THE WORLD OF ISLAM
'The tide of things rolls forward, surge on surge,
Bringing the blessed hour
When in Himself the God of Love shall merge
The God of will and power.'
[Sidenote: The Fruit of Lull's Life.]
Where was the fruit of Raymund Lull's life, and the answer to his
prayer? His call to the Christian Church fell on deaf or unwilling
ears, and his prayer seemed to have been in vain. He left no
followers in his Crusade of Love; none caught his spirit or sought
his task. One or two short, fitful efforts by men like Francis
Xavier and his earnest Jesuits, who stood alone in love and piety, is
all that we can trace in the Church's history of the survival of
Lull's spirit and Lull's mission as the long centuries pass on from
the darkness of the Middle Ages to the light of modern times.
To find the fruit and the answer we must take a leap of five
centuries from {150} the time of Raymund Lull's death, landing in the
opening years of the nineteenth century. The spirit of Raymund Lull
was now born anew in Christendom, and the spirit of the new
Crusade--the Crusade of Love--was growing in the Church. The Moslem
needed something better than he had! The Moslem was worth winning!
The Moslem was included in the world to which the Church was bidden
to go! The Church, the body of Christ, could never be complete until
the Turk was won!
It would be slow work. Then so much the more reason for not wasting
time! It was dangerous work. What had that to do with it? It was
difficult work. Then so much the more were brave hearts zealous to
share in it!
These thoughts came slowly and gradually with compelling force to
just a few here and there as the years rolled on. And the nineteenth
century gave its long thin line of knights to the new Crusade of
Love. They were the advance guard of the new army, and right bravely
did they do their work. No Moslems wanted them, no Government
encouraged them, {151} few even protected them, most of the great
Moslem countries were shut and barred and bolted against them.[1]
They took their lives in their hands, they spent long years in study,
they mastered the hardest languages in the world and harnessed them
for the Gospel, translating the Bible and providing Christian
literature. They prayed open doors that were closed, they quietly
stole through any that were ajar. Some willingly laid down their
lives, more sacrificed their health, all faced lives of apparent
failure, confident that in the end the cause of love must triumph.
[Sidenote: The Spirit of Christ in the 19th Century.]
This era of modern Moslem missions is but another evidence, perhaps
the strongest of all, of the spirit to which, in this last hundred
years, most wonderful of all in history, Christian men and women have
opened their hearts.
The spirit that stopped the slave trade, that reformed our prisons,
that regulated our factories, that multiplied our hospitals, {152}
that sent Livingstone to Africa, Coleridge Patteson to the South
Seas, and Selwyn to New Zealand, that inspired Barnardo and General
Booth, that nerves thousands of workers in the slums of our great
cities, is the same spirit that impels Christian missionaries forth
to the Moslem world to-day.
And what is this spirit? May we not dare to say that it is born of a
new understanding of a Life lived among the hills and valleys of
Galilee, and a Cross raised on a lonely hill outside Jerusalem
nineteen centuries ago? There, at the centre of world-history, men
learned to look up into the face of God and say 'Our Father,' and
then look out upon mankind and call them 'brothers,' and gazing on
that Cross see there the World's Redemption, the Son of God lifted up
that He might draw all men to Himself. Every dark corner of the
earth, every place of pain and sickness, every haunt of sin and
shame, every falsehood and every half-truth seen in that light is but
a challenge to the Christian, to lift up Him Who is the Lord of Life
and Light and Glory, to catch His Spirit that He may be once more
incarnate in the Life of His Church.
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So it has been for very many of us in the Great War. It has seemed
that so many of the things He died for are at stake--liberty and love
and gentleness and the sympathy that appreciates the aspirations of
other peoples. And our men and women too have gladly given their
lives and yielded of their best that the eternal things might win
through and that other generations may live in a better world.
And when peace comes to us again, the same call will be there--less
strident but no less urgent--summoning every true man to give his
life for the world's cleansing, to follow as he may the great
Redeemer, who redeemed men by His cross. The ultimate test of
Englishmen will be those years of peace. Will there then be a great
uprising to the truly holy war of love and unselfish service and the
great adventure of the Cross--the war against sin and injustice,
against social and national wrong, the war for love and truth and
purity and the kingdom of Jesus Christ?
[Sidenote: Awakening of the East.]
Meanwhile in these opening years of the twentieth century, away in
the Far East nations great and ancient are awakening to {154} take
part in the life of the world. The Renaissance of Europe in the
fifteenth century is dwarfed by the Renaissance of Asia to-day.
Japan has claimed a place beside the European peoples in the comity
of nations, and has justified her claim. China, awakening from the
sleep of ages, claims it too. India--our own Empire, torn by
dissensions under many masters in the past--is in the throes of
upheaval and unrest. This rising national spirit in the heart of the
Eastern nations, of China, Japan, Korea, and India, is a challenge to
Christendom. But it is far more. With its lofty, national
aspirations it offers to the Church of Christ a greater opportunity
than any in history.
