Page 15 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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receptivity to the medical work and non-religious teaching.

While no converts were coming forth and Bible sales were mini­

mal, yet patients flocked to Dr. Riggs dispensary and many

Arabs expressed a real desire to learn English and hear more

about technological advances in the West. Encouraged by the

example of the Church Missionary Society, which had opened a

station in Baghdad in 1883 and soon gained acceptance through

its hospital and boy’s schools in Baghdad and Mosul,^ Zwemer

decided to shift the emphasis in Basrah from evangelism to
12
medical and educational missionary work. "Of the power and

success of this method in disarming prejudice and awakening

sympathy in Moslem lands,” he wrote, "the CMS dispensary,
v
conducted by Dr. H.M. Sutton at Baghdad is wonderful proof ,
In the following year, 1892, Zwemer traveled to Bahrain,

a small trading island in the Gulf several hundred miles to

the south of Basrah. Here Zwemer remained for three weeks

and was pleasantly surprised to encounter little difficulty

in obtaining a residency permit. Once again, although he was

able to sell forty-four scriptures, Zwemer found himself much

more readily accepted as a medical, missionary than in any

^
•
other guise. 14
"In the whole island, with some 50,000 people, there
is no doctor and native quackery is cruel in the extreme.
In a place where dentistry is practiced by the use of
wedges, hammers, and tongs and where they fill a hollow
tooth with melted lead to ease pain, I have won a score
fi 15
of friends by less painful methods.

Although Zwemer's visit to Bahrain in 1892 was a highly

successful one in many ways and reassured him somewhat after