Page 35 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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Kuv/aiti position, had suffered much heavier casualties,

leaving 800 dead on the field of battle to the Kuv/aiti*s

63. The fate of the wounded v/as similar, for of the estimated

800 wounded Wahhabis many died after the battle due to infec­

tion and exhaustion, while of the 120 v/ounded Kuwaitis under

Dr. Mylrea’s care only 4 were lost."^ Shaikh Salim and many

of,the religious elders of the town, who had previously been

most strongly opposed to the Mission, we re completely v/on

over. Mylrea refers to the Battle of Jahra in his memoirs

as a major turning point in the mission’s fortunes in Kuwait.

Thus in the 1920’s and 1930’s the Arabian Mission had

prospered. The Mission had established several new outstations

in ’Iraq and made numerous tours to the interior of Arabia
and along the coast. In 1934, Dr. Louis P. Dame reported to

the Mission Board in New York that Ibn Sa’ud was now request-

ing annual tours of the Sa'udi Arabian interior. 54 The Mis-

sion’s five schools were also prospering, and by 1933 had

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enrolled over six hundred regular students. ^ The son of the

Shaikh of Muhammarah had graduated from the Basrah school in

1932, and there were so many applicants that fifty new

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students had to be turned away, Over two thousand students

had graduated from the School of High Hope in its first

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twenty years of operation.

Most of all, the medical work v/as prospering. In its

annual summary for 1932 the Mission v/as able to report that

1,400 operations had been performed in its eight hospitals

and over 153,000 patients treated. Having reached such large