The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Hash Guys

Even without California complicating the matter, the question of who should be Caliph and what counts as the Caliphate has been a tricky one ever since the Prophet Mohammed died. The first khalifa was a fellow called Abu Bakr who had been one of the first converts to Islam. However, after a few years, some folk decided that it shouldn’t have gone to him and that the position should, instead, have been handed down to Mohammed’s son-in-law and thence to his grandson and so on and so forth from one eldest son to the next. These people were called the Shia, and the others were called the Sunni.

However, heredity in principle always leads to dispute in practice, and so in 765 AD, when one of the descendants of Mohammed disinherited his eldest son, Ismail, the Shias themselves split into two. There were those who agreed that Ismail should be passed over and there were those who didn’t. These latter were called the Ismailis.

The Ismailis did rather well for themselves. They managed, in the ninth century, to conquer most of North Africa and they sent out lots of undercover evangelists to the rest of the Islamic world. These evangelists converted people in secret until there was a huge network of secret Ismailis who were, perhaps, going to help to establish an Ismaili Caliphate once and for all.

But they didn’t, because the Sunnis invaded North Africa, burnt all the Ismaili books and converted everybody straight back to the first form of Islam at the point of a scimitar. Now all the Sunnis needed to do was to root out the Ismaili converts in their home territory and everything would be fine and dandy.

So the Ismailis had a hard time of it. They were tracked down and persecuted and fined and put to death and all the other lovely things that mankind likes to do to his neighbour. They couldn’t fight the persecution because, though there were a lot of them, they were scattered about here and there and couldn’t raise an army. Then an Ismaili called Hasan-i Sabbah had a brilliant idea.

He seized one single, solitary castle near the Caspian Sea. It wasn’t a strategically important castle, as it was at the top of a remote mountain at the end of a remote mountain valley in a remote region. But for all these reasons the castle of Alamut was essentially invincible and unattackable. From this base Hasan let it be known that if any Ismailis got persecuted he would respond: not by fighting the soldiers or taking territory or anything like that – he would simply send one of his disciples out to kill the one man, the senior official who had ordered the persecution; and what’s more, the killing would be done with a golden dagger.

And they did. The first chap they killed was the Vizier of the Caliphate himself, and then they picked people off left, right and centre. Two things (other than the gold dagger) made them utterly terrifying. The first was that they would get into their target’s entourage as sleeper agents and were prepared to work for years as stable boy or servant just to get close enough to the victim. You could hire bodyguards, but how did you know the bodyguards weren’t killers themselves? The second was that they were quite prepared to suffer death afterwards, indeed they saw it as a bit of a bonus. They would kill their targets and then kill themselves, confident in the promise of paradise.

Nobody knew what to make of them, but the general opinion was that they were all on hashish. This is almost certainly untrue, but the name stuck. They were the hash guys, or in the colloquial Arabic plural, the hashshashin.

Religious fervour fades but gold always gleams, and when the Crusaders arrived in the Middle East they made contact with the Syrian branch of the Ismailis, in a second mountain fortress that was run by the Old Man of the Mountain. The Old Man agreed to hire out the services of his disciples to the Christian invaders, who were immensely impressed by their fatal fanaticism and discipline. Stories of the hashshashin got back to Europe, where the Arabic H was dropped and the hash-guys became the assassins.

It wasn’t long before assassin had been verbed into assassinate, and then all you needed was William Shakespeare to invent the word assassination for his play Macbeth:

But, etymologically speaking, assassination will always be the cannabisation of the victim, or the marijuanafication or the potification, or whatever synonym you want to use for dope.