Chapter 11
MULLAHS AND MISSILES:
ISLAMIC WARS SINCE 1945
When the industrial world went to its two great wars in the twentieth
century, much of the Islamic world was spared. Turkey was a combatant
in World War I, and Muslim soldiers were raised in appreciable numbers
by their French, British, or Italian colonial masters in both contests. This
being said, the Islamic world was shielded from the worst of the two world
cataclysms by the fact that most of those Muslim peoples did not live in
independent nations. Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were still
much in the throes of imperial colonialism, and those fading empires had
never been successful at mobilizing the full human potential of their sub-
jugated peoples.
These colonial troops, like most other soldiers, when well led, well
trained, and well supplied, could be splendid. Sadly, this was rarely the
case. Most Muslim soldiers were raised for theaters of war in which their
European overseers could not deploy the weight of their sophisticated
mechanical equipment. Most of the best European officers were assigned
to the armies of their homelands. Thus, most Muslim soldiers served as
simple riflemen or labor troops in distinctly second-rate formations,
though exceptions arose and many Muslim troops were employed in Eu-
rope. Indeed, much of the Free French Army that liberated France in
1944–45 was Muslim.
This military experience in the world wars, and particularly in World
War II, did not provide the best possible military pool for the new Muslim
states that formed in the immediate postwar decolonization of Africa, Asia