Hazrat Malik Ghulam Faridra MA (1896-1977)
The signal failure that has attended the gigantic proselytising efforts of the evangelist has greatly perturbed Dr Zwemer. Islam has, by its inherent vitality and inborn strength, successfully withstood the onslaughts of Christianity. It has proved to be “an insurmountable obstacle in its way and its greatest enemy.” There is no denying the fact that if the success of a religion had depended solely on the evangelistic endeavours of its followers, Islam would have long been extinct in the world and the Cross would have supplanted the Crescent in every land. But the Almighty God who has sent Islam is its protector and guardian. The mendacious propaganda that has callously been carried on against Islam in the past and still continues unabated, the millions of pounds that are spent every year on missions in Muslim countries and the thousands of preachers that are working there and the profuse dissemination of Christian literature and the free distribution and vast diffusion of the Bible in Islamic lands have produced results in no proportion to the labour and money expended.
Dr Zwemer on Christianity’s decline in the Muslim world
Dr Zwemer, a tried veteran of the Faith of Christ, has, to his chagrin, admit it. He ruefully remarks:
“In considering the task of evangelizing the Moslem world, we must record at the same time great sacrificial effort and apparently small visible result. Looking back to the early pioneers such as Raymond Lull and Francis of Assisi, or down the past century to Henry Martyn’s day, what is there to show for all the tears and blood save the patience of unanswered prayer? Like Simon Peter, the lonely worker at Tangier or Tanta, at Adana or Aden, at Khartoum or Kairwan, might well say, ‘Master, we have toiled all night and taken nothing; nevertheless, at Thy word we will let down the net.’ A confession of faithfulness: ‘We have toiled.’ A confession of failure: ‘We have taken nothing.’ A confession of dauntless faith: ‘Nevertheless, we will let down the net.’
“Mr Findlay Andrew writes from Western China: ‘Islam has been referred to as a challenge to Christian Missions; once a Moslem always a Moslem in Western China. During the past years but few Moslems have been reached with the Gospel, and after a profession of faith been accepted as church members or enquirers, the number has been very small, and of those who have got the faith only about one remains in Church fellowship at the time of my writing.’
“In Persia there are beginnings of a Movement toward Christ among Mohammedans, and yet, after fifty years and more of missionary effort, there are fewer than 300 converts from Islam.
“In Arabia, where men and women have toiled for thirty-four years, the total number of Mohammedan converts who are professing openly that they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and are His followers, is less than the number of years of toil and tears and patience and prayer poured out on those desert acres.
“Turn to Turkey, and Dr McCallum testifies: ‘All our work is practically destroyed; not a single church of Moslem converts in existence in all the Turkish area after a hundred years of foreign missions.’
“In North Africa, including Egypt, Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the total number of Mohammedans who profess and call themselves Christians must still be put at less than five hundred.
“Although there are 438 Missionaries in Egypt, and although some of the mission bodies are working almost exclusively for the Moslems, and although there are about 19,000 Evangelical Christians in Egypt with good church organisations and a well-educated ministry, and although there are in the various mission schools approximately 2,500 Moslem students continuously receiving instruction in Bible study, the visible result of the Missionary work for Moslems is not very great. At the present time, we probably could not point to more than 150 living converts from Islam in Egypt. If the Moslem converts were distributed among the missionary workers, there would be about one convert for every three missionaries. If the comparison is made with the Evangelical Church, there would be about one for every congregation in Egypt. Every missionary method known to man has been tried and is being tried, but until the present neither the missions nor the Evangelical Church have whereof to boast in the face of this great and baffling problem.” (Missionary Survey, 1924)
Many reasons are given for the paucity of converts and various causes are suggested for this discouraging failure. Some blame the church for lack of faith; others blame the missionaries for lack of love. The reason, others say, is that the missionaries have tried to win by controversy rather than by kindness and the difficulty is one of method. Some argue that the time is not yet, the hour has not struck, and the harvest is not ripe. One missionary writes: “I venture the opinion that Islam is perhaps reprobate. Since the apostasy was subsequent to God’s offer of grace in Christ, He has withdrawn them from his sphere of activity. Perhaps corporately, Islam has sinned against the Holy Spirit. I have toiled here two years, living in this Moslem home, thinking and talking like a Moslem, knowing their inner life as perhaps few do. Why is it, I wonder? To be quite candid, I expected that coming here in absolute simplicity and poverty, living amongst them, as near as possible as I believe Paul did, without committees or funds, I asked and expected God to give the increase, and yet, comparatively speaking, we have caught nothing.”
