"During the Khilafat movement, Gandhi did what earlier Congress leaders had not dared to do. He appealed to Hindus neither to interfere directly with Muslim cow slaughter nor to attempt to pass laws in their municipalities limiting slaughter. He said that Muslims must be persuaded to abandon slaughter volun¬ tarily. He wrote that while the question of cow protection was “the greatest” facing Hindus, “the only chance Hindus have of saving the cow from the butcher’s knife, is by trying to save Islam from the impending peril [in the Middle East] and trusting their Mussalman countrymen to return nobility, i.e., voluntarily to protect the cow out of regard for their Hindu countrymen. . . . The best and only way to save the cow is to save the Khilafat.”"