Essentializing Islam as singular enabled belief in pan-Indian conspiracies.
Evidence
Such convictions presumed a singular Islam that required all adherents to act in prescribed ways. This helped make a pan-Indian conspiracy plausible in many British imaginations. The stereotype of the inherently intolerant, aggressive jihadi which helped convince Britons of a potentially India-wide Wahhabi conspiracy rested on a reified understanding of Islam that pictured the religion as a self-motivating agent. — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear, 119
Categorization
- XREF: Parallels modern Islamophobia discourse that reifies Islam as a singular threat, connecting 19th-century colonial framing to contemporary terrorism narratives. — connects to: Conspiracy functions as an alternative epistemology when interpretation has no ground truth — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 105; British conflated diverse Indian Muslim movements into an imagined Wahhabi conspiracy — Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon Fear:…, 76; Reifying Islam as a unified agent underwrote conspiracy theories of a pan-Indian jihad (+5 more)
- SEED: An essay angle tracing how ‘essentialized religion as a self-motivating agent’ frames conspiracy thinking across colonial and modern periods.
- recurring: this claim recurs 3 times within its source
Broader Connections
- Reifying Islam as a unified agent underwrote conspiracy theories of a pan-Indian jihad
#corroborates(0.90) - Perceiving Islam as monolithic and static drives most Islamophobia
#expands(0.60) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 53 - Monolithic Islam assumptions enable guilt-by-association targeting
#expands(0.50) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 55