both Sunni and regarded the Nizaris as unorthodox outcasts. Sunni accounts from the time accused the Nizaris of all sorts of irreligious practices, including using hashish. But this slur wasn’t even based in reality, because there is no evidence that the medieval Nizaris even used hashish, and they likely didn’t given Islam’s dim views on drug taking. Nonetheless, this druggy, murderous reputation was established. The murderous part of the slur was actually true, it seems. As the Nizaris resisted further persecution by the Seljuks, one of their most formidable weapons was the threat of sudden execution by secret agents. In fact, attacks on several Sunni leaders during the Crusades were attributed to Nizari agents. They really were skilled assassins it turns out.
When the Crusaders returned to Europe, they embellished upon what they had heard about the Nizaris from the group’s enemies and told sensational stories about the hashish eaters. Marco Polo spun a tale of how young assassins were given a potion and made to yearn for paradise — their reward for dying in action — by being given a life of sensual pleasure before their secret missions. These legends spread through Europe like wildfire, in cafés and bars.
Through untrained ears, the Arabic word hashishiyy (حشيشين) sounded to medieval Italian speakers like “assassini.” So this new word, a result of loanword adaptation, or the process by which speakers make unfamiliar foreign words sound more like their own language, became the new label for the Nizaris. Italians also mistakingly thought that the word’s plural suffix [-in] was part of the main word, so that further complicated the word.
According to the entry in English Words of Arabic Origin, this generalization of the sect’s nickname to a more general meaning of “any sort of assassin” happened in Italy at the start of the 14th century and into the 15th century. In the mid 16th century, the generalized Italian word entered French, followed a little later by English, where it is currently defined as “one who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.”