Word: hashshashin
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...paperback and next door, and so is to be considered as something quasi-fictional, set apart by razzle-dazzle technology and melodrama from the life of real grief and real blood. The bestselling Matarese Circle has at the base of its plot the idea of the original assassins, the hashshashin, a bunch of hashheads who practiced contract murders at the behest of an "Old Man of the Mountains." We have had Three Days of the Condor, one Day of the Jackal, even a Day of the Dolphin-all equally preposterous and plausible, thanks to the strapped imaginations of real-life...
...word assassin is commonly thought to be derived from hashshashin (consumers of hashish), although it may also come from the Arabic root hassa, which means, among other things, to kill or exterminate...
...five to ten times as potent as bulky, unrefined marijuana. Crusaders returning from the Holy Land brought back the tale that the chief of a Moslem sect used hashish to give fanatical courage to his hirelings before they set out on murder missions. Thus, from a corruption of hashshashin, they added the word assassin to the language. What has since been learned about hashish suggests that while the crusaders may have been good fighters, they were rotten reporters. More likely, the bloodthirsty sheik, if he ever existed, gave his men hash after, not before, their exploits, during a period...
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