The Great Wahhabi Case produced an eight-year legal ordeal and a judge’s murder

Evidence

The ‘Great Wahhabi Case’, as the Khan brothers’ legal ordeal was popularly known, was the last, and the most controversial, of the large state trials of suspected Wahhabis in the 1860s and 1870s. The brothers’ legal ordeal stretched over eight years, involving court hearings in Calcutta, London, and Patna. In the summer of 1871 a lower court acquitted Hashmadad, but convicted Amir of waging war against the queen. Adding to the sensation surrounding the case, days before the scheduled final appeal in Amir’s case, an assailant murdered the officiating judge on the steps of the Calcutta courthouse. In a final twist, after spending years securing his conviction, in 1877 on the eve of the coronation of Queen Victoria as empress of India, the government officially pardoned Amir. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 14

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A real 19th-century courtroom thriller: a judge assassinated on the courthouse steps days before the final appeal, an eight-year cross-continental case, and a pardon timed to the Queen’s coronation — structurally ready-made for a novel.
• FICTION: Parallels The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s interest in how a Muslim man’s story gets framed by state suspicion and sensational press.
• CANDY: A defendant convicted of waging war against the queen was quietly pardoned on the eve of her imperial coronation — perfect elevator fodder.