The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis

Farhad Daftary's The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis, I. B. Tauris, London, 1994, is an academic monograph. Its strength is that Daftary, the leading modern historian of Ismaili studies, systematically traces how the medieval Assassin legends grew from hostile outside sources rather than from any Ismaili practice, a genuinely settled scholarly correction of a long lived myth. Its limit is the ordinary one for a single scholarly monograph: it is Daftary's own synthesis, though on this particular question it reflects a position the field has broadly accepted rather than one he holds alone.