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Nevertheless, the most acceptable etymology of the word assassin is the simple one, it comes from Hassan (Hasan ibn al-Sabbah) and his followers, and so had it been for centuries.
The noise around the hashish version was invented in 1809, in Paris, by the French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, whom on July the 7th of that year, presented a lecture at the Academy of Inscriptions and Fine Letters (Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres) –part of the Institute of France- in which he retook the Marco Polo chronicle 'concerning drugs and this sect of murderers,' and associated it with the word. Curiously his theory had great success and apparently still has.
– Jacques Boudet, , Les mots de l’histoire, Ed. Larousse-Bordas, Paris, 1998.
Many scholars have argued, and demonstrated convincingly, that the attribution of the epithet 'hashish eaters' or 'hashish takers' is a misnomer derived from enemies of the Isma'ilis and was never used by Muslim chroniclers or sources. It was therefore used in a pejorative sense of 'enemies' or 'disreputable people.'
This sense of the term survived into modern times with the common Egyptian usage of the term Hashasheen in the 1930s to mean simply 'noisy or riotous.' It is unlikely that the austere Hasan-i Sabbah indulged personally in drug taking. ...
There is no mention of that drug [hashish] in connection with the Persian Assassins - especially in the library of Alamut ("the secret archives").
– Edward Burman, The Assassins - Holy Killers of Islam
