The same religious trait could justify praise or condemnation depending on the observer’s aim.

Evidence

Mill demonstrates here a dynamic common among Britons in India: the identification of a specific characteristic supposedly unique to one religious group might be the reason that one Briton praised Muslims relative to Hindus and the reason another condemned Muslims in favor of Hindus. The manliness that Mill saw curtailing despotism would be viewed as the very engine of Muslim tyranny by others. However, as with Mill, few Britons considered either community superior to their own. In this manner, Britons often positioned themselves as the normative middle ground between two extremes of human behavior and belief. If most Hindu men seemed passively effeminate and Muslim men fanatically violent, then the British man represented the proper poise of action and restraint. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 127

Categorization

• XREF: This mirrors the pivot from examining the object (Hindu/Muslim) to examining the frightened subject (the British observer) — exactly the analytical move this reader’s project is built around. — connects to: Identical source material can yield opposite religious impressions
• DEFINE: Names the mechanism by which a colonizing observer self-positions as normative middle ground between two caricatured extremes.