Read The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam for Free Online

the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (24:14). The Great Commission is often misconstrued as an imperativeto convert the whole world. The underlying message is that once the whole world hears the evangelical message, Jesus will return—regardlessof whether or not that message is accepted. To most, it’s about offering an invitation, not getting an answer.
    At the turn of the twentieth century, war, industrialization, and this new theology made evangelicals in America and Britain suddenly determinedto “evangelize the world in this generation.” 3 These were the words of the Reverend Arthur T. Pierson, a now largely forgotten Yankee evangelical who inspired a worldwide movement. As Pierson put it, “[A]ll should go and go to all.” With his urging, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), founded in London in 1844, launched the Student Volunteer Movement. Thousands of young men and womenmobilized as missionaries to reach what they believed were the last blank spaces of the map with the Gospel. Preaching to the poor and focusing on building a “healthy mind, spirit and body,” 4 these clean-cut, educated young people led Bible study, built health clinics, and introduced organized sports. Their understanding that Christ was Lord offered more than a set of beliefs; it was the cornerstoneof a whole way of life.
    This worldview, with its emphasis on the language of light and darkness, good and evil, flourished in opposition to an enemy. Islam, many evangelicals believed, was their most formidable foe. The Kumms, for example, were concerned—correctly, it turned out—that the same innovations of the industrial revolution (the steamship and telegraph) that allowed Christian missionariesand explorers to spread the Gospel inland in Africa and Asia also encouraged the spread of Islam. More African Muslims were, for instance, going on hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, spreading Islam more widely on their return home.
    The nexus of this conflict lay along the tenth parallel. In June 1910, at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, twelvehundred Protestant missionaries gathered to chart the greatest crises Christianity was facing. (No Roman Catholics were invited.) The most pressing challenge to their faith—and to the world’s future—many argued, was Islam. John Mott, the YMCA’s founder, who spoke at the conference, wrote in his 1910 book,
The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions
:
     
    Two forces are contending for Africa—Christianityand Mohammedanism [Islam]. In many respects the more aggressive is Mohammedanism. It dominates Africa on its western half as far south as 10° N. latitude, and on its eastern half, as far south as 5° N. . . . If things continue as they are now tending, Africa may become a Mohammedan continent . . . Once received,it is Christianity’s most formidable enemy. It permits a laxity of morals, in somecases worse than that of heathendom. It sanctions polygamy. It breeds pride and arrogance, and thus hardens the heart against the Word of God. 5
    Karl Kumm, the ambitious German evangelist, also spoke at this watershed Edinburgh conference—the first of its kind to bring together more than a thousand Protestants from different denominations. He and his wife, Lucy, stood at the vanguard of this newmovement to stop Islam. Lucy, the daughter of a famous Irish evangelical pastor, H. Grattan Guinness, was thirty-three when she and Karl were married on February 3, 1900, at the American Mission Church in Cairo. She was already a writer, and an accomplished evangelist in her own right. Well traveled in the world’s roughest corners, she exemplified the power wielded by women missionaries at thebeginning of the twentieth century. The evangelical movement, which began as a call to social justice, preached for women’s equality at home and in the field, where women performed work as dangerous and unforgiving as that of