What is the historic validity of "Nothing is real; everything is permitted" as the Assassins' motto?
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AlexNGU1 responded to my question on another site and I think they explained it quite well:
As something the Ismailis said? Pretty well none. A version of it appeared in the works of Silvtre de Sacy; who is also largely responsible for the myth of the Assassins consuming hashish as a religious rite. The idea that de Sacy put forward was that an Ismaili initiate renounces all claims to anything other than pure materialism to become a true Ismaili. Additionally that the Ismaili doctrines even across competing sects were really a way to espouse atheism to their most entrenched followers.
As you point out this is very much at odds with the actual beliefs of the Assassins and seems to be based on taking polemical texts uncritically and at face value.
The actual origin of the quote is Flügel in his "Geschichte der Araberbis auf den Sturz des Chalifats von Bagdad." (History of the Arabs up to the fall of the Baghdad Caliphate) where he writes the ultimate truth of the Ismailis was "Nichts zu glauben und Alles thun zu dürfen" (Nothing is to be believed and all is permissable). Nietzsche then popularised the idea as philosophy in his "On the Genealogy of Morals" "When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that invincible order of Assassins – that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest order received, through some channel or other, a hint about that symbol and spell reserved for the uppermost echelons alone, as their secret: "nothing is true, everything is permitted". Now that was freedom of the spirit, with that, belief in truth itself was renounced."
Probably most famously Bartol popularised the phrase in fiction in his book "Alamut". This then entered popular culture more broadly with the Assassins Creed games, themselves heavily drawing from Bartol for inspiration.
It is likely that this chain of errors started from polemical writers who Silvestre de Sacy translated. Or a more fundamental misunderstanding of the extreme apophatic belief system used by the Ismailis to discuss theology.
As you can see "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" was never used by the Ismailis but attributed to them by European chroniclers, and the spread in popular culture by other Europeans.
Sources:
Komel, M. (2014): Orientalism in Assassin's Creed: Self-orientalizing the Assassins from forerunners of modern terrorism into occidentalized heroes. Teorija in Praska, No. 51.
Sacy, Silvestre (1838/2006): Exposé de la Religion des Druzes. Paris: Elibron Classics.
Sacy, Silvestre (1818): Mémoire sur la Dynastie des Assassins, et sur l’etymologie de leur nom. Paris: Institut Royal de France.
Flügel, Gustav L. (1864): Geschichte der Araberbis auf den Sturz des Chalifats von Bagdad. Dresden
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887/1967): On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York, NY: Vintage."
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