Page 96 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

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and clinics within the most traditional of Islamic societies.

Forward-looking Muslim leaders like king Abdul Aziz Ihn Sa'ud

of Saudi Arabia or Shailch Mubarak the Great of Kuwait felt

that they could thus avail themselves of the benefits of Wes­

tern civilization without seriously disrupting their traditional

Islamic way of life. The missionaries, for their part, hoped

through their hospitals, schools and bookshops and their

daily contact with the Muslim peoples of the Gulf eventually

to win converts to Christianity.

In the end, both were mistaken. Arab acceptance of Western

medicine and science inevitably seemed to imply a weakness in

Islam, which viewed itself not as a religion separable from

the everyday secular world but as an all-encompassing and all-

explaining way of life. Thus the turning towards the West for

scientific advancement and medical knowledge exposed Islam to

radical challenges and questionings. Eut the dissolution of
traditional Islamic society did not spell a victory for Christ­

ianity either, but rather signaled a vistory of secularism and

materialism over both Christianity and Islam. While the mission­

aries had been working in the Gulf, Western society at home

had undergone a similar transformation, replacing its former

value systems and beliefs with a veritable worship of science

and technology. And so in its central goal of evangelizing

Arabia the Arabian Mission must be deemed a failure. By 1973,

after eighty-four years of operation it could only claim some

fifty-four converts (two in Kuwait, twelve in Bahrain, and

some forty in Muscat - largely from Peter Zwemer’s Freed