The European powers colonized one Islamic country after
another. France occupied Algeria in 1830, and Britain Aden
nine years later. Tunisia was occupied in 1881, Egypt in 1882,
the Sudan in 1889 and Libya and Morocco in 1912. In 1915 the
Sykes-Picot agreement divided the territories of the moribund
Ottoman Empire (which had sided with Germany during the
First World War) between Britain and France in anticipation of
victory. After the war, Britain and France duly set up protectorates
and mandates in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and
Transjordan. This was experienced as an outrage, since the
European powers had promised the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Empire independence. In the Ottoman heartlands,
Mustafa Kemal, known as Atatürk (1881-1938), was able to
keep the Europeans at bay and set up the independent state of
Turkey. Muslims in the Balkans, Russia and Central Asia became
subject to the new Soviet Union. Even after some of these
countries had been allowed to become independent, the West
often continued to control the economy, the oil or such resources
as the Suez Canal. European occupation often left a
legacy of bitter conflict. When the British withdrew from India
in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned between
Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which are to this day in a
state of deadly hostility, with nuclear weapons aimed at each
other's capitals. In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their homeland
to the Zionists, who set up the Jewish secular state of Israel
there, with the support of the United Nations and the
international community. The loss of Palestine became a potent
symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the
hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms
about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians.
