New Republic: On a spring day in 1929, a young Muslim man by the name of Ilam Din burst into a bookstore in Lahore, in the British colony of India, and stabbed the owner, a Hindu man named Mahashay Rajpal, in the chest. The knife pierced Rajpal’s heart, killing him instantly.

Ilam Din had planned the murder for some time. Like many Muslims in the colony, he was incensed by an infamous pamphlet Rajpal had published a few years earlier. The Colorful Prophet was a satirical tale that detailed the sexual deviance and general chicanery of its main character, the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Backed by powerful Hindu fundamentalist political groups, The Colorful Prophet was translated into several South Asian languages and spread across the vast British colony, stoking riots and violent protests as it went.

After the stabbing, Ilam Din yelled loudly and repeatedly that he had taken revenge for the prophet. Fresh riots broke out the next day, injuring a hundred people. “Feeling has been whipped to white heat here,” the New York Times reported, noting that “British troops and armored cars” had been called into the city.

The carnage at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, where Muslim gunmen claiming to defend their prophet’s honor murdered a dozen people, has left many in the West grasping for understanding. Why do some Muslims act out violently in response to unflattering depictions of their prophet? Here, an obscure colonial episode may be illuminating. Most Muslims imagine Muhammad as a wise and inspiring prophet—the perfect human being. Many non-Muslims have long held him as a sexually deviant fraud. Historically the Western depictions of that Muhammad often haven’t arisen from benign or secular impulses, to put it gently.

The chasm of perception gives extremists of all types fertile ground for cultivating conflict. Since the massacre in Paris, dozens of attacks have fallen on Muslims and their community sites in France. In several German cities, right-wing anti-immigration rallies have attracting tens of thousands of people. An American TV personality proudly proclaimed himself “an Islamophobe” in the days that followed. In Karachi, police shot four peopleduring protests organized by Islamic political groups against the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo, which placed an unflattering image of Muhammad on the cover again. Ten people died in Niger during similar protests, and the French cultural center along with 45 churches were set ablaze around the country.

Nearly a century ago, Mohandas Gandhi seemed to appreciate this danger. “I have asked myself what the motive possibly could be in writing or publishing such a book except to inflame passion,” he wrote in a 1924 essay after reading The Colorful Prophet. “Abuse and caricature of the Prophet cannot wean a Musalman from his faith, and it can do no good to a Hindu who may have doubts about his own belief.” The pamphlet “had no value,” Gandhi wrote. “The harm it can do is obvious.”

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