THE CLAIMS OF THE MOSLEM WORLD* BY ROBERT E. SPEE R. NEW YORK evangelizing the Moslem world? In the first place, we are under a peculiar debt to the Mohammedan peoples because their religion is the only one of the great religions of the world which came after Christianity, and which repudiated Christianity. There are great areas of the world which once were Christian but now are Mohammedan. There are peoples which once were Christian but now are Mohammedan. There are church buildings which once were Christian which Christians may not enter to- day. It was a right instinct that lay at the basis of the Crusades, altho the method was wrong ; an instinct in # Frora an address at a parlor meeting under the auspices of the New York Committee of the Nile Mission Press, December 7, 1911. Mrs. E. E. Olcott, Treasurer, 38 West Thirty-ninth Street, New York City. Reprinted from The Missionary Review or the World, March, 1912. HAT are some of the considerations on the basis of which we f make our appeal to the Christian Church to take a new interest in Christendom which filled it with a sense of horror and of shame that great areas which had belonged to Christ had been handed over to Islam. We need to recover these areas in our day. In Mohammedism we are deal- ing with a religion which has reck- oned with our religion, or thinks that it has, which has rejected it and usurped its inheritance, and we are called to go out to reclaim that which once belonged to our Lord. The Moslem Barrier In the second place, we must deal with Mohammedanism because it has interposed itself as a barrier between two great sections of the world which ought to have found their nearest ap- proach across the territory which Mo- hammedanism usurped. Dr. Nitobe, at Columbia University, made allusion to this fact, pointing out that there was no original chasm between the East and West — when the Persians poured over into Europe and when the Europeans poured back into Per- sia ; when ideas flowed to and fro from the East and West. There were great currents of human movements between them until that wall of Mo- hammedanism arose in the seventh century and the natural roads of in- tercourse were closed. It is high time that we removed that barrier which has intervened between the East and the West. It is true that commerce passes more easily over the water than over the land ; but religion moves from community to community, and Christianity should have gone, and no doubt would have gone, hundreds of years ago eastward overland into Asia if it had not been for the great area which Mohammedanism made an interracial barrier. The argument has been often ad- vanced that Mohammedanism was not an absolutely dead wall, but was a real channel of communication ; that there was a great intellectual light shining in Islam. Any one who has taken the trouble to study the ques- tion, even second-hand, as most of us have only been able to do, must ac- cept the judgment set forth in Sell’s “Faith of Islam,” in which he holds that all the science was Grecian in its foundations; that not one great phil- osopher who arose was an Arab; that the men who wrote the greatest treatises in Arabic were without ex- ception Spaniards or Persians; that Islam never produced a great book on science or philosophy whose transla- tion has been demanded ; that it never conquered a people with a literature; that it never was a channel of com- munication between the East and the West. It was an intellectual non-con- ductor, a massive racial and religious barrier. Moslem Women and Children In the third place, we are called to work for the Mohammedan world to- day, and this ought to appeal to every true instinct in us — because that re- ligion has borne down most heavily upon the weakest and most defense- less classes — upon the women and the children. It is the religion that has done most basely for womankind by its doctrine of polygamy and divorce. A great part of the degrada- tion of womanhood in India is due to Mohammedanism and Buddhism, not to Hinduism at all. The Mohammedan conception of women has degraded woman as she has been degraded by no other religion of the world, and the Mohammedan doctrine of divorce has, of course, poisoned the life of childhood throughout the Moham- medan world, making it impossible for children to grow up in the atmos- phere of purity. The great majority of humanity is made up of women and children, and upon these Islam has borne down with heaviest depression. The Power in Iilam In the fourth place, we are called upon to toil for these Mohammedan peoples because, nevertheless, we have in them a great mass of powerful en- ergy and virility with which to work, that we may take their energy and power and commit it to the Kingdom of God. I do not refer to moral and intellectual virility. Dr. Cochran, who was born in Persia and spent all his life there as a medical missionary, whose profession brought him into the most intimate relations with all classes of men in Persia, told me that deeply as he regretted to say it, he had to acknowledge that he had almost never met a morally pure Moslem in all northwest Persia. In India the moral tone of Mohammedanism is lower than that of Hinduism. The Mohammedans have never been an intellectual race. They have no idea of history, they study no literature and their ideas are those of twelve hundred years ago. There has been no quickening, intellectual life among them. But, strange as it may seem, there is no nonchristian race of more masculine vitality and power. No one who has traveled through Asia has failed to be imprest by this whenever he has passed through the Moham- medan races. We are called to take possession of this virility for Christ, who needs all that latent power that is waiting to be used in the work of the Kingdom of God in the world. The Hopelessness of Islam In the fifth place, we are called to take a deeper interest in this work for Mohammedans because of the ut- ter hopelessness of these peoples un- der the influence of Islam. There can be no dispute that wherever Moham- medanism has gone it has either found a desert or made one. The greatest waste areas of the world fall within the borders of Islam. Take one after another of the countries that Moham- medanism has dominated; they were prominent and industrious, but the in- fluence of Islam has simply destroyed industry, civilization, thrift, comfort, plenty