Report of a Visitation of the Syria Mission of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions PDF Download

Author: Arthur J. Brown
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781331063148
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Excerpt from Report of a Visitation of the Syria Mission of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions: March 20 April 26, 1902 The Turkish Moslem is an orthodox Sunnite and the Sultan is his religious as well as I political ruler. It is not true, as some have asserted, that no Moslems have been converted, but every intelligent student of missions knows that unusual difficulties attend the effort to preach the Gospel to the followers of Islam. A girl's confession of Christ in one of our boarding schools caused a riot in, which physical violence was only averted by extraordinary tact and courage on the part of the missionaries. A converted Moslem must immediately leave the country, or he will be drafted into the army, sent to some distant place and never heard of again. In either case he is lost to the Protestant Church in Syria. Indeed, according to Moslem law a Christian who has never been a Mohammedan is only allowed to live in a Moslem land on the following conditions: "He shall not found churches, monasteries, or religious establishments, nor raise his house so high as, or higher than, the houses of the Moslems; not ride horses, but only mules and donkeys, and these even after the manner of women; draw back and give way to Moslems in the thoroughfares; wear clothes different from those of the Moslems, or some sign to distinguish him from them; have a distinctive mark when in the public baths, namely iron, tin or copper bands; abstain from drinking wine and eating pork; not celebrate religious feasts publicly; not sing or read aloud the text of the Old and New Testaments, and not ring bells; not speak scornfully of God or Mohammed; not seek to introduce innovations into the State nor to convert Moslems; not enter mosques without permission; not set foot upon the territory of Mecca, nor dwell in the Hadjas district." But when Mohammed II captured Constantinople in 1453, he found prosperous colonies of Genoese and Venetians, who had long enjoyed extra-territorial rights, and as he saw that his revenues would suffer if he banished so important a part of the population, he issued the famous Edict of Toleration, confirming "the existing system of extra-territoriality for the Genoese colony, and a modified form of it to the native Byzantines, whose empire he had just made his own. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.