The British had recently introduced a new rifle, the Enfield, that required that the end of the cartridge be bitten off before it was rammed down the rifle's muzzle. And since good Muslims cannot touch pig grease, nor Hindus the fat of cows, the ''sepoys," as Indian soldiers in the service of the British were called, perceived a Western assault on their religions.

Wright tried to tell his men that ''the grease used is composed of mutton fat and wax," but his denial was not enough. The first serious unrest broke in Bengal. A sepoy named Mangal Pande of the 34th Native Infantry incited his brothers to mutiny yelling, ''it's for our religion," fired at an English officer, and struck him with a sword. By spring the fire of the great Indian Mutiny had spread across north India, spreading death and insurrection that rocked the British Empire to its core.

I thought of Captain Wright's denial when I heard Mark Whitaker of Newsweek retract his story of American interrogators flushing a Koran down a toilet -- a story which helped fuel deadly riots across the Muslim world. For it is unlikely that Whitaker's retraction will convince Muslims that their religion is not under attack any more than British denials about the cartridge grease stemmed the mutiny.

Reports of desecrating the Koran have been seeping out of Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq for a couple of years now. In March of 2002, prisoners in Guantanamo staged a hunger strike over mistreatment of the Holy Book. Numerous former detainees have reported similar incidents. Aryat Vahitov told Russian television in June 2004 that ''they tore the Koran to pieces in front of us, threw it into the toilet." Abdallah Tabarak told Moroccan newspaper in December that Americans had trampled the Koran underfoot and ''throw it in the urine bucket."

Former detainees may not always be reliable sources, but then the International Committee of the Red Cross also said it had ''multiple reports" of Koran misuse in the early days of Guantanamo. And the Pentagon itself has reprimanded two female guards for acts designed to make prisoners feel unclean and thus unable to pray.

Clearly the Newsweek report was used by people trying to stir up trouble and instigate riot. President Bush might even use Captain Wright's words to describe them as ''evil disposed persons."

But the larger point is that neither the Newsweek article nor the greased cartridges 148 years ago were the real reason that the two rumors gained traction. Historians tell us that India was going through a period of great change in the mid-19th century. In the 18th century the British in India often adopted an Indian way of life and culture. But the 19th century saw British customs and mores making themselves felt across the subcontinent in what are now the nations of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.

Reforms that looked quite sensible to British eyes were often misunderstood and resented. Land reform had affected not only big land owners but thousands of lesser landlords too, and many of them relatively poor -- the classes among whom most sepoys were recruited. They ''felt deeply aggrieved by the government's reforms, apprehensive as to what further deprivations their British rulers might have in mind," according to Christopher Hibbert, author of ''The Great Mutiny." ''Nor were the peasants as pleased with the reforms as the government had expected," he writes. ''They preferred their own ways to the strange ones being imposed upon them by foreigners." And they believed their religion was in danger.

Today we are in another age of great change, and there are Muslims who are suspicious of the reforms foreigners would impose. They fear what America may have in mind for them. Today many perceive in rapid and all-encompassing Westernization a threat to their religion, just as the sepoys did a century and a half ago.

© 2005 Boston Globe

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