p. 18 | The Mohammedan’s Challenge to Christianity

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 24, 1910

The Mohammedan’s Challenge to Christianity

MOHAMMEDANISM, from the very outset, has put it down as one of its great oracles of faith that its creed must be spread throughout the whole world. If we were in the Turkish capital and asked the new sultan the secret of his success and power, he would show us, carefully guarded in a sacred closet, the old mantle of Mohammed, the sword of Mohammed, and that green standard on which are the words, “There is no God but one, and Mohammed is God’s apostle.” I wish you could go with me to Cairo and see the strength of Mohammedanism as a religion. Cairo is the Oxford and the Cambridge of the Moslem world. There is a university where ten thousand students study Mohammed’s book and go out as the fanatic devotees of the religion of Mohammed. The whole Mohammedan world gathers around a black stone. Two months ago you might have seen seventy thousand men and women running a race around the black house and kissing the black stone, saying, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

The real strength of this religion is measured in terms of devotion and conviction and other characteristics—a strong man fully armed, a veritable Goliath, defying the armies of the living God in three continents for thirteen centuries. The call to prayer was taken up first in the Philippine Islands, and carried over to China. The cry was taken up in Persia, and throughout all Arabia. You might have heard that cry on the steppes of Siberia, far to the north, while in the Russian empire there are no less than fourteen and one-half million Mohammedans. In Malaysia, Java, and Sumatra there are thirty million ; in Africa, fifty-eight million; fifty-four million north of the equator and four million south of the equator; and yet I have not mentioned the greatest Mohammedan problem in the world, for in India there are sixty-two million eight hundred thousand Mohammedans. And this vast problem, measured over the whole world, means that every third person—including men, women, and children—in the Dark Continent says that he is a Moslem, and that every sixth person in the whole population of the globe lives and dies a Mohammedan. Every sixth soul that goes out from the sunlight into the dark goes muttering the name of Mohammed.

The strength of this religion is its solidarity. Hinduism is divided and subdivided, and it is a religion of caste. But Mohammedanism is a great unity, with one prophet, one hope, and with one great ambition to make the world Moslem. That is why the sultan gives Germany permission to build the Bagdad railway on condition of protecting the Moslems in China. That is the reason that a lonely missionary, writing from the West India Islands, says this: “My work here is among the East Indians, although we meet the creoles also. Miss Stanley has encountered much Mohammedan opposition. . . . To us out here it seems that the keystone of the arch in the present day of missionary work is Mohammedanism.” Was there ever a stronger testimony that this mighty giant stretches out like a great octopus?

This religion is strong and mighty because it has great truths. Its adherents believe in God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. They believe in Jesus as a prophet. They even believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. They believe he ascended to heaven. They believe he is coming again. They believe in the forgiveness of sins, in the resurrection of the body, and in the life everlasting. The Mohammedans believe these things not in a loose sense, not as a mere opinion, but as a heart conviction. Bancroft says, “A Calvinist and a coward never went together.” The Mohammedans are the Calvinists of the Orient.

The Moslem world appeals to our love. Did you ever think of that world as the greatest social problem? The Mohammedan world is the most degraded, the most hopeless part of the non-Christian world. Illiteracy, superstition, and social degradation because of polygamy do not obtain in Japan or China or India among the Buddhists or Confucianists as it obtains in the Moslem world. In India there are sixty-two and one-half million Mohammedans, and by the government census ninety-six and one-half per cent of those people can neither read nor write. The ameer of Afghanistan has a motor carriage, uses smokeless powder, phonographs, and Remington typewriters, and yet he has hanging around his neck an amulet which is supposed to protect him against bullet wounds! There is the most groveling ignorance, the most awful superstition. The Mohammedan world is socially degraded, socially hopeless.

A score of women have come to our hospital and have begged for poison to end the lives of those they hated. I shall not forget how I was told of a company of women who came to see a missionary, and as she showed them the simple comforts of home and innocent childhood and pictures on the wall and joy and peace, a Moslem woman said, “I foreswear you by the life of Jesus, tell me the truth. Do you believe in a future life?” The missionary said, “Yes, we all do.” And the woman almost kissed the words as she said, “Why, your life is heaven now, and our life is hell.” And what can be the life of your Moslem sisters but hell with the horrors of polygamy, concubinage, and divorce? If the women are degraded, what do you think of the men? Do you suppose you can rob motherhood of honor and not damage manhood? The most pitiful thing is not the degradation of womanhood, but the degradation of Mohammedan manhood.

You whose boys are scattered over the college world, you know what it means; but your boy in his university temptations turns to a book which is as pure as any book in God’s world,—he turns to the life of Jesus, and he lifts up his eyes to heaven. There is hope for that boy. The Mohammedan boy goes to college, and he wrestles with temptations more fierce, and he turns to Mohammed’s bible,—you don’t dare read it in public,—he turns to Mohammed’s life,—a man who died with thirteen wives on his hands,—and to Mohammed’s paradise. Is there hope in that religion? Do you need to turn the pages of your Bible to find an argument to carry the gospel to the Mohammedans? I tell you those who live without Christ are without hope now. And that world is without hope when they die.

There are changes in the Moslem world,—new liberty in Turkey, new intellectual life in Persia, railroads in Egypt,—and all the way from Morocco to Calcutta you can see in this great Moslem world the beginning of movements such as were in Japan thirty years ago, or in China six years ago. The morning light is breaking. The Mohammedan world is awakening. God is calling us to reinforce the lonely workers.

I want to conclude by asking you to take this Mohammedan world and put it as a big burden in your home, and take your son and your daughter and send them out as missionaries to the Moslem world. Why not? “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” Doesn’t he expect you, perhaps, to give your only begotten son or daughter to go and be a missionary? Are you willing to take your missions among Moslems and support them by funds and forces in order that the cry of these lonely workers may not ring to God and be your condemnation? I was in Bahrein, Arabia, for four years, the only missionary. There are missionaries to-night in Persia and in North Africa, standing all alone. Do you hear their cry? I can hear it. God grant unto us something of the spirit of the early pioneers to win the Mohammedan world for Jesus Christ. True, our only weapon is love, our only sword the Word of God, our only defense and our only hope his presence!

— Abstract from address by Dr. S. M. Zwemer in St. Paul’s Church, Lincoln, Neb.