The real cause of Christianity’s failure in Muslim lands
Some of the reasons given above have a measure of truth and the rest are absolutely ridiculous and childish. The real cause of the failure of Christianity in Muslim lands lies somewhere else. It is the irresistible charm and the captivating beauty of the doctrines, dogmas, tenets and teachings of Islam that are the real hindrance in the way of the spread of the faith of Christ in Islamic countries. Islam in its true and original sense is more adaptable to the natural aptitudes and inborn faculties of man. It fits in entirely with human reason and common sense. It offers no abstruse proposition and abstract statement from which the human mind is apt to recoil. It presents no riddling enigma of Christian tritheism and the puzzling dogma of atonement. It is a practical religion, very simple and easy of comprehension. “Believe and you are saved,” is not the watchword of Islam. “Believe and act rightly,” is the motto and guiding star of Islam. To quote S Lane Poole: “It is a form of pure theism, simpler and more austere than the theism of most forms of modern Christianity, lofty in its conception of the relation of man to God, and noble in its doctrine of the duty of man to man, and man to the lower creation. There is little in it of superstition, less of complexity of dogmas; it is an exacting religion without the repulsiveness of asceticism; severe but not merciless.”
This is an impartial testimony of a Christian writer to the beautiful character of the teachings and tenets of Islam and to this may be ascribed the rapid spread of Islam in the remotest corners of the globe without men and money and the comparative failure of Christianity in those parts that has bewildered the evangelist and he, shutting his eyes to the actual facts, attributes it to the law of apostasy in Islam according to which (he says) death awaits a man who renounces Islam for any other faith. Dr Zwemer, among many others, like Dr Margoliouth, Rev. WT Fairman, and Rev. HU Weitbrecht, says that “the Moslem law concerning apostates is one of the factors to explain the paucity of converts from Islam to Christianity. Death, forced separation from wife and family, loss of property and legal rights, naturally cause many who are convinced of the truth of Christianity to hesitate to profess faith in Christ.”
I do not know to what should I attribute this flagrant misstatement of Dr Margoliouth and Dr Zwemer about Islam. Is it due to a deplorable ignorance of the teachings of Islam on their part or the outcome of fanatical bigotry, I cannot make out? Both the gentlemen claim a consummate scholarship of Islamic principles. Hence, the natural consequence is this: they have purposely indulged in studied and deliberate misrepresentation and thus have sought to stigmatise Islam as a wholly intolerant religion, “whose doors swing only inward and not outward.” This totally wrong interpretation of the law of apostasy in Islam has been irrefutably repudiated by my friend Professor Muhammad Din[ra], our missionary in America, in the January and February issues of The Review of Religions and the charge of intolerance of Islam has been rebutted in the article entitled “Toleration in Islam” in the last number of this journal. The reading of these two articles by Dr Zwemer with an unbiased mind, I hope, will do him substantial good. Islam has not only allowed unrestricted exercise of their religious rites to the followers of other faiths, but has enjoined upon the Muslims in clear and unmistakable terms not to lay down their arms till religious freedom is restored and every one may worship God according to his conscience, “And fight with them until there is no persecution and disturbance, and religion should be only for Allah.” (Ch.2: V.193)
It is taking too much liberty with truth to assert that in these days of the supremacy of Christian powers over Islamic countries, converts from Islam to Christianity are everywhere put to death, persecuted, forcibly separated from wife and family and lose their properties and regal rights. Dr Zwemer has taken great pains to collect a very few scattered cases in which the parents or relatives of those who were converted to Christianity abused them and maltreated them because the methods that were adopted in most cases to win them over to Christianity were too degrading. But the truth is quite the other way around.
About the tactics of the missionaries in Egypt, I quote Dr Zwemer himself: “Whereas the Christians who belong to the Protestant Church have officially recorded a disgraceful act which cannot be wiped out and never shall be wiped out, by depriving me of the sight of my son, the favourite of my heart, even from a single glance of his portrait, and he being of the age of twenty-two years and seventy days ending on the day of his unhappy marriage, therefore, let anyone who has any religion, and everyone. Whatever may be his religious persecution, shrink back from assisting these ravening wolves, especially those who share with them in their joys on the coming Sunday (tomorrow) in the Church of Al Miniya (which is called the Evangelical Church), because they are consciously renewing the age of persecution under Nero. (Signed: M Abdullah)”
The story speaks for itself.
If it be admitted for the sake of argument that the converts to Christianity in Islamic countries are subjected to persecution and therefore Dr Zwemer is justified in finding fault with Islam, is it fair, I ask, to judge a religion by the corruptions of its followers? Islam is responsible only for what the Holy Prophet[sa] or his immediate successors or companions did and not for what those who call themselves Muslims do.
