Page 242 - Neglected Arabia 1902-1905

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THE NEED FOR WOMEN WORKERS AMONG
THE WOMEN OF ARABIA

The need for women workers among the women of any othcH
mission land has long since ceased to be questioned. The edu­
:：V- cated Christian women of heathen India, China, and Japan show
the pow.er of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the One >vho honored
womanhood, to transform the lives of the lowest heathen women
The result accomplished has, however, cost years of untiring_
consecrated labor and many precious lives and wo do not antici­
pate any less cost in our own field.
The Mohammedan religion has done as much as any other
to degrade womanhood. To be sure, female infanticide formerly
practised by the heathen Arabs was abolished by Islam, but that
death \vas not so terrible as the livjng deatli of thousands of the
Arab women who have lived since the reign of the “ merciful ’’
prophet, nor was its effect upon society in general so denioral-
izing. In the “ time of ignorance/1 that is time before Moham­
med, women often occuped positions of honor. There were
celebrated poetesses, and we read of Arab queens ruling their
tribes.
Such a state of things does not exist to-day but the woman’s
influence, though never recognized by the men, is nevertheless
indirectly a potent factor but never of a broadening or upliflin^
type. To have been long regarded as naturally evil has had a
degrading influence. Mohammedan .classical writers have done
their best to revile womanhood, “ May Allah never b^ess woman-
kind ** is a quotation from one of them.
“ Moslem literature, it is true, exhibits isolated glimpses of a
•w •J:. worthier estimation of womanhood but the later view, which
comes more and more into prevalence, is the only one which finds
its expression in the sacred traditions, which represents hell as
full of women, and refuses to acknowledge in its women, apart
from rare exceptions, either reason or religion, in poems which
refer all the evil in the world to the woman as its root, in prov-