Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier Part 17

ROUGH DIAMONDS

A novel inquirer--Attends the bazaar preaching--Attacked by his countrymen--In the police-station--Before the English magistrate--Declares he is a Christian--Arrival of his mother--Tied up in his village--Escape--Takes refuge in the hills--A murder case--Circ.u.mstantial evidence--Condemned--A last struggle for liberty--Qazi Abdul Karim--His origin--Eccentricities--Enthusiasm--Crosses the frontier--Captured--Confesses his faith--Torture--Martyrdom.

I will recount shortly in this chapter the stories of two Afghan converts, to show what strange cases we have to deal with, and how difficult it is to discover the motives at work, even if we ever do discover them.

Seronai was one of the Marwat clan of Pathans, which inhabits the southern part of the Bannu district.

One afternoon in the year 1899 I had been conducting the open-air preaching in the Bannu bazaar, and was returning home, when I noticed that I was being followed by a stalwart Afghan, over six feet high and broad in proportion. I had noticed him among the crowd at the preaching, as he was quite the biggest man there.

"What is it I can do for you?" I said to him.

"I am going to join your religion," was the reply.

I took him home, found that he was a farmer in a small way, possessed a few acres of land in a very criminal village right at the base of the frontier hills, could not read or write, and knew very little indeed of the Muhammadan religion beyond the prayers. Yet when I asked him, "Why do you wish to join our religion?" the only answer I could obtain was, "Because it is my wish."

"But you do not know anything about either religion."

"You can teach me; I will learn."

So importunate a pupil it was impossible to refuse. He was willing enough to learn, but proved very slow of comprehension. It is our rule not to let inquirers idle away their time, but to give them work, whereby they may at least prove that they do not intend to become burdens on the mission. Seronai was willing enough to work, and had the appet.i.te of an ox; but, unless watched, his strength was far in excess of his discrimination. Given a field to dig up, and he dug up the flower-beds round, too. Given a tree to cut down, and he brought it down quick enough, crashing through a verandah, till finally we found that if we kept him at all it was most economical not to let him do anything.

About his zeal there was no doubt. Not only did he attend all the Christian services, but insisted on accompanying us to the bazaar preaching, and letting all and sundry know that he intended to--in fact, had already--become a Christian. This naturally roused the ire of the people in the bazaar, and when one day there were some of his fellow-countrymen in the audience, I could see that they meant ill, though, from Seronai's great size and strength, they would no doubt be careful in their tactics. The next day, the bazaar preaching being over, Seronai returned towards the mission, while I stopped behind a few moments conversing with a questioner in the crowd. I had gone a little way up the street when I saw an excited mob and heard much shouting, and out of the crowd burst Seronai, tearing himself away from his captors with clothes torn, turban off, and his long locks dishevelled about his face. He ran towards me, calling out, "Save me from these men!"

It did not seem likely when he had been unable to save himself. However, I did my best to enable him to escape, but we were at once surrounded by the crowd, and though no violence was intentionally done to me, Seronai was torn away and mercilessly beaten. Before long, however, the police appeared and dispersed the crowd, and marched off Seronai to the lock-up. As that seemed the safest place for the time being, I told him to keep up his spirits, and that the next day arrangements would be made for him.

The next day he was brought before the civil officer of the district, who also called for the chief man of the section of the tribe which had been creating the disturbance the day before. Seronai was then asked whether he wished to be a Muhammadan or Christian.

"I wish to become a Christian and to remain with the Padre Sahib,"

he said decidedly.

"Very well, you shall," said the officer, and told the chief to explain to his people that they must not resort to further violence.

The next week an old lady in a great state of excitement appeared in the mission compound. With her was a lad of about fourteen summers. They were Seronai's mother and younger brother. She had been told that her son had become a Hindu. As to what a Christian was, she had no idea. She had never heard of such a thing. All she knew was that her son had disgraced her, and when Seronai came she wept on him, and called him reproachful names, and caressed him, all in turns and all together. Seronai was very quiet, and he was genuinely sorry for the old lady's trouble, and came to me and said: "I must go back to my village with my mother to comfort her, and then I will return to you."

It was about a week later. We were sitting in church at evening service, when in came Seronai, looking very hot and dishevelled. He said that the people in his village had seized him, and tied him down to a bed, and set a guard over him night and day. It was impossible to escape till one day a raiding party of Wazirs came down suddenly on the village grazing grounds and carried off about twenty camels. A chigah was sounded, and all the able-bodied men of the village started off in pursuit. His mother came and untied him, and he had escaped to us, doing the forty-five miles that lay between his village and the mission without a stop. Seronai's condition pointed to the truth of his story, which was, indeed, a very credible one. We heard afterwards that the camel raid had taken place in the way he related.

Seronai went on now learning about the Christian religion, but making very little visible progress. He was zealous, and did not for a moment try to avoid persecution by hiding his light--in fact, he seemed to delight in courting it. Some suggested that he was becoming a Christian in order to spite some relation. This does occasionally happen; but there were no grounds for supposing it to be the case here. Others suggested that he had made a bet that he would become one, but this would hardly account for his carrying the role so far at such great personal suffering. In short, though his spiritual aspirations were not, as far as we could see, sufficient to account for it, we were quite at a loss to find any other satisfactory explanation.

