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The fact that Islamic nations have the lowest per capita of Christian missionaries in the world is intriguing, for Muslims are considered an enormous religious group with over a billion adherents. In researching who has gone to reach them with the gospel, two obscure people come to light: the medieval-era Raymond Lull and the modern-era Samuel Zwemer. Being a turn of the twentieth century missionary, Samuel Zwemer pioneered modern mission work in the spiritually and vegetatively barren land of Arabia, procuring only about twelve direct converts in over forty years of service.
Initially, Zwemer’s evangelistic goal to Muslims was rejected as impractical by the Reformed Mission board. In response to this, Samuel Zwemer played a key part in establishing the independent Arabian Mission, together with fellow seminarians and the guidance of his professors at the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church in America at New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Arabian Mission’s motto was adopted from Genesis 17:18, when "Abraham said to God, ‘Oh that Ishamael might live before Thee!’" Alongside his seminary work, Zwemer assisted a doctor from India in New York City, learning a trade in medicine that would prove vital in opening the locked territories of Arabia to the gospel. After graduation, Zwemer sailed for Beruit, Lebanon, where he engaged in a rigorous challenge to absorb the Arabic language from Arabic scholars. Zwemer described this linguistic endeavor: "The first difficulty is its correct pronunciation. Some Arabic letters cannot be transliterated into English, although certain grammars take infinite pains to accomplish the impossible. The gutturals belong to the desert and doubtless, were borrowed from the camel when it complained of overloading. There are also one or two other letters which sorely try the patience of the beginner and in some cases remain obstinate to the end." This has encouraged me to persevere in the study of the unspoken language of Koine Greek. Upon his arrival in Arabia in 1891, Zwemer and his fellow mission partners opened the first mission station and headquarters of the Arabian Mission in Basra, which is now a strategic port on the Shatt-Al-Arab, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge in southern Iraq. From this beachhead, mission work was directed both inland up the Tigris and Euphrates towards northern Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and also towards the East among the countries of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. Since no modern mission work had been established in the Arabian peninsula, Zwemer undertook the task of assessing the vast spiritual need of the Muslim inhabitants. Eluding Ma’dan river pirates and enduring clouds of insects, he traveled widely, from the city of Ur to Mecca and from Bahrein to Yemen, either conversing with the sultans and Arab leaders or fleeing from irate Islamic masses. Everywhere he journeyed, Zwemer sought to have Arabic Bibles and literature available to sell to the common people. After assessing the people and cities of the Arabia, Zwemer established a satellite mission base from Basra on the island of Bahrein in 1893. Because the Old Testament name "Samuel" is not found in the Koran, Zwemer adopted the Arabic name "Dhaif Allah," meaning "the guest of God" since he also was a guest in Arabia. He moved into a small apartment next to a mosque and established a bookshop for people to visit, discuss spiritual issues, and buy Christian literature. Throughout life, Zwemer had an "open door" policy in his home and welcomed those who inquired about the Christian faith or who needed counsel.
In 1912, Zwemer and his family were called to Cairo, Egypt, the intellectual capital of Islam, to organize and lead the Nile Mission Press in the printing and distribution of Christian Arabic literature. It was in this capacity that Zwemer sought never to tone down the basic truths of the Christian faith, such as the inspiration of the Bible, the Diety of Christ, the Virgin Birth, Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection of the Lord, but present these issues in a spirit of love to Muslims. Dr. Charles Watson said, "No agency can penetrate Islam so deeply, abide so persistently, witness so daringly, and influence so irresistibly as the printed page." Eventually, the Nile Mission Press turned into the American Christian Literature Society for Muslims. This organization sought to keep overhead low by only paying rent and postage, not executive salaries, and by directing the rest to mission work. In Cairo, Zwemer was joined by one of his recruits, William Borden, who was undergoing Arabic language training while on his way to the Muslim highlands of Tibet and Western China. As an understudy of Zwemer, Borden lived with an Egyptian family to better acquire the language. By depriving himself of a car, Borden became a familiar figure on the streets of Cairo as he traveled via bicycle for evangelistic work and tract distribution. However, Zwemer conducted Borden’s funeral after he suddenly fell ill and died from spinal meningitis. In addition to leading the Christian Arabic literature organization, Zwemer was also given the responsibility of representing it at many conferences around the world. Between 1912 and 1930, Zwemer traveled extensively to Muslim lands near and far. In Persia, Zwemer wrote about the growing educated class who were separating from the old Islamic structures but who had not yet come