Thanks to fanatical groups like ISIS (or ISIL), much of the Middle East has become a free-fire zone, the Mosque Militant is in the ascendant, and Christians and Jews living there have good reason to look anxiously over their shoulders.

While the level of violence generated by Islamic philosophy has ebbed and flowed over the past thirteen centuries, it was during a relative lull that the following article appeared; members of the Christian churches viewed the adherents to Mohammedanism as ripe fruits in the missions field ready to be plucked. Had they succeeded, the history of the past century would no doubt have unfolded in a radically different and less bloody fashion.

We have excerpted parts of the article, and urge you to go the full story linked here:

OUTLOOK FOR THE MOHAMMEDAN WORLD

IT has often been asserted that Islam is the proper religion for the desert sections of Asia Minor, especially for Arabia. The Rev. Samuel M. Zwemer, a missionary of the American Dutch Reformed Church, writing in The Missionary Review (October) upon “The Mohammedan World of To-day,” quotes the words of a Bedouin on the unadaptability of this form of religion for a country like Arabia. Says the Bedouin: “Mohammed’s religion can never have been intended for us; it demands ablution, but we have no water; fasting, but we always fast; almsgiving, but we have no money; pilgrimage, but Allah is everywhere.”

Mr. Zwemer can see no hope for the civilization of any of the countries where Islam flourishes:

“Islam has had fair trial in other than desert lands. For five hundred years it has been supreme in Turkey, the fairest and richest portion of the Old World. And what is the result? The Mohammedan population has decreased; the treasury is bankrupt; progress is blocked; ‘instead of wealth, universal poverty; instead of comeliness, rags; instead of commerce, beggary—a failure greater and more absolute than history can elsewhere present’.” . . .

. . . “Moreover, if it be true, as it probably is to some extent, that Mohammedanism has helped forward the Hausas in the path of civilization, the assistance rendered here, as in every other country subject to Mohammedan rule, is by no means an unmixed good. Mohammedan progress is progress up an impasse; it enables converts to advance a certain distance, only to check their further progress by an impassable wall of blind prejudice and ignorance. We can not have a better proof of this statement than the progress, or rather, want of progress, in Arabia, the home of Mohammedanism, during the last thousand years. [Gifford] Palgrave, who spent the greater part of his life among Mohammedans, and who was so far in sympathy with them that on more than one occasion he conducted services for them in their mosques, speaking of Arabia, says: ‘When the Koran and Mecca shall have disappeared from Arabia, then, and then only, can we expect to see the Arab assume that place in the ranks of civilization from which Mohammed and his book have, more than any other cause, long held him back’.” . . .

. . . “There was a thousandfold more enthusiasm in the dark ages to wrest an empty sepulcher from the Saracens than there is in our day to bring them the knowledge of a living Savior. There is no Peter the Hermit, and no one girds for a new crusade. We are playing at missions as far as Mohammedanism is concerned. For there are more mosques in Jerusalem than there are missionaries in all Arabia; and more millions of Moslems in China than the number of missionary societies that work for Moslems in the whole world! Where Christ was born Mohammed’s name is called from minarets five times daily, but where Mohammed was born no Christian dares to enter.

“America entertains perverts to Islam at a parliament of religions, while throughout vast regions of the Mohammedan world millions of Moslems have never so much as heard of the incarnation and the atonement of the Son of God, the Savior of the world. The Holy Land is still in unholy hands, and all Christendom stood gazing while the sword of the Crescent was uplifted in Armenia and Crete, until the uttermost confines of the Moslem world rejoiced at her apathy and impotence.”

We’ve touched on Mohammed’s religion in a previous article here.