and left them in devastation and ruin. We asked men in Persia again and again, fourteen or fifteen years ago, how they accounted for it that the fruits of Islam were so dis- mal in Moslem lands, while the Chris- tian lands contained all the progress and life of the world. Some of them said: “If you look back you will see that between 1,000 and 1,500 years after the beginning of each religion comes the dark age. Christianity has had its dark age, and now Moham- medanism has its, and our reformation will come just as yours came.” Others of them would sadly abandon all such hopes and admit that Christians had the better of it in this world, but that Mohammedans were to have their share in the other ; that Christians would pay then for their advantages here, while Mohammedans would en- ter into the paradise which had been reserved for the faithful. The fact is that those nations are held in a death grip by Islam, and there is no progress for them save as they shake off the evil which Islam has wrought by the perpetuation of the crude social and political ideas of Arabia in the seventh century by placing those ideas in an unalterable book, a book to be the law of man’s life forever. Kinship to Christianity We owe a great debt to the Mo- hammedan world because we dare not, feeling the thrill of the life that is guiding us, leave these nations to their death and hopelessness and de- cay, from which they can never es- cape save as they escape from their faith, and accept instead of its death, the life of Christ. We owe a special debt to this Mo- hammedan world because it is so akin in its religious faith, in some respects, and in others so alien to our Christian inheritance. We have so much in com- mon on the one hand — our clean, strong monotheistic faith. They, too, have an uncompromising faith in one God. They hold with us that Jesus Christ was the only sinless prophet. We have that great point in common with them. They admit that alone of all their prophets, Mohammed not ex- cepted, Christ was the sinless one. They admit our Christian scriptures as sacred books, but they believe that what we call Christian scriptures are corrupted. Historic criticism fights on our side in this matter. All this antagonism to the Christian scrip- tures on that ground must die away. We have these great points in com- mon. On the other hand, think how deep the divergences are. They have no perfect moral code. The Koran can not endure the light of day as a book of ethical principles and ideals. In the second place, in spite of their faith Mohammed is not an ideal ; he did not claim to be their ethical ideal ; he nev- er said of himself what our Lord said of Himself: “Which of you convinces me of sin?” They have no pure, moral code embodied in a person and they have no living, abiding Power by which that moral code is to be in- corporated in the lives of weak and sinful men. We are called to share with them the faith that has done for us every- thing and that can do everything also for them. We owe a great debt to this Mo- hammedan world because of the tre- mendous changes that are shaking it in our time. The unity of Moham- medanism has often been held up to us as a reproach, but Mohammed held that Mohammedanism was to be su- perior in the matter of disunion, also to all other religions. As a matter of fact, however, we never have been divided in Christianity as Moham- medanism is divided to-day. Persia is full of sects and it is often stated that there is not an orthodox Moham- medan in the land. Mohammedanism is one of the most perilous and fragile of religions when at last dissolving forces and influences are brought to bear on it. A religion of ideas can stand a great deal, whereas a statu- tory religion such as Mohammedan- ism can not admit any light and can only anticipate collapse when new ideas beat upon it and new influences divide and undermine it. It is with- out any power of adaptation. The Mohammedan world is con- fronting the approach of a fearful re- ligious collapse. It will be a terrible thing if that collapse comes without sufficient preparation therefor on the part of the Christian Church, with a message to lay hold of the Moslem mind when the old institutions finally break down beyond all possibility of recovery. Christianity — False and True Most of all, we owe a great debt to Mohammedanism because my state- ment made at the beginning was not entirely true. I said we were under a special obligation to a religion which had in its initial program re- pudiated Christianity. But what was the kind of Christianity that it repu- diated? It was a false kind. The re- ligion, with which Mohammed col- lided 1,200 years ago, was not a true religion and deserved to be over- thrown. It was not the Christian faith as we understand it, but a re- ligion which died away before the im- pact of Islam because Islam had some qualities superior to those which that religion had. What was the Christian faith that Mohammed repudiated 1,200 years ago? It was a travesty of the Christian religion. Because the Christian faith they denied was a Christian faith in name and not Christianity, we are bound by 1,200 years of obligation to give to the Mo- hammedan world a Christian faith that is real and true, and to offer Mo- hammedans the opportunity to undo their judgment of 1,200 years by ac- cepting the true light and the true faith in place of the false representa- tion of Christ which alone was offered in the name of Christianity twelve centuries ago. Wonderful Opportunities We stand before wonderful oppor- tunities to-day in northern Africa, where the animistic peoples are wait- ing for a faith that meets the needs of human souls and will take Islam, which is pressing in upon them, if we do not offer them the Christian faith ; in Egypt, in Turkey, shaken down to the foundations, in Persia and in oth- er lands where doors are now open and no barrier is interposed to ma- king Christ known. What shall we say to our Lord if we miss these opportunities and deliver over to Islam in the twentieth century more Christian territories or more lives that belong to Him, to whom we are to bring not those lives only but the 230,000,000 people, who by the very earnestness and devotion of their loy- alty to Mohammed and his faith have shown that they are the material out of which may be made the true and loyal followers of our Lord and Savior ?