British fear of Wahhabis vastly exceeded the real threat they posed

Evidence

As Hardy put it, “In thinking about Muslims after 1857, the so-called 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 Shahid 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. Saiyad Ahmad’s jihad failed but some of his followers remained on the frontier into at least the 1870s. British concerns loomed more menacingly than the actual threat, the mujahidin numbering perhaps 600 in 1852. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 141

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framework of examining the frightened subject: the British are the paradigm case of fear constructing a threat larger than the object itself. — connects to: The Wahhabi threat was a category Britain could not stop thinking even beyond evidence. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear:…, 76; The produced moral panic far exceeds the actual terrorist threat — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 762