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TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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MOHAMMEDANISM AND CHRISTIANITY

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    I once met a sweet missionary woman returning from Africa with her little child, who had fallen sick of fever, to America for medical treatment. She described the great advance of Mohammedanism in Africa and the seemingly hopeless task of the Christian missionaries there. She made a sort of map of mission stations and explained: "We are trying to put a barrier across Africa to prevent Mohammedanism spreading to the South, beyond the equator," "From what you say to me," I observed, "you can not do it." "We can’t," she said, "but God can." This seems unanswerable and must appeal strongly to the religious devotee, but there is an answer and it is this: "God can, of course He can; but He doesn’t, and probably He will not." It seems probable that the great gift of Christianity has been so abused and shamed by the so-called Christian nations that God is weary of them, and considers it presumptuous for them to send out missionaries to convert people of another faith. It has been abundantly shown to all reasonable human beings, who are not religious zealots, that money expended in the attempt to convert Moslems is money thrown away. Even the missionaries themselves in Turkey seem to have given it up.

    The same story is heard everywhere. In "The Crescent in Northwest China", by G. Findlay Andrew, a missionary, the author says: "Islam has often been referred to as the challenge to Christian missions. During the past few years a few Hwei-Hwei (Chinese Moslems) have been reached with the Gospel and, after a profession of faith, have been accepted as church members or as inquirers. The number has, however, been very small, and of those who have ‘kept the faith’ only about one remains in church fellowship at the time of writing." And yet the good missionary sums this gloomy report up with the remark: "Great as the problem is, yet the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent in Kansu is assured." It is difficult to follow the process of reasoning which derives this conclusion from these premises.

    The attention of the reader has already been called to the fact that the Turks are the lowest of the Moslem races and it would not be fair to Mohammedans in general to say that they approve of butchery and rape as carried out by that people, so well characterized by Gladstone and many historians. In fact the Turks are not the greatest danger to the Christian church. They have accomplished their fell task, and their influence as a proselytizing power will not spread beyond their own dominions unless they wage another successful war.

    A few quotations from that penetrating book, "The New World of Islam", by Lothrop Stoddard, will suffice to show how Islamism is ousting Christianity in those places where it meets it face to face. The strongest and best organized proselytizing order among the Moslems are the Senussiya, well described by Mr. Stoddard:

    "The beginning of systematic, self-conscious pan-Islamism dates from about the middle of the nineteenth century. The Sennussi are careful to avoid a downright breach with European Powers. Their long-headed, cautious policy is truly astonishing. For more than half a century the order has been a great force, yet it has never risked the supreme adventure. In many of the fanatic risings, which have occurred in various parts of Africa, local Sennussi have undoubtedly taken part, and the same was true during the Italian campaign in Tripoli and the late war, but the order itself has never officially entered the lists. The Sennussi program is the welding, first, of Moslem Africa, and, later of the whole Moslem world into the revived "Imamat," of Islam’s early days; into a great theocracy embracing all true believers—in other words, pan-Islamism. But they believe that the political liberation of Islam from Christian domination must be preceded by a profound spiritual regeneration. Year after year and decade after decade the Sennussi advance slowly, calmly, coldly. They are covering North Africa with their lodges and schools; and to the southward converting millions of pagan Negroes to the faith of Islam. Every candid European observer tells the same story. As an Englishman remarked some twenty years ago: ‘Mohammedanism is making remarkable progress in the interior of Africa. It is crushing Paganism out. Against it the Christian propaganda is a myth.’ And a French protestant missionary remarks in the same vein: ‘We see Islam on its march, sometimes slowed down, but never stopped, toward the heart of Africa. It fears nothing. Even Christianity, its most serious rival, it views without hate. While Christians dream of the conquest of Africa, Mohammedans do it.’ These gains are being made at the expense of African Christianity as well. The European missions lose many of their converts to Islam, while across the continent, the ancient Abyssinian Church, so long an outpost against Islam, seems in danger of submersion by the rising Moslem tide. There is to-day in the Moslem world a wide spread conviction that Islam is entering on a period of Renaissance and renewed glory."

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