Chapter X: 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.

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?

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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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