Page 16 - 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
El
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,1'1' Zwemer

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

success of this method in disarming prejudice and awakening

sympathjr in Moslem lands," he wrote, "the CMS dispensary,

>•
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
A
and was pleasantly surprised to encounter little difficulty
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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
f, 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