Colonial blame for the 1857 revolt landed hardest on Muslims

Evidence

As W. A. Wilson, a Canadian missionary in Indore, made his own case for the distrustfulness of Muslims in 1911, he quoted Hunter, “The Mussulmans of India are and have been a source of chronic danger to the British power in India.” Wilson went further, claiming obliquely that, “There are many who doubt the loyalty of the Mohammedan people as a whole.” For evidence, Wilson followed Hunter by pointing to the so-called Wahhabi conspiracies, Qur’anic injunctions to overthrow infidel rule, and Muslim resistance on the northwest frontier. But as with most Islamophobic authors in British India, Wilson viewed one event to hang particularly heavily over Muslim heads: “They remind us of the part they played in the terrible mutiny, when they pressed to the front and through rivers of blood made a furious dash to seize the standard of empire.” 29 As the terrible series of vengeful reprisals reaped immediately following the end of the rebellion demonstrated, Muslims took the brunt of British blame although they were no more seditious than Hindus and many Muslim soldiers and officials had remained loyal. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s project question about where fear gets relocated — here it’s collective punishment of Muslims following a revolt in which they were no more seditious than others, mirroring post-9/11 patterns.