The Reformed 'Apostle to Islam'

For the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, CRC News has prepared aseries of stories about how the Christian Reformed Church and its members have responded – and what we have learned – in the last 10 years.

Photo courtesy of Samuel Zwemer
Theological Seminary

One of the pioneering missionaries in working with Muslims was a pastor with deep Reformed roots.

Called the "Apostle to Islam," Samuel Zwemer was a member of the Reformed Church in America and was among the early Christian missionaries to make a solid connection to the Muslim world. He did this early in the 20th century.

Especially after terrorist attacks ofSept. 11, 2001, Christians in universities and seminaries and in churches turned to Zwemer and his many books for some answers.

Roger Greenway, a seminary professor and former director of Christian Reformed World Missions, says that Zwemer exemplified the best in what the Christian church had to offer in terms of outreach to Muslims.

Zwemer knew the language of the Qur'an and he was familiar with much of the classic literature of the Islamic faith. Even a century after his first real foray into the Muslim world, Zwemer’s "analysis and thorough knowledge of Islam remains unsurpassed," said Greenway.

Although he made it his life’s work to try to turn the faith of those who embraced Islam to Christianity, he did so with a great deal of empathy and love for the people. As a result, says Greenway, Zwemer “made a tremendous impact on our understanding of the Middle East and of Muslims in particular.”

A man of enormous energy and extraordinary faith, Zwemer left Holland, Mich., where he went to college, in the late 19th century and soon made his first of many forays into the Middle East.

There were restrictions and much reluctance on the part of members of Islam to respond favorably to the Christian message or, for that matter, the Christian messenger.

Despites the difficulties, Zwemer was able to make contact deep in the Muslim world. He had an adventurous and captivating spirit that is evident in his many books and letters.

In these, he describes in telling detail his travels and the challenges he faced as he familiarized himself with a part of the world that had, for many North Americans, been hidden behind a veil of secrecy.

Zwemer describes in his letters the journeys he made up and down rivers, across deserts, up mountains and into communities that may have never seen an American before. He dealt with snakes and venomous spiders, angry water buffalo and sometimes even angrier tribespeople.

Zwemer also observed first-hand religious ceremonies in which people sliced themselves with knives and danced into frenzied ecstasies.

Wherever he went he was very courteous. He saw himself as a visitor into ancient cultures and did not intrude on Islamic rituals and religious ceremonies.

He did, however, speak about his faith. One time he did this for days with an Arab fisherman who sat in the back of a river boat headed for Baghdad.

He handed out tracts in dusty marketplaces. He met with the leaders of tribes and people across Arabia. He was occasionally threatened, but never really injured.

Although he was a lifelong member of the Reformed Church in America, Zwemer worked closely with Anglicans, Lutherans, Coptics, Presbyterians and others who also had an interest in trying to bring the message of salvation to those who followed Islam.

In one of his books, titled simply Islam, Zwemer writes that the Christian church was finally "awakening to the fact that one of the great unsolved missionary problems of the 20th Century is the evangelization of the Mohammedan world."

He tried in the book to rally other missionaries to consider devoting their careers to reaching members of Islam, a faith that, said Zwemer, is full of beauty and wisdom and yet is also a religion riddled with heresy.

He said the modern world, with travel options opening up, needed to address the issue of Islam having taken over vast parts of the world. Islam was a religion that Christianity needed to engage, and to engage with patience and love, on the way to bringing the message of salvation in Jesus.