Love and Learning Toward Muslim Neighbors

In the long history of Christian mission, some men are remembered for the crowds they gathered and the converts they counted. Samuel Zwemer is remembered for something rarer. He gave his whole life to a people who, for the most part, never answered. Born in 1867, he set out for the Arabian Peninsula, the very heartland of Islam, and stayed turned toward Muslim neighbours for more than half a century. They called him the Apostle to Islam. It is a grand title, and a heavy one, because Zwemer's labour was not measured in numbers. It was measured in love that refused to give up.

He did not approach Islam from a distance. He learned. He bent over Arabic grammar until the script became familiar. He studied the texts, the history, the geography, the customs, the prayers of the people he had come to serve. He travelled the harsh interior of Arabia, into places where Christians were strangers and the gospel was unwelcome. He visited homes. He sat with men in the heat and spoke of Christ, plainly and respectfully, and then he listened. And here is the hard part, the part that tests every missionary's heart. The response was small. For years and years, the visible fruit was thin. A man might preach his whole life in Arabia and baptise almost no one.

Imagine what that asks of a person. To rise each morning in a foreign land, far from the comforts of home, and pour out study and prayer and patience into ground that seems to give nothing back. Zwemer knew loss in the deepest way too. He buried two of his young daughters in the mission field, two little girls gone within days of each other in the heat of Bahrain. He marked their graves with words that spoke of treasure laid up where moth and rust do not corrupt. He stayed. He kept learning. He kept loving the people many other Christians simply feared or ignored.

And because he could not count converts, he counted faithfulness differently. He wrote books. He founded and edited a journal called The Moslem World, so that the church might think clearly and truthfully about Muslim peoples rather than in caricature. He taught a rising generation of missionaries, urging them to study before they spoke, to honour before they argued, to see image-bearers and not enemies. He believed that you cannot truly love a neighbour you refuse to understand. So he made understanding his life's work.

He was a man of his own age, and some of his words carried the assumptions of an era of empire that later Christians would learn to lay down. He was not flawless. No labourer is. But strip away the era's failings and what remains is striking. A man who chose the slow road. A man who measured obedience not by the harvest he could see, but by the love he could give. He did not need contempt to feel sure of his faith. He needed only Christ, spoken clearly, and a heart turned toward people the church had largely forgotten.

When Samuel Zwemer died in 1952, he left behind no great movement of mass conversion in Arabia. What he left was something quieter and more enduring. He left a way of bearing witness that joined deep learning to deep love. He left books and students and a journal that taught the church to take Muslim neighbours seriously as people, not projects. He left the example of a man who sowed for decades and trusted God with the increase. The title men gave him, Apostle to Islam, is less a boast than a question still hanging over the church. Are we willing to love our neighbours enough to learn, to listen, to stay, and to speak the truth in love through all the long years when nothing seems to answer?