One of the most striking features of the British cemetery at Gallipoli is the attention given to honoring the diversity of the dead. Final farewells from loved ones carved upon stone plaques line the footpaths up the hillsides where the Ottomans rained down machine-gun and artillery fire. Fallen Muslim soldiers, children of the Raj, lie side by side with Christians who died for king and country. Arabic and Persian inscriptions often immortalize the grief and love of the Muslim families; Persian was the court language of the Moguls and the Indian Civil Service.

There is a long history of Muslims fighting for the British and the French against other Muslims. The Algerian wars—the rebellion against France and the following purge of Franco-Algerians—were so awful (perhaps the bloodiest internecine strife in the Middle East before the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s war against Syrian Sunnis) because so many Algerians allied with France against the rebels-cum-liberators. Albert Camus’s plea in his Chroniques algériennes is heartrending because he urged France to embrace all the Muslims of Algeria as her children or risk a civil war that could poison Muslim-non-Muslim relations far beyond North Africa.