[Sidenote: The Problem of Islam.]
Among all these insistent problems, the problem of Islam is this:
That in this modern world of renaissance, reform, movement, and
progress, one-seventh of mankind turns to one physical and spiritual
centre, a black stone in the Kaaba at Mecca, a city of the past. In
that holy city, alas! notorious the world over for its sin and
wickedness,[2] pilgrims meet from half the {155} races of the
earth--Tartars and Malays, Russians and Negroes, Indians and Chinese,
Arabs, Afghans, Persians, Egyptians, and many more. All this crowd
of races, peoples, nationalities, and tongues own one Faith. For
all, the limit of aspiration, of morals, of spirituality, was cast
hard, fast, unchangeable, in the life of the Prophet and his book in
the sixth century of Arabia.
From the far-off Celebes Islands in the East to Rio de Oro, on the
Atlantic shore of Africa; from Russia, even from European Russia, in
the North down to the British Protectorates of South Africa, that
huge Moslem world spreads out like some great octopus, and its
peoples turn themselves inwards, westwards, eastwards, southwards,
northwards, as they prostrate themselves in prayer towards Mecca, the
historic centre of the Faith.[3]
[Sidenote: East Indies.]
Away in the furthest East the muezzin ushers in the new world's day
in the great {156} luxuriant islands of the East Indies, where,
whilst Europe was occupied with the Reformation, Mohammedan traders
settled among the simple pagans, winning them to Islam. To-day, in
the islands of Celebes, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and the Straits
Settlements, thirty million Moslems of Malay race recite with one
accord the creed of Allah and His Prophet.
[Sidenote: China.]
A few hours later, in the western provinces of China, eight million
Moslems are summoned from sleep to prayer. These Chinese Moslems
have never been under Moslem rule, nor are they by any means the
fanatics we have got to know so well in lands where Islam holds
undisputed sway. They are Chinese first and Moslems after, wearing
the queue, concurring in many Confucian rites, and joining in
ancestral worship, a witness to the power of Islam where it never
drew sword or held the sceptre.
[Sidenote: India.]
Hear, next, the voice of India's sixty-six million Moslems, who, amid
the confusion of worship of countless idols, acknowledge with no
uncertain sound the one God and His Prophet, and in stately mosque
and crowded bazaar and lonely {157} field spread themselves in prayer
towards the sacred city. These Moslems[4] are successors of the
great warriors who ruled and conquered India through a thousand
years--men like Mohammed Kasim (711 A.D.), Mahmoud of Ghazni (1019
A.D.), Jenghis Khan (1221 A.D.), Timur (1398 A.D.), and Mogul rulers,
such as Akbar, Shah Jehan, and Aurungzeb. They are among the most
loyal of our British fellow-subjects, but have never stood in India
for the cause of enlightenment or progress up to the present time.
They are in the mass far more illiterate than their Hindu
compatriots; they are in an undue minority in the schools. The
Moslem farmer is thriftless, and in debt to the Hindu money-lender.
The Mohammedan population stolidly oppose all the efforts of the
Government to stay the ravages of {158} bubonic plague. Purity in
the home and personal life is more rare than among Hindus. Five
times a day the muezzin calls one-fifth of India to recite the
creed--the creed without a Saviour.
[Sidenote: Afghanistan Baluchistan.]
Through the great historic passes of the North Indian mountains file
down to-day the Afghans and Baluchis, warriors by nature, but in the
Pax Britannica merchants with their caravans. These wild and warlike
people in their mountain fastnesses know none other than Mohammed,
consecrate their matchlocks to his service, and ask the blessing of
Allah on their raids. In these rocky uplands every man prays
Meccaward, and the dead face Mecca in their graves.
[Sidenote: Central Asia.]
On, into Central Asia, that great table-land, 'the roof of the
world,' where three empires meet. In Bokhara, a centre of Moslem
influence and learning for all Central Asia, and in Turkestan, almost
wholly Moslem, the faithful spread their prayer-mats towards the
south.
We are on the borders of Europe now, but not at the limit of Islam.
Among the scattered peoples of the 'Steppes' and beyond in Europe to
the very boundary of {159} Siberia, 'where the winter day is so short
that the Moslem can hardly find time to pray all his stated prayers,'
still the Prophet of Arabia is acclaimed by eighteen million Moslems
scattered among a nominally Christian people. The voices of those
who in this vast tract worship JESUS rise but faintly to our ears.
Westward again: and we stand in the vast land of Persia, among the
ruins of world-empire, once the home of the worshippers of the sun,
and of the hosts of heaven. Persia now turns its back to the rising
sun and its face towards Mecca. The Shah, the officers of state, the
law, the people, are Moslem, and have been for twelve centuries; in
Persia, as in Arabia, the great closed land, Islam has reigned alone.
