Upper-class defendants collapsed the boundary separating Wahhabis from respectable colonial Calcutta.

Evidence

Yet the Khan brothers’ case broke down the boundaries that marked off the Wahhabis as a loathsome sect of Muslim fanatics. The brothers’ upper-class status and the weakness of the government’s case against them made many people in Calcutta wonder if it might be their door the police showed up at next. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s interest in how moral panics over dress/identity get reframed once elites are implicated.
• SEED: Angle: how a single elite defendant’s trial converts a ‘fanatic sect’ into a general threat to everyone — the mechanics of panic diffusion.