318 DESTINY DISRUPTED
up during the war years among virtually all colonized people, both Mus-
lim and non-Muslim, now hit the breaking point. In Egypt, rebellion
started brewing among army officers. In China, Mao's communist insur-
gency began to move against Chiang Kai-shek, widely seen as a Western
puppet. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, who had come back from thirty years
of exile to organize the Viet Minh, attacked the French. In Indonesia,
Sukarno declared his country independent from the Dutch. All over the
world, national liberation movements were springing up like weeds, and
the ones in Muslim countries were much like the ones in non-Muslim
countries: whatever else might be happening, the Islamic narrative was
now intertwined with a narrative Muslims shared with others.
Geographically, many of the "nations" that the liberation movements
strove to liberate were defined by borders the imperialist powers had drawn:
so even in their struggle for liberation they were playing out a story set in
motion by Europeans. In sub-Saharan Africa, what the king of Belgium had
managed to conquer became Congo (later renamed Zaire). What the Ger-
mans had conquered became Cameroon, what the British had conquered in
East Africa, Kenya. A label such as "Nigeria'' referred to an area inhabited by
over two hundred ethnic groups speaking more than five hundred languages,
many of them mutually unintelligible, but the world was now organized into
countries, so this, too, became "a country," its shape and size reflecting the
outcome of some long-ago competition among colonizing Europeans.
In North Africa, national liberators accepted the reality of Algeria,
Tunisia, and Libya as countries, each one spawning a national liberation
movement of its own. All three movements eventually succeeded, but at
great cost. Algeria's eight-year war of independence from France claimed
over a million Algerian lives, out of a starting population of fewer than 9
million, a staggering conflict. I
Issues inherited from the days of Muslim hegemony continued to echo
here and there. The persistence of the Muslim narrative manifested most
dramatically in the subcontinent oflndia, the biggest full-fledged colony to
gain independence. Even before the war, as this nascent country struggled
to rid itself of the British, a subnational movement had developed within
the grand national movement: a demand by the Muslim minority for a sep-
arate country. At the exact moment that India was born (August 15, 1947)
so was the brand-new two-part country of Pakistan, hanging like saddlebags