Actually considering I made about 80 typos over those two posts, including spelling Ithna’asheri differently on every attempt, I have to commend your self-control ;).
- Tamerlane
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Ah, but you give us too much credit if you think I, or almost anyone else here, would have noticed that one. 
Hmm… Cite? You are confusing fact and fiction here. The Nizari Ismailis were by no means the Assasins. Yes, the Nizaris were damned secretive about their beliefs, but then you would be to if everybody else was trying to bump you off. The fact of it is, a lot of the stories put out about the Ismailis being assasins were put out by their enemies, people trying to discredit them, and the Ismailis were secretive about their doctrines. I suggest you read
Legends of the Assasins for what is, a rather scholarly view of the subject.
Oh, and don’t let the fact that its an Institute of Ismaili Studies publication fool you - they’re actually a rather reputable Islamic Studies institution.
Well, actually they were in the strictest sense of being dubbed that by westerners. It is where the word assassin originated. However hashishin was apparently a local epithet, rather than a descriptor of activities:
*In one such polemical epistle in issued in 516/122 by the Fatimid Caliph al-Amir, the Nizaris of Syria were for the first time referred to with he abusive apellation hashishiyya, without any explanation. This term was later applied fresh…in 597/1183 by Imad al-Din al-Katib al-Isfani. Subsequently a few other historians, notably Abu Shama (d. 665/1267 ) and Ibn Muyassar ( d. 677/1278 )…The Persiuan Nizaris too, were designated hashishi in some Zaydi sources produced in northen Persia during the Alamut period. It is important to note that in all the muslim sources in which the nizaris are referred to as hashishis, this term was used metaphorically and in its abusive sense of “low-class rabble” and irreligious social outcasts". The literal interpretation of this term in reference to the Nizaris is rooted in the fantasies of medieval Westerners and their “imaginative ignorance” of Islam and the Ismailis.
…It was in the time of Sinan, the original Old Man of the Mountains of Crusader fame, that occidental chronicers of the Crusades and certain European travelers and emissaries collected details and wrote about the Nizari Ismailis, designated as the Assassins. The term Assassin was evidently based on the word hashishi ( plural, hashishiyya, hashishin ), applied to the nizaris perjoratively by other Muslims and picked up locally by the Crusaders and their European observers…
The Crusaders had been particularly impressed by the highly exaggerated reports and rumours of the Nizari assassinations and the daring behavior of their fida’is, the devotees who carried out these missions in public places and more often than not lost their life in the process. This explains why the legends came to revolve around the recruitment, training and indoctrination of the fida’is; fictions which were meant to provide satisfactory explanations for behavior that would otherwise seem strange to the medieval Western mind.*
From *A Short History of the Ismailis: Traditions of a Muslim Community by Farhad Daftary ( 1998, Markus Wiener Publishers ).
So in terms of proper name, Brainglutton is correct - the Assassins were Isma’ilis, in the sense that that is term the medieval Nizaris, a sub-sect of the Isma’ilis, are known as in the West. Rather similar to how the Dakota/Lakota amerindians of the U.S. are popularly known as the Sioux, a diminuation of a perjorative appellation ( variously argued as meaning ‘barbarian’ or ‘ambusher/snake’ ) that originated with the Ojibwa.
- Tamerlane
Yeah, I know that. I was just pointing out that the concept of Nizari Ismailis=highly trained fanatical killers was a myth perpetrated by their enemies, which Westerners picked up on.
Was it a myth? The story (as I read it in The Travels of Marco Polo and other sources) is that the Old Man of the Mountains brainwashed his followers by bringing them to his mountain castle in Afghanistan, doping them with hashish and letting them wake up in a Garden of Earthly Delights filled with lovely foliage, delicious food and drink, and beautiful and available girls and boys. Then he doped them again, and when they woke up, back in the Old Man’s stronghold, he told them they had just visited Paradise, and they could get back in again if only they obeyed the Old Man absolutely in all things. He then turned them into “sleeper agents” – an Assassin would get a job in the retinue of a powerful ruler and then, perhaps after several years, he would get a coded order from the Old Man and kill the target, sometimes at the cost of his own life, or sometimes vanishing into the night and leaving behind a calling card in the form of a dagger marked with a flame emblem. Is this all false? Vicious propaganda of the Ismailis’ enemies, or fevered imaginings of the Crusaders?
Nitpick : Al Alamut is in Iran, not Afghanistan, AFAIK.
Yes, its a myth. Perpetrated by the Ismailis’ enemies, picked up on by the Crusaders and Marco Polo.
The Ismailis were (and still are) a spiritual sect of Islam. The IIS Website has some history of the Ismailis. I would also reccomend Dafferty’s book that Tamerlane mentioned.