"The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" is a science fiction short story by American writer Alfred Bester.
It has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, and has been reprinted nine times, most recently in Virtual Unrealities (1997).
[1] When mad scientist Henry Hassel discovers his wife in the midst of committing adultery, he decides that simple murder would be intellectually unsatisfying; he therefore builds a time machine with the intention of killing his wife's grandparents in their youth, so that she will never have existed.
In a desperate attempt to alter history, Hassel begins killing historical figures of greater and greater significance (eventually including Mohammed, thus the story's title), only to learn that the nature of time is very different from what he had thought.
"Mohammed" was nominated for the 1959 Hugo Award for Best Short Story,[2] and The New York Review of Science Fiction describes it as a "final development" to the theme of time travel in Bester's work.