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

Publication Type  Article
Year of Publication  2016
Date Published  2019
Authors  Guba, David A
Original Publication  Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 30 (2016)
Volume  Vol 30
Issue  SHAD (2016
Publisher  Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 30 (2016)
Source  

David A Guba is world history faculty member at Bard Early College in Baltimore, Maryland and a doctoral candidate in history at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Key Words  Hachichins; :Orientalizing hashish
Full Text  

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 Hashisheating Muslim assassins into common knowledge requiring, by the middle of the nineteenth century, no citation or reference to prove its veracity.


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

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 Hashisheating Muslim assassins into common knowledge requiring, by the middle of the nineteenth century, no citation or reference to prove its veracity.

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