Religious labels become weapons of courtly and political rivalry

Evidence

In 1883 in a book entitled Tarjuman-i-Wahhabiyyat (Translation of Wahhabism), he bitterly complained that, ‘all men of experience know that when a man is enemies with another man or with a group and he is unable to entrap his opponent by other means he harms him by exposing him to the government as a Wahabi’. By the late 1880s, the term Wahhabi had taken on such negative connotations that Muslims in the Punjab petitioned the government to discontinue the use of the term in official correspondence. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 184

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ thesis — moral/religious labels as class and identity signaling rather than sincere description.
• SEED: An essay on how a single word becomes a loyalty test: ‘Wahhabi’ as a colonial-era smear, tracking how the accusation did more work than any actual doctrine.
• SHARE: The detail that Punjab Muslims formally petitioned the British government to stop using a word — a wonderfully specific, niche moment for anyone into colonial administrative history.