Mark Gabriel Articles

One of the highlights of my life is the time I put flowers on the grave of a man I had never met. I first heard this man’s name—Samuel Zwemer—in the 1980s during a class at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest and most prestigious Muslim university in the world, sometimes called the “brain of Islam.”

My professor taught us that throughout history Christians had attempted to destroy Islam. He reminded us of the bloody battles Christians had waged against the Islamic world during the 200 years of the Crusades. He pointed out the Western colonialism that had been practiced from the late 1700s to the mid-1900s.

“Now Christians have a new strategy to defeat Islam,” he added. This strategy was embodied in the name and picture I saw in my textbook: that of Samuel Zwemer.