[Sidenote: Turkish Empire.]
Across the Euphrates Valley, past the cities of Babylon and Nineveh,
whose names are the only relics of their former greatness, and we
stand among the Moslem countries bordering the Mediterranean on the
north-east, ruled with iron hand according to Korânic Law by the
Sultan of Turkey, from Constantinople, the queenly city of the Golden
Horn, political {160} centre of the Moslem world. Here, in Asia
Minor and Syria, in the historic cities where the Apostle of the
Gentiles loved, prayed, laboured, and suffered, and in which he
planted Christian Churches, the muezzin's voice is heard to-day.
Great Moslem populations proclaiming their simple, confident creed
almost drown the feeble praise of the few dispirited Christians,
remnant of Churches that have been.
Palestine, now swept within the Turkish Empire, re-echoes the hard
rasp of the Moslem creed and shrinks beneath the pressure of the
Moslem heel. Strange that within the Empire of the Turk, the Empire
which in the past has stood for oppression and persecution, should
lie the land that once cradled the Saviour of the world. Stranger
still and far more tragic, that on the hills which JESUS trod, around
the lake He loved, and in the villages which heard His words of Life
and Light and Truth, His Name is almost forgotten, dishonoured by the
name that denies His claim.
[Illustration: A CHALLENGE FROM WEST AFRICA. '_Where Moslem mosque
and pagan temple are side by side._']
The Bedouin Arab with his camel or his herd of goats camps unthinking
upon the sacred sites. Bethlehem, Nazareth, {161} Cana, Capernaum,
Calvary, Olivet mean nothing to him. He spreads his prayer-mat
towards Mecca and invokes Mohammed.
We have traversed Asia from the farthest East, and the voice of the
muezzin has haunted our ears. But we have not finished yet.
[Sidenote: Africa.]
Africa lies before us, the land of trackless deserts, overpowering
forests, pestiferous marshes, vast inland seas.
It is the continent of pagan races, negro and Bantu crowding in
mud-built towns or scattered in countless villages on the river
banks. No stately temples of sculptured marble enshrine their pagan
gods; weird sacred trees, fetishes, sacred stones take their place.
The pagan continent--is it so indeed? What means, then, the muezzin
call from Cape to Cairo, from Lagos to Zanzibar? Whence come fanatic
Moslems facing eastward and northward in the old strongholds of
Christian Churches in North Africa and Egypt, in the heart of the
Sahara, in the great, walled cities of Sokoto, in the vast bush lands
of West Africa, where Moslem mosque and pagan temple are side by
side? Down through central, {162} pagan Africa, the land where
Livingstone's heart still lies, we find the Moslem convert where ten
years ago Mohammed was not known. Pagan Africa! its paganism fades
into the past, and it fades before the crescent, not the Cross.
[Sidenote: Urgent Problems.]
That is the problem of Africa, and it is the problem of today. What
is to be the future of this great continent? The land is in trust to
the powers of Europe, Christian by name. They must decide its fate.
Is the simple, laughing savage, clinging so feebly to his poor
superstition, to be gripped by the iron hand of this Islam we have
studied, or shall his feet be set upon the path which has no limit
but the purity, the love, the holiness of God? Twelve centuries ago
the Christian citadels of North Africa were wrested from the
Christian Church and they have never been recovered. Islam has
rolled across the great Soudan and in the last fifty years has broken
through into the Southern Continent. In the last ten years it has
spread down the Niger river, passing little Christian churches on the
way, across the old West African Protectorates, and out to the sea,
building its tiny mosques in {163} heathen villages, teaching its
short, simple creed, steeling the African against the Gospel.[5]
One-third of Africa is Moslem. The next twenty-five years must
largely decide the fate of the rest.
[Sidenote: Moslem Propaganda in Africa.]
How has it come to pass? Not by the sword, for Europe has ordered
the sword to be sheathed. Not by the prestige of Moslem government,
for the great bulk of Africa is under European rule, which professes
to treat all religions alike.
The Moslem trader, confident, earnest, and proud, sitting at rest in
the market of a neighbouring village, on the long march of a caravan,
on the ship that bears him up and down the Nile, in the streets of
the great coast towns, boldly acknowledges Allah and His Prophet. He
feels no qualms for any inconsistency in his life, nor is his message
weakened thereby. The simple pagan, whose ancient superstitions are
already rudely shattered by advancing civilization, eagerly grasps at
{164} a creed so simple and so apparently complete. He knows it
offers him a brotherhood and a social status he never dreamt of
before. The meagreness of Islam's demands makes conversion easy. He
need make but small change in the manner of his life, while, instead
of the haunting dread of a world full of evil and evil-meaning
spirits, comes the great revelation, 'There is one God.' For him for
the rest of life his relation to that God is summed up in one word,
'Islam'--submission. 'We must submit to God.'
