On Christian Missionaries
Samuel Zwemer (d. 1952) was the most famous American Christian missionary to the Arab and Muslim world. He dedicated his life to try to convert people to his reformed Protestant branch of Christianity. He wrote a number of key works educating Christian missionaries on how to convert Muslims, founded a famous academic journal that still exist to this day (‘The Moslem World’ - although it is now a mainstream journal), and spent over forty years in numerous Muslim lands preaching the Gospel.
At the beginning of his career, he felt that the bulk of the Muslim world would convert, because his writings showed, according to him, the errors of ‘Muhammadanism’. His disdain for Islam as a religion, and Muslim cultures he encountered, seeps through almost every article and book he wrote, and his controversial tactics and aggressive preaching didn’t help either. He criticizes aspects of the sīra, claimed that the Quran ‘... has no logical order or sequence… the defects of its teachings are many and its historical errors evident even to the casual reader’, and blamed the penalty of apostasy for being a primary impediment to conversion. All of this didn’t prevent him from living in the Muslim world and learning Arabic, but as the years turned into decades, he became increasingly more pessimistic about the success of his mission.
According to Prof. Ruth Tucker, “Zwemer’s converts were probably less than a dozen during his nearly forty years of service.” Prof. Thomas Kidd writes, “... very few Muslims converted to Christianity by way of western missionaries in the 19th century… although precise numbers are hard to come by, there may have actually been fewer Christians in the Middle East at the end of the 19th century than at the beginning.”
By any standard, despite a lifetime of work, and large amounts of funding by Protestant Churches in America, despite many theological debates and attempts to undermine the Quran and sīra, Zwemer’s legacy remains an utter and dismal failure.
Current missionaries should learn from Zwemer’s life and choose alternative paths that will be more productive for their legacies. The Muslim world definitely has to take on many modern challenges, and we would be fooling ourselves if we didn’t admit that we do have a crisis of agnosticism amongst our next generation, and an embracing of un-Islamic ideas that corrupts the faith. Yes, we do have majors problems to tackle in our era.
But conversion from Islam to any other faith (much less a Trinitarian one) has never been an issue of concern in the entire history of Islam, and it’s not something that we need be concerned about now either. The tactics of Zwemer failed, and even if Zwemer’s intellectual heirs have upped the game and are attempting more sophisticated attacks, their tactics too will fail.
Picture: Zwemer in Egypt preaching the Gospel (FYI, most of his ‘converts’ were Coptic Christians who became Protestant).
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