But will Dr Zwemer care to see the beam in his own eyes instead of trying to find out mote in another’s eye? What has he to say about the never-dying tale of aggressive bloodshed and the most offensive warfare of the Crusaders? Is not the Christian conquest of Spain and the subsequent atrocious and outrageous persecution and expulsion of the Muslim Moors the blackest imaginable page in the history of mankind? Are not the days of Inquisition an ineffaceable stigma on the face of Christendom? Is not the tragedy of St. Bartholomew’s Day and many similar others enacted in the heyday of Christianity a sufficient cause for the Christians to hide their faces in shame? Were not these brutal enormities sanctioned and hallowed by those who claimed direct successorship of Jesus Christ and on whose shoulders fell the mantle of St. Peter?
Moreover, there is no cause for complaint for Dr Zwemer if those who are converted to Christianity or who intend to be converted are persecuted. Is it not a fact that in the early days of its inception, Christianity made progress by rapid strides in the teeth of persecution and opposition? Why does not the adage so often reiterated by the evangelists, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” hold good now? We see that in the early ages before the advent of Islam, when Christian churches were destroyed and Christian writings publicly burnt, when Christians were declared incapable of holding any public office, and Christian slaves were deprived of any hope of freedom, when the law was always put in force against them, but never in their favour, when they were wrapped in the skins of wild beasts and torn to pieces by dogs, when they were nailed to crosses and fastened to the wheels of chariots, and when they were burnt alive, they bore all this with delightful hearts and smiling faces. The continued and protracted persecution of the Christians by the Antonines and other Roman Emperors failed to quail the devout followers of Jesus Christ and arrest the progress of the faith. How could persecution that was responsible for the spread of Christianity in the early ages could be the cause of its failure now?
Persecution has never retarded the progress of any true religion. “The blood of the Martyrs is the seed of the Church,” is a truth not confined to any particular creed.
Amidst bitter opposition and cruel persecution, the Ahmadiyya Movement is gaining converts every day in large numbers. As a matter of fact, the Community gets fresh impetus from these persecutions. Dr Zwemer and with him Rev. WT Fairman, Rev. ΗU Weitbrecht Stanton and others have made a wrong diagnosis of the consumptive disease of Christianity, which is eating up its vitality, sapping its strength and helping it to crumble and totter. Persecution is not the cause of the failure of Christianity in Muslim countries. The real cause of its failure I have given above. Its huge edifice stands on hollow foundations. Someday it must fall and it shall fall.
We see that wherever Christianity and Islam have stood face to face, the former equipped with men and money, with all sorts of resources and material means at its back and the latter weak, deserted and destitute, Islam has defeated its adversary because it appeals more to human reason and common sense and is more practical and practicable than Christianity.
The following few facts from the pen of the Christian writers themselves will bear out my remarks. Mr Bosworth Smit, in his book, “Muhammad and Muhammadanism,” writes as follows:
“Nor can it be said that it is only among those negroes who have never heard anything of a purer faith that Muhammadanism is making such rapid progress. The Government Blue Book of the year 1873 on our West African settlements, and the reports of missionary societies themselves are quite at one on this head. The Governor of our West African Colonies, Mr Pope Hennessy, remarks that the liberated Africans are always handed over to Christian missionaries for instruction, and that their children are baptised and brought up at the public expense in Christian Schools, and are, therefore, in a sense, ready-made converts. Missionary societies are not likely to err on the side of defect in enumerating their converts; yet the total number of professing Christians in all our African settlements put together, as computed by the missionary societies themselves – very few even of these, as the Governor says, and as we can unfortunately well believe from our experience in countries that are not African, being practical Christians – falls far short of the original number of Africans liberated at Sierra Leone alone, and their descendants.
“On the other hand, the Rev. James Johnson, a native clergyman, and a man of remarkable energy and intelligence as well as of very Catholic spirit, deplores the fact that, of the total number of Mohammadans to be found in Sierra Leone and its neighbourhood, three-fourths were not born Mohammadans, but have become so by conversion, whether from a nominal Christianity or from Paganism.”
[…] This is why, in spite of being a very zealous and devout Christian, Bosworth has to admit that if the question must be put, whether it is Mohammadan or Christian, nations that have as yet done most for Africa, the answer must be that it is not the Christian. And if it be asked, again, not what religion is the purest in itself, and ideally the best, for to this there could be but one answer, but which, under the peculiar circumstances, historical, geographical, and ethnological, is the religion most likely to get hold on a vast scale of the native mind, and so in some measure to elevate the savage character, the same answer must be returned.
These few facts, I hope, are quite enough to open the eyes of Dr Zwemer as to why Christianity does not meet with success in Muslim countries and why Islam is an insurmountable obstacle in its way and is its greatest enemy.
(Transcribed and edited by Al Hakam from the original English, published in the March 1925 issue of The Review of Religions)