Page 63 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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personal feelings of trust and respect for the individual mis­

sionaries he had met and admiration of their perseverance and

bravery, from the faithful follower of one evangelical re­

ligion to the faithful followers of another.

If the missionaries had won Arab respect, trust and

admiration, they still, however, had not secured any large
:
‘A
amount of conversion, nor had they forsaken their evangelical

goals. Zwemer had included in the July-September quarterly

report of 1922 an account of 45,000 Muslims and 555,000 hea­

thens on the island of Java being converted to Christianity.

Whether he had done this to encourage the Arabian Mission or

to goad it is unclear, but such large scale conversions were

obviously never to be part of the history of the missions in
|
the Gulf. At the Tambaram International Missionary Council

held at Madras from December 12th to 29th, 1938, Dr. Paul

Xi
m W. Harrison stood up before' the world missionary community
to report the evangelistic record of the Arabian Mission:

five converts in fifty years. 117 Despite the thunderous

applause that greeted his courageous statement and the con­

ference resolution "that the Christian Church has a special

. obligation not to leave the Muslim world without the witness
of the Gospel, despite all difficulties, meagreness of re-

suits and narrowing of opportunities, n1l8 the meaning was

clear for all to see. Despite the courageous and persistent

efforts of three generations of missionaries, in an evangel­

istic sense at least, Islam had successfully resisted Chris­

tianity as a spiritual force.