The fact that attention is paid to suffering women by medical missions is already changing the prevalent idea that woman is inferior and worthless. And although it may seem sometimes an impossible task to ever raise these women to think higher thoughts and to rise from the degradation of centuries, yet we know from experience that those who come in contact with Christian women soon learn to avoid all unclean conversation in their presence. Visiting them in their huts and homes is also a means of breaking down prejudice. The daily clinic in the three mission hospitals of East Arabia, where thousands of sick women receive as much attention as do the men, is winning the hearts and opening the eyes of many to see what disinterested love is. They can scarcely understand what constrains Christian women to go into such unlovely surroundings and touch bodies loathsome from disease in the dispensaries.
When the men have wisdom to perceive that the education of their women and girls means the elevation of their nation, and when they give the women an opportunity to become more than mere animals, then will the nation become progressive and alive to its great possibilities. Reformation cannot come from within but must come from without, from the living power of the Christ. Are you not responsible to God for a part in the evangelization of Arabia in this generation?
"Let none whom He hath ransomed fail to greet Him,
Through thy neglect unfit to see His face."
The following earnest words, from one who being dead yet speaketh, are a plea for more workers to come out to Arabia. Marion Wells Thoms, M. D., labored for five years in Arabia and wrote in one of her last letters as follows:
"The Mohammedan religion has done much to degrade womanhood. To be sure, female infanticide formerly practised by the heathen Arabs was abolished by Islam, but that death was not so terrible as the living death of thousands of the Arab women who have lived since the reign of the 'merciful' prophet, nor was its effect upon society in general so demoralizing. In the 'time of ignorance,' that is time before Mohammed, women often occupied positions of honor. There were celebrated poetesses and we read of Arab queens ruling their tribes.
"Such a state of things does not exist to-day, but the woman's influence, though never recognized by the men, is nevertheless indirectly a potent factor, but never of a broadening or uplifting character. To have been long regarded as naturally evil has had a degrading influence. Mohammedan classical writers have done their best to revile womanhood. 'May Allah never bless womankind' is a quotation from one of them.
"Moslem literature, it is true, exhibits isolated glimpses of a worthier estimation of womanhood, but the later view, which comes more and more into prevalence, is the only one which finds its expression in the sacred tradition, which represents hell as full of women, and refuses to acknowledge in its women, apart from rare exceptions, either reason or religion, in poems which refer all the evil in the world to the woman as its root, in proverbs which represent a careful education of girls as mere waste.
"When the learned ones ascribe such characteristics to women, is it any wonder that they have come to regard themselves as mere beasts of burden? The Arab boy spends ten or twelve years of his life largely in the women's quarters, listening to their idle conversation about household affairs and their worse than idle talk about their jealousies and intrigues.
"When the boy becomes a man, although he has absolute dominion over his wife as far as the right to punish or divorce her is concerned, he often yields to her decision in regard to some line of action. In treating a woman I have sometimes appealed to the husband to prevail upon his wife to consent to more severe treatment than she was willing to receive. After conversing with his wife his answer has been, 'She will not consent,' and that has been final. Lady Ann Blunt, who has travelled among the Bedouins, says, 'In more than one sheikh's tent it is the women's half of it in which the politics of the tribe are settled.'
"In regard to their religion they believe what they have been told or have heard read from the Koran and other religious books. They do not travel as much as the men, and do not have the opportunity of listening to those who do, hence their ideas are not changed by what they see and hear. All the traditions of Mohammed and other heroes are frequently rehearsed and implicitly believed.