Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and the Myth of the Hachichins: Orientalizing hashish in nineteenth-century France

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Building on recent historical scholarship on drugs and European empires, this study shows how early French conceptions of hashish use emerged from a popular imperial imaginary developing across Europe and the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that routinely envisaged drugs as stereotypical markers of Oriental barbarism. The first section examines the discursive process through which the mythic connection between hashish and Islamic assassins, first established by French linguist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy in 1809, became a fait prouvé in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that Sacy based his studies of the Islamic assassins on Orientalized fantasies rather than facts and thus inaccurately portrayed hashish as an evil intoxicant used by certain Muslims to transform disciples into blindly obedient and bloodthirsty murderers. Ignorant of, or indifferent to, the inaccuracies in Sacy’s contentions, scholars and scientists working in a range of academic disciplines routinely referenced Sacy’s myth when discussing hashish, Muslims, and the Islamic world. With their repeated, mostly uncritical citations of Sacy’s work, French and European scholars steadily transformed the myth of the Hashish-eating Muslim assassins into common knowledge requiring, by the middle of the nineteenth century, no citation or reference to prove its veracity.