Western reports miscast the Assassins as anti-Crusader when most victims were Muslim rulers

Evidence

What was their objective? What was the purpose of all this? The first reports reached the West from the Crusaders, who brought back all sorts of strange and wonderful stories about these people, including the term assassin itself, from the Arabic hfiashı¯shiyya. The Crusaders were convinced that they themselves were the main target, that the Assassins were there in order to fight and destroy them. This impression, which has persisted into modern times, is quite false. There were very few Crusader victims among the scores who fell to the daggers of the Assassins between the 11th and 13th centuries. Most of their victims were Muslims—caliphs, sultans, amirs, generals, judges and high ministers of state. In the few cases where they did murder a Crusader, there is good evidence that they did so as a service to a Muslim ally rather than for any reasons of their own. They were not terribly interested in the Crusaders who were, so to speak, outside their world. Their aim was to overthrow the existing order in the Islamic lands and to take over. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 571

Categorization

• XREF: Perfectly exemplifies the Said-adjacent claim about Western legibility distorting Islamicate political reality — the Crusader/Western lens remade an intra-Islamic revolutionary movement into a threat aimed at “us.”
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when did hāshīshiyya pass into Crusader/Latin usage as ‘assassin,’ and does the etymology itself encode the dismissive ‘users of hashish/heretics’ framing?
• SEED: Strong essay angle: how an error built into a loanword’s very origin — the Crusader mistranslation of who the Assassins fought — still shapes how a category of political violence is narrated today.