to Christ. On the island of Java in Indonesia, Zwemer wrote about the extensive converts (37,000 people) from Islam to Christianity. Returning to Basrah in Iraq from a Jerusalem conference in 1924, Zwemer rode in a convoy of two Cadillac and two Buick cars for over 400 miles with only one stop that had water. As Zwemer’s biographer recounts, "The drivers knew their way across the flat plains as sailors know the sea." In 1933, on mainland China, Zwemer took his first airplane ride that covered over 400 miles in 3 ˝ hours, a trip that would have taken three weeks by land. On the return trip, Zwemer and his fellow worker rode on packing cases over rough mountainous regions. When they arrived at their destination, they found that the cases contained munitions and dynamite for the Chinese army! Such travels took a toll on Zwemer’s family life. Although his wife, Amy, sometimes accompanied Zwemer on his tours, she was often left for six to eight months staffing the Cairo mission station and literature organization. In addition, Zwemer left two of his four young children in the states after a furlough to continue their education. Both of these instances have caused me to think about the role of the family in a missionary’s life. On the one hand, Zwemer demonstrated selfless abandonment to the ministry. But from my third-hand perspective through reading his biography, it appears that the ministry took front-seat over Zwemer’s family. The role of the family is a delicate issue in missions today, and I believe that the natural God-given priority of caring for the spiritual, intellectual, and physical well-being of one’s family must come before and along side of reaching out to the lost world (I Timothy 3:4-5). While working among the Arabs in Cairo, Zwemer banded together with two other mission organizations to form an early Inter-mission organization. Zwemer’s theology was conservative Calvinism and the Reformed faith. He was vigilant in speaking against the teeming new breeds of higher critics of Scripture. Being the Student Volunteer Movement spokesman for Arabia in the United States, Zwemer urgently called for young people to commit their lives to missions. While the guest in many different homes around America, Zwemer would overtly request and acquire donations for his mission from his hosts. Regarding regular missionary support, he encouraged individuals to support specific missionaries and not a mission mechanism. He believed that this would encourage the donors to follow up their monetary gifts with prayer for the specific missionary and his work. Zwemer also vitally participated in many mission board meetings, constantly sharing his new ideas on how to reach people for Christ. Because of Zwemer’s extensive knowledge of Islam, he wrote over thirty-seven books challenging both the Christian church and Muslims abroad. His book, The Law of Apostasy in Islam, answered why there are so few converts from Islam. It also confronted modernistic Islamic apologists who denied the Koran did not call for the death penalty of someone who converted from Islam to Christianity. Another book, The Cross Above the Crescent, presented the "validity, necessity and urgency of missions to Muslims." In The Call to Prayer, Zwemer correlates the five daily Muslim traditional prayers to the Christian world and urges the necessity of daily prayer as "the basic and most vital need of the Christian Missionary movement." From 1911 to 1946, Zwemer edited a quarterly periodical entitled "The Moslem World" which expounded on mission work and opportunities in the Muslim world. In 1930, Zwemer was called by Princeton Theological Seminary to take the chair of History of Religion and Christian Missions. It was in this capacity that Zwemer taught courses ranging from "The Origin of Religion" to "Rethinking Missions". In rethinking missions, Zwemer said that we should not be anxious of trying to discover new missionary methods. Instead, today’s missionary ought to look back and "listen to the voices of those in the back seat—the early missionary pioneers, the apostles who succeeded where [modern missions] have failed". An analysis of the lives of these great men who first opened the various countries to the Gospel reveals that they possessed several qualities sometimes absent from the modern missionary. The most pertinent qualities are: vision, knowledge (of the language and people), persistence, passion for souls, and the ability to endure loneliness. He said that it is a new man that is needed, rather than a new method (Wilson 160).
In closing, the chief lessons gleaned from Samuel Zwemer’s life have been through his example of perseverance, availability, and boldness. Learning the Arabic language was tedious, Islamic converts to Christianity were few, the desert heat was exhausting, and persecution came often, yet Zwemer persevered through the hard times by the grace of God. Through gracious boldness, Zwemer was able to confront, reason, and witness to the Islamic leaders and throngs in mosques all across Arabia. Finally, he has been an example to me by his availability in both witnessing to people and to the leading of God in his life. It was through these three qualities that God used Zwemer in evangelizing Arabia and encouraging other young people to give their lives to missions.
Works Read:
Wilson, Christy J. Apostle to Islam. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1952. 247 pages. For further information on reaching Muslims for Christ, visit the following links: |
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