[Sidenote: A magnificent Moslem.]
Traders or warriors, there is something great about these Moslems.
There is a fine picture by Sir Reginald Wingate of Abdurahman Wad en
Nejumi, his noblest enemy who fought under the Mahdi in the Eastern
Soudan:
'He was a Jaali, one of the not very numerous tribe of Jaalin, but
one in whom the Baggara recognized warlike qualities similar to their
own, and with whom it was important to keep on good terms. In early
life, a Fiki, like the Mahdi, and his devoted friend, stern, hard,
ascetic, the thin, dark man was the incarnation of a blind sincerity
of conviction. He never transgressed the self-appointed strictures
with which he ruled his conduct. Withal, a spice of madness entered
into {165} his composition. There was no man but trusted his word,
and his the distant enterprise, his the forefront of danger always
was. Mahdiism was the natural outlet for his wild temper. He was
the Khâlid of the Prophet's wars. He it was who prepared the
stratagem which annihilated Hicks. He it was who crept silently
round through the shallow mud beyond the crumbled ramparts of
Khartoum. In him was realized the phrase, unique in consular
dispatch, "They are so fond of the Mahdi, one may say that they are
the body, and he the soul."'
And this of Wad en Nejumi's death a few years later:
'All fighting appeared over, when a camel laden with what was at
first supposed to be a gun was observed along the line of retreat,
surrounded by some forty men. This party, on being observed, was
fired on by a troop of cavalry; the camel fell and most of the men
appeared to have been killed; the cavalry then followed up, and
called upon the remainder to surrender, but as they approached, the
Arabs supposed to have been killed suddenly sprang up, and rushing at
them, a hand-to-hand encounter ensued; a number were killed, and the
remainder returned once more to their camel. They were again called
upon to surrender, but their only response was a second charge, which
resulted in all being killed except one, who, mounting a passing
horse, succeeded in escaping. The cavalry finding no gun on the
camel, as they expected, continued the pursuit, but it was
subsequently discovered that {166} the camel had been carrying the
dead body of an important chief, and under the direction of Captain
Macdonald it was sent to Toski, where it was at once identified by
all the captives as that of Nejumi. It eventually transpired that,
being severely wounded, he was being carefully tended by his
bodyguard, who, placing him on a rough camel litter, had attempted to
convey him to the rear. One of his sons, a boy of five years old,
was found dead beside the camel, while another baby boy, scarcely a
year old, was brought by his nurse into the camp at Toski on the
following day.'[6]
We dare to admire him. Can we not sever the man from the system and
learn to love him too?
That is the paradox of Islam--the hateful system, and the rough,
natural, earnest, lovable man. How shall the Church of Christ bear
herself towards it? What does it mean for each individual Christian
in these opening years of the twentieth century?
QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER X
1. What grounds are there for considering the problem of the duty of
Christianity in the face of Islam to be one of the great
world-problems of our day?
{167}
2. What do you know of the Mohammedan population of India?
3. Draw a sketch map of the Turkish Empire. What is meant by the
muezzin?
4. Why is Africa to-day one of the greatest battle-grounds between
Islam and Christianity? What is being done? What ought to be done?
5. What do you know of Wad en Nejumi? How should such men be treated
by the English in Egypt?
[1] It should be remembered that the early Church 'for three hundred
years had all the Governments of the world and all the Courts of
Justice against her.' Yet these were the days of the Church's
greatest vigour!
[2] An Arabic proverb is common throughout Persia which sadly
epitomizes the influence of Mecca. It is as follows: 'If your friend
has been to Mecca, trust him not. If he has been there twice, avoid
him. If he has made the pilgrimage three times, then flee from him
as you would from Satan himself.'
[3] The reader is recommended to keep the map (on pp. 200-1) open
while reading this chapter.
[4] Kashmir and the North-West Frontier Province are Moslem almost to
a man; the hardy races of the Punjab are predominantly Moslem; the
whole of that huge stretch called the United Provinces, with its old
Mohammedan citadels and mosques, is still the intellectual centre of
Indian Mohammedanism. Calcutta, and the dense network of villages of
Bengal, contain twenty-five million professed Moslems. In Bombay
one-fifth of the people are Mohammedans. During recent years
Mohammedanism has still been spreading in India.
[5] Speaking at the Lagos Church Synod in 1906, the Rev. A. W. Smith
said, 'Mohammedanism was introduced into the Ijebu country [a huge
and densely populated district near Lagos] in 1893, and to-day half
its population is professedly Mohammedan.'
[6] Sir Reginald Wingate, _Mahdiism and the Egyptian Soudan_, pp.
239, 431, 432.
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