Wahhabi was an Indian polemical slur before it named a sect

Evidence

Some sources suggest that Fazl-i-Rasul of Badayun (1798/99–1872) was the first person to use the term ‘Wahhabi’ to discredit Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi’s political and religious movement. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the prominent nineteenth-century educationalist and reformer, claimed that the term Wahhabi was used regularly in India from the early period of British rule to discredit those who called for direct consultation of the Qu’ran and hadith and who questioned the binding authority of the judgements of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Himself sympathetic with some of these reforms, in an essay written in 1850 Sayyid Ahmad Khan lamented: ‘he who follows the sunnat [the teachings and practices of Muhammad] is called a Wahhabi and he who practices bidat [heretical innovations] is called wali [holy man]’. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 31

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the modern weaponization of sectarian labels (Salafi/Wahhabi, or ‘Islamist’) as domestic political cudgels — parallels the reader’s interest in identity-signaling moral panics.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The Slur Before the Sect’ — how a pejorative travels backward to become a taxonomic category, using Wahhabi, Puritan, and Jacobin as cases.
• SHARE: Niche enough for someone specifically into South Asian Islamic reform movements or colonial-era religious labels.