Minority status depends on hierarchy, not on numerical size.

Evidence

“Minority rights” are not derivable from general theories of citizenship: status is connected to membership in a specific historical group, not in the abstract class of citizens. In that sense minorities are no different from majorities, also a historically constituted group. The fact that they are usually smaller in number is an accidental feature. Minorities may be numerically much larger than the body of equal citizens from whom they are excluded. In the British empire vast numbers of colonial subjects were ruled by a democratic state of citizens far smaller in number through a variety of constitutional devices—which rendered them legally and ideologically minorities. Because minorities are defined as minorities only in hierarchical structures of power. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 853

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad redefines ‘minority’ as a position in hierarchical power, not a demographic fact — central to his secularism critique.
• CANDY: The British empire ruling far more colonial subjects through a smaller citizenry, rendering them minorities, is a bracingly clear reversal of the intuitive meaning of ‘minority.’
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 853
• XREF: connects to: Institutional quotas kept Tutsi confined to minority-status roles before the genocide — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 60