Read and Download Our Moslem (Muslim) Sisters HERE
Read and Download Our Moslem (Muslim) Sisters HERE
The Muslim World (TMW) is one of the leading academic journals covering Islam worldwide. Strange it would call its own history “bigoted”.
It was founded in 1911 by Samuel Zwemer, a founding father of Protestant missions in engagement with the oft-rival monotheistic faith. Now published by Hartford Seminary, like much of the Protestant mainline its original evangelistic fervor has faded. Still I was startled to read the concluding sentence of an informative historical biography TMW published in commemoration of their 100th edition:
“A century later, TMW has successfully broken ranks with religious provincialism and bigotry, and lives up to the present motto of the Seminary “exploring differences and deepening faith.””¹
Is this a fair account of all but TMW’s most recent scholarship…
I was 18 years old when the Lord placed a burden on my heart to bring the gospel to Muslims. A year later, I married my high school sweetheart, who had led me to Christ during my senior year. Two years later, we and three teammates set off to plant a church in a 100% Muslim country.
Needless to say, we were young, ambitious and a little naïve. We were also unprepared, but our youthful zeal carried us onward. Despite our intentions to be like the Apostle Paul and “preach Christ where He was not known,” we found ourselves back home, after only two years, with our faith barely intact. Looking back, I can now see that we had bitten off far more than we could chew. We approached our training for Muslim ministry more like a sprint rather than a marathon. We made incredible friendships with Muslims yet we had little to offer them, regarding a relationship with Jesus. We knew very little about Christianity and almost nothing about Islam. Simply put, we were ill-equipped for the task we were sent out to do. If not for the grace of God…
Despite winning only a handful of converts, Samuel Zwemer was the greatest missionary the United States has ever sent to the Muslim world. Of him, the historian Kenneth Latourette said, “No one is more deserving of the title, ‘Apostle to Islam.’” He was a gifted evangelist, a prolific author, a compelling speaker, and a dedicated professor—never deviating from this message: Muslims need Jesus, and Christians need to reach them.
Courses and books on Muslim Women are often seen as peripheral materials. This is odd when you consider that women make up at least half the Muslim world, amounting to one billion people. Because the Muslim world is largely gendered, the world Muslim women inhabit is largely invisible to many of the men running courses and writing books around the world. I don’t mean that women are not visible and active in public places, along with men—they are in most Muslim countries today. But the rules that guide their interaction, behavior, the topics they discuss, and the themes that shape both their religious and personal experience are different from those of Muslim men. They are two different communities occupying the same space.