Page 176 - The Winter of Islam and the Spring to Come

The Winter of

ISLAM

and the Spring to Come
CHAD

The Muslim country the

colonialist French adminis-

tration tried to destroy

I n the first chapter of this book, we
stressed how the "plundering" of the
colonialist powers had sucked dry the
natural resources of all the nations of Africa
and brought them to the edge of terrible
poverty. Due to their distorted mentality,
Western nations, which saw the peoples of
Africa as "a primitive race which had not yet
completed the process of evolution" and be-
lieved they had the right to exploit those
countries, were particularly repressive to-
wards Muslim peoples. This oppression was
carried out openly between the fifteenth and
nineteenth centuries, after which it was car-
ried on secretly in the twentieth.
Colonialist powers such as Britain and
France abandoned the region when they
could no longer hold onto their colonies in