23 - France and its colonial civil wars, 1940–1945

Summary

This chapter provides an overview of the political history of the Islamic world in the war, assessing the impact of the conflict on Muslims across the world. It also provides a sketch of the Second World War in a vast and highly heterogeneous region defined as the Muslim world. On the eve of the war, most of the world's Muslims were subjugated to foreign rule. Throughout the interwar period, the Muslim world was shaken by antiimperial upheaval. The first region with a Muslim majority population that became a war zone was North Africa. In the autumn of 1940, in his quest to establish an Italian empire in the Mediterranean, Mussolini attacked British-controlled Egypt. One of the most dominant political issues across the Muslim world during the war was the question of national independence from imperial rule. By the end of the war, tens of thousands of Muslims had fallen in battle, used as cannon fodder by all major powers.