De Sacy projected his Jacobin Terror fears onto medieval Islamic sects

Evidence

Since de Sacy was a fervent Christian, it was more or less inevitable that he should regard Muhammad as a skilled impostor. However, de Sacy was less interested in mainstream Islam than he was in its various schismatic, secretive and sometimes subversive movements. Having lived through the horrors of the Jacobin terror, he projected his horror of revolutionary conspiracy backwards into the early history of Islam and presented the Druzes, the Isma’ilis and Nusayris as forerunners of such sinister modern movements as the Freemasons, Carbonari and Jacobins. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 259

Categorization

• XREF: Pattern of present political trauma shaping scholarship of the past connects to orientalism-as-mirror themes, and echoes how Western present-mindedness distorts history in Innis’s work.
• SEED: Essay angle: how one generation’s lived horrors (the Terror) silently rewire what historians ‘find’ in distant pasts — a case study in the political unconscious of scholarship.