Page:The young Moslem looks at life (1937).djvu/149

 YOUNG MOSLEM AND CHRISTIANITY 135

people who regard themselves as Christians gives the Moslems ample room for believing that drinking is one of the abominable things permitted by Christianity, like the use of pork.

10. Western Christians are guilty of race prejudice. Moslems criticize them severely for this. What better describes the Moslem point of view than the following:

Islam preaches brotherhood and lives it. Christians preach brotherhood but do not live it. The Moslem missionary goes to a pagan tribe. He marries four wives from the tribe. He has sons and daughters, and he marries his sons to their daughters, and his daughters to their sons. He is one of them. The Christian missionary comes, but does he marry even one wife from their tribe? No! he brings a white wife from his own land, he sends his sons to find white wives in that homeland, and his daughters he would sooner shoot dead than marry to the young men of the tribe. 1

But is that all there is to it? If so, then the Moslem is right.

11. Christianity is but an agency of the forces of Western imperialism. There are two reasons for this criticism: One is that the Moslem can never blot the history of the Crusades from his memory. The other is that so often he has seen Moslem power give way before a superior force from the West. He has seen that happen in Egypt and the Sudan, North Africa, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and India. Following the ar 1 "The Moslem Point of View," by "Orientalist," in The Moslem World, January, 1936, p. 41.