Missionaries, too, often referred to an essentialized Islam, as Zwemer demonstrated 30 years earlier, “In India Islam has abandoned, as untenable, controversial positions which were once thought impregnable.” 86 Again, others dissented. For instance, in response to the anti-Muslim sentiment he observed filling a newspaper’s columns following the Muslim assassination of a British chief justice, the Orientalist W. Nassau Lees portrayed the multi-vocality of Islamic law, emphasizing how most Islamic jurists had ruled that Muslims could live under a Christian government, although some groups—such as Wahhabis—would not.

XREF: Resonates with scholarship on religious legal pluralism and how outsiders essentialize vs. nuance religions.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 175