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This paper presents a micro-ethnographic study of R v Nuttall, a Canadian terrorism prosecution, to examine how Canada’s statutory motive requirement in the definition of “terrorist activity” transforms belief into evidence and identity into risk within the courtroom. Through a close reconstruction of the trial record, the paper shows how the motive clause draws courts into adjudicating religion, ideology, and expressive life as central sites of legal meaning, rendering spiritual and political orientations judicially actionable as indicators of danger. In Nuttall, the Crown organized the case around Muslimness as the lens through which threat could be seen, narrated, and proven. Drawing on extensive primary materials—including jury instructions, trial submissions, exhibits, and transcripts—the paper traces how ordinary religious references, symbolic artefacts, and political language were curated into a coherent narrative of ideological menace. It argues that this dynamic is not best understood as an aberration of prosecutorial overreach, but as a consequence of a deeper legal architecture in which the motive clause authorizes courts to adjudicate identity as risk, rendering the “dangerous Muslim” intelligible, governable, and legally convictable.