British conflated diverse Indian Muslim movements into an imagined Wahhabi conspiracy

Evidence

As Hardy put it, “In thinking about Muslims after 1857, the socalled Wahhabis were for the British the great unthinkable that was always thought.” British belief in Indian-based Wahhabis originated in the 1820s, as Saiyid Ahmad Barelwi and his followers moved to the northwest territories to launch a jihad against the Sikhs who ruled there. Their Tariqah-i Muhammadi may have shared a notion of jihad with Arabia’s Wahhabis, but its efforts at reform drew much more from Sufi traditions. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 76

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to modern scholarship on the ‘Great Game’ and fears of pan-Islamic conspiracies; also to the moral-panic literature on amplified out-group threats. — connects to: British rule deliberately fanned caste and communal divisions in India; British officials tried to weaponize pan-Islamism against Bolshevism after World War One. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear:…, 72; British colonial ideology consolidated the essentialized idea of Islam as a homogeneous threat (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: how an exaggerated threat narrative (‘phantasmal conspiracy’) got institutionalized in colonial intelligence and administration — a case study in the bureaucratic life of a false belief.
• recurring: this claim recurs 3 times within its source

Broader Connections

• British colonial ideology consolidated the essentialized idea of Islam as a homogeneous threat #corroborates (0.90)
• Reifying Islam as a unified agent underwrote conspiracy theories of a pan-Indian jihad #expands (0.85)
• Essentializing Islam as singular enabled belief in pan-Indian conspiracies. #corroborates (0.85) — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 119