Biography
Samuel Marinus Zwemer was born on April 12, 1867, in Vriesland, Michigan, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a Dutch Reformed family. His father, Adriaan Zwemer, was a minister of the Reformed Church in America, and his mother, Catherine, was a devout woman. The Zwemers were a family of faith, thrift and learning. Several of the children entered the ministry or the mission field. The household was a place of strict discipline and of warm piety, and the Bible and the Dutch Psalms were at the center of its life. As a boy, Samuel was a hard worker and a strong student. He went to Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, where he graduated in 1887, and then to the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, in New Jersey.
At the seminary, he was influenced by the Student Volunteer movement, and he was gripped by the need of the Muslim world, which was then almost without a Christian witness. Together with a fellow student, James Cantine, he proposed a mission to Arabia. The two men called it the Arabian Mission. The Reformed Church in America was unwilling to take it up at first, so they formed an independent body, which the church later adopted. In 1890, Zwemer sailed for the Middle East. He was twenty-three. He settled in Basra, in what is now Iraq, and then in Bahrain, an island in the Arabian Gulf. It was a place of fierce heat and fierce resistance. He lived in rough conditions, in a house of mud and stone.
He learned Arabic and began to work as a colporteur, selling and giving Bibles and portions of Scripture in the bazaars. He talked with Arabs in the coffee houses and in the markets, and he was patient with their questions. He traveled along the coast of Arabia, to Muscat, to Kuwait, to Yemen, and to the interior. He faced the hostility of the people and the unfriendliness of the climate. He often fell ill. The converts were few. In the early years, he saw almost no fruit. He said that the work of the first years was the work of a sower, not of a reaper. He wrote that he was prepared to wait.
In 1896, he married Amy Wilkes, an Australian-born English missionary, who had come to Arabia to work as a nurse. They had a happy marriage. They had six children. In July 1904, their two small daughters, Ruth, who was seven, and Katharina, who was four, died within eight days of each other, of dysentery, in Bahrain. It was a stunning blow. They buried the children in the sand of the island. On the gravestones, they placed a text from Revelation, which says that the Lamb in the midst of the throne shall feed them and lead them to living fountains of waters. He wrote of his grief, and also of the comfort that he found. He did not leave the field.
In 1905, he moved to Cairo, Egypt, which was a center of the Muslim world, and where the great mosque and university of Al-Azhar was located. He worked among the students and scholars of Al-Azhar, and he organized conferences. In 1911, he founded a journal, The Moslem World, which he edited for thirty-seven years. It became the leading journal of Islamic studies from a Christian point of view. He organized the Cairo Conference of 1906 and took part in the great missionary conference at Edinburgh in 1910. He was the chief voice of the missionary world on the subject of Islam. He wrote more than fifty books, among them Arabia: The Cradle of Islam, The Moslem Doctrine of God, The Disintegration of Islam and The Glory of the Cross.
He was a tireless traveler, who journeyed across Asia, Africa and Europe, and he spoke to thousands. He was known as the Apostle to Islam. He was a man of great learning, who studied the religion that he wished to confront. He took a stand against the careless attitudes of his fellow missionaries. He spoke plainly about the errors of Islam, and he held that it must be answered with love. He pressed the church to send its best to the Muslim world. He was criticized by some for his negative language about Islam, which was thought to be too harsh. He was also a man of his time, who held to some colonial ideas. He was not an easy man to work with. He made a number of enemies.
In 1929, he became a professor of missions at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught there until 1937. He lived in New York in his last years, writing and speaking. He died on April 2, 1952, at the age of eighty-four. His wife, Amy, had died in 1937. His life shows the effect of a man who gave his life to a field that was nearly closed, and who left a legacy of scholarship and of faith.