Thomas Patrick Identities in Transition: Muslims soldiers in WWI The intent of this paper is to show conflicting and evolving attitudes of Muslims who fought in World War I and the rationale for the reasons they fought. This war was a particularly defining moment in the history of those who had been colonized by Europeans. It was a time of identity construction, reconstruction and deconstruction as Muslims within the colonial regimes of various belligerent powers were confronted by conflicting loyalties, desires and obligations, few of which were compatible. For many Muslims poised against the Ottoman Empire, it posed a dilemma: whether to join with the Ottoman Empire and heed their call to Jihad or to serve other colonial masters who opposed the Turks, namely the British and the French. French colonial administrators had to be vigilant of Muslim troops who deserted to the Germans, who made a point of using their alliance with the Ottoman empire to demonstrate their alliance with Islam and attract those deserters. The writings of Rabah Abdallah Boukabouya, who had deserted from the French in 1915, are especially helpful in this regard. The war was a definitive staging ground for a multiplicity of identities that responded in a political way, as either for or against Ottomanism, and in a religious and philosophical and therefore personal way as people confronted what it meant to be Muslim. The answer, however articulated and expressed, would fundamentally alter and reorganize these identities.