The Phantom Wahhabi conspiracy was conjured by post-1857 colonial panic, not evidence

Evidence

The idea of an anti-government Wahhabi conspiracy stretching from eastern Bengal to the frontier regions of the Punjab emerged out of phobias peculiar to the post-1857 period. … William Tayler, a panicprone and quarrelsome colonial administrator in Patna, might be the best candidate for being the original conjurer of this Phantom Wahhabi. In 1855 Tayler assumed the commissionership of Patna. He considered the city a ‘seat of disloyalty and intrigue’, associated in particular with its ‘immense Mahomedan population—many of them of old and respectable families—many impoverished in consequence of the resumption of their lands’. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 44

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on how imperial administrators invent the conspiracies they then crush — the Phantom Wahhabi as a template later reused for the ‘Bolshevik menace’ and jihadist networks.
• XREF: Connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist and to histories of colonial-era Muslim identity policing in South Asia.