The actual origins of Hashish are as hazy as its sagacious smoke.
One of the earliest written uses of the word Hashish — which is Arabic for dried grass — discovered so far comes from a pamphlet found in Egypt dated 1123AD. It was used as a slur, accusing Nizari Muslims of being “Hashish-eaters,” which would be the equivalent of calling someone a stoner today.
This could also be seen as some of the earliest evidence of Cannabis being used as a recreational drug.
Hashish is mentioned in the classic Arabian tale, One Thousand and One Nights, which dates to the 11th century, and records from the 10th century show scholars debated its use.
Stories were also spread that followers of Hassan ibn al-Sabbah — leader of the Nizari Muslims in what today would be northern Iran — used Hashish to help them get into the proper mindset to commit murder. They were called Hashishins, which got conflated and mistranslated through several centuries and languages, eventually leading to the modern term: assassin.
Hashish possibly evolved from Charas, likely starting when Cannabis was brought by the Scythians into what is today Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.
It would have been used as a textile, but the Scythian penchant for Cannabis could have led to exploration of consumption methods.
Charas — made by rubbing flowering buds between the hands and scraping the resin into a ball — had been consumed for thousands of years, so ancient people would have known about trichomes.
But as any good stoner knows, Cannabis has to be decarboxylated to really be effective.
Dried resin, called kief (which comes from the Arabic word for pleasure), would have been pressed together, much like with Charas, and the climate of what today is Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon would have been hot enough for decarboxylation to happen, at least partially.
That means early Hashish would have been more potent than Charas, which could be why it was given a new, Arabic name.
Still today, Lebanon, Morocco and Afghanistan are known for making the best Hash.
Hashish was also mainly consumed as an edible for the first several hundred years. It wasn’t until the 1400s that explorers brought smoking to Eurasia from North and South America, along with tobacco.
The first laws against Hashish were made in the 1300s. Ibn Taymiyyah issued a Fatwa, likening it to wine, with the punishment being 80 lashes.
Another Arabian Emir, Soudon Sheikhouni of Joneima, outlawed its use in 1370. That punishment was having all your teeth pulled and your crops burned but people still consumed it.
By the 1700s, laws against Hashish had spread throughout the Islamic world.