Page 37 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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numbers of Arabs and been so successful in combating epidemics

the Mission was now beginning to have an effect on popular

attitudes towards sanitation and modern medicine. The British

political resident in Bahrain wrote to the Foreign Office in

1929 about the Mission’s success in this respect:

’’During the past years they have made great strides
in obstetrical cases. Most of the younger generation of
the ruling family employ them and this has set the fashion
totthe merchant classes.” 58

Zahra Freeth, writing about her childhood in Kuwait, told
r-
similar stories of the tremendous impact the missionaries

had made on the Kuwaitis in getting them to accept immuni-

59
zations and modern medical treatment.

What had perhaps started as the qualified patronage of

the medical missions by a few, powerful and forward-looking

Arabrulers in the early years, Shaikh Khasal, Sayyid Rejib

al-Ragib, Shaikh Mubarak, King Abdul Aziz and others, had
(ffa
now come to be popularly accepted. But why had the Muslims

been so ready to accept the Mission’s teachings and medical

treatments? Although Abdul Aziz had encouraged the missionary

doctors to return frequently to Riyadh, he still forbade their

proselyt_lzation or the establishment of a permanent mission

in Sa’udi Arabia. Eleanor Calverly, a pioneering woman doctor

in Kuwait, trying to explain to the home church why she had

been so readily accepted as a medical missionary offered one
plausible explanation:

”To the Moslem, the lady physician is, first of all,
a Christian, and, like other infidels, is undoubtedly des­
tined for the ’fire.’ On the other hand, she is a believer
in the prophet Jesus, who, according to the Koran, was