No vicarious efforts by propaganda will ever take the place of personal
precept and example. In hunting proselytes among the followers of Islam
it is not advisable to rely too much on the Scriptures, as Moslems doubt
the authenticity of our version and point to our own divergent copies in
proof thereof. Nor is it any use asking them to believe as an act of
faith; if they did they would need no proselytising: an appeal must be
made to their reason, and there is no better appeal than the life,
works, and conduct of one who professes and practises Christianity. Even
if he makes no single convert he has leavened the population around him
with the dignity and prestige of his creed which has produced such a
type. Unfortunately such results cannot be scheduled in mission reports,
though they are real enough and well worth living for, whether a man be
a missionary or not; only they cannot be produced by brilliant
wide-sweeping feats of organisation and enterprise, but by persevering,
consistent lives, which are not easy or spectacular.
Egypt should be a great field of religious warfare by personal
influence, as Christians and Moslems live side by side in daily contact
and reasonable accord, yet few of us take advantage of the fact to
uphold the prestige of our creed or even of our race. We Europeans are
busy with our multifarious interests and duties, while Egyptian Moslems
are either entangled in the web of their environment, as are the
_fellahin_, or eager snatchers at the gifts of civilisation, as are the
more or less cultured effendis, or mere hair-splitters in futile
religious controversy, as are too many of the _ulema_ or sages at the
great collegiate mosque of al-Azhar. In each case, spiritual matters
are apt to get crowded out. The fault lies chiefly with our cosmopolitan
ingredients, which engender feverish living, if not actual vice, and the
over-strained effort on the one side to impart and on the other side to
assimilate a Western system of education which has induced intellectual
dyspepsia. So we hear of students mugging parrot-like to pass
half-yearly examinations, in the hopes of getting Government
appointments for which there are far too many applicants; these young
men besiege the Press with complaints of unfair treatment if they fail,
or even go to the length of attempting suicide with carbolic acid
(fortunately with sufficient caution to ensure it usually being but an
attempt); this latter petulant protest at the temporary thwarting of
their material hopes is dead against all the teaching and tradition of
Islam, but it has become so frequent that a leading educational
authority suggests that no student who attempts suicide shall be allowed
to sit again for a Government examination. Among their seniors up at
al-Azhar are men of real learning and remarkably persevering scholarship
(their theological course makes the average brain reel to contemplate),
but some sheikh started a controversy as to whether Adam was a prophet
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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