About a month later he disappeared once again, and then I did not hear of him for two years. At the end of that time, I was seated one day in school teaching one of the cla.s.ses, when I got a message from the head of the gaol saying there was a prisoner who professed to be a Christian, and desired to see me. On responding to the call, imagine my surprise to find Seronai. He said that on leaving us he had intended to work his land, but, owing to the enmity of the people, had been obliged to seek refuge in the mountains, where a certain malik had befriended him and given him shelter. He had remained there till a few weeks back, when he wished to pay a visit to his mother and his village. On arrival there, he found that a tragedy had just been enacted. He had a sister there married to a farmer in the village; this lady had accepted the advances of another swain from the next village, and had prepared to elope with him. They had, however, been frustrated in their intentions, for the corpses of the two had been found--the woman shot through the head, her lover through the heart.

Suspicion would most naturally fall on the husband, but the arrival of Seronai at this moment suggested an alternative: the people of the village would be glad to get an apostate, such as they considered him to be, into trouble; circ.u.mstantial evidence was not difficult to arrange, and witnesses in support might be had for the asking. Besides, by making a scapegoat of Seronai, the rest of the village would escape the harrying of the police myrmidons, who might otherwise settle on their village like a swarm of locusts, for no one knew how long. Thus it came about that Seronai was in gaol on the charge of double murder. It was not much that I could do for him beyond giving him the consolations of religion; circ.u.mstantial evidence was very black against him, and it was not a matter of surprise when the judge found him guilty and awarded him the extreme penalty of hanging.

Two days yet remained to the carrying out of the sentence, when there was a great uproar in the gaol. Seronai and another prisoner, also under sentence of death, had broken loose from cells, but, unable to scale the outer wall of the prison, had clambered on to the roof of one of the buildings, from which they bade defiance to all who ventured near. They tore up the cornice, and if anyone came near he ran the risk of having his head smashed with a well-directed brick. This siege went on for two and a half hours; the two defenders were so alert that if a ladder was put up at one side while a feint was made at the other, they ran from side to side, aiming bricks at anyone within reach. This could not be allowed to go on, so the superintendent of police made the guard fall in with loaded rifles, and then took out his watch, and, addressing the two men, told them that if they did not surrender in four minutes the guard would fire. There was breathless suspense among the spectators, who by this time numbered several hundreds, as the minutes pa.s.sed and the men were still defiant. Half a minute remained when the two men surrendered to the guard, and were marched back to the cells. Two days later the extreme penalty of the law was enforced.

Qazi Abdul Karim was altogether a different type of man to Seronai; he came of a good Afghan family and was a very learned man, being, as his name denotes, a Qazi, or one ent.i.tled to adjudicate Muhammadan law. He was well versed in the Quran, the Hadis, and Muhammadan theology and literature, and held a position of honour in the towns of Quetta and Kandahar. He was a man of property, too, so that no one could taunt him with having become a Christian for the sake of bread. He was converted many years ago at Quetta, where he was baptized by the medical missionary, Dr. Sutton; he pa.s.sed through many dangers and privations, but I go on at once to speak of my first acquaintance with him at Bannu. He had worked for a time at most of the frontier mission stations, but did not seem able to settle down anywhere. The Missionary Society requires those who desire to become its recognized agents to pa.s.s certain examinations, and examinations were not in his line, and he would not present himself for one; thus he never became a recognized agent of the Society. He had a repugnance to doing work in the hospital wards, so it was difficult to know how he was to gain his support. His habits, too, were rather expensive, as he had been accustomed to entertain freely in his Muhammadan days, and could not realize that he must not ask all and any into meals when he had not the wherewithal to pay for them. He had given up almost everything to become a Christian, and he could not understand why the Society would not support him to work on his own lines, without the trammels of rules and regulations.

He was very sensitive in his nature, and ready to think that he was being slighted or not wanted, so he seldom stopped long in any one station. He did not get on well, as a rule, with the other native Christians, and often imagined that schemes were being laid for poisoning his food. This led to bickerings, which the missionary often had trouble in allaying. Thus, notwithstanding his great gifts, Abdul Karim was not a persona grata in any of the missions, and the missionary was often glad when he realized that he had outstayed his welcome and pa.s.sed on to another station. Yet, though certainly not popular with the native Christians, they all admired him for the troubles he had undergone for the sake of Christ, and for his pluck in confessing his faith before all audiences, and regardless of consequences. The last time he visited Bannu he had been undergoing great hardships in a voluntary tramp through the country, literally "despised and rejected of men," because of his uncompromising advocacy of Christianity. He was worn quite thin, and looked so haggard that I did not at first recognize him, and his clothes were reduced to a few rags. We fed him up and got him some new clothes; but even then he could not rid himself of the idea that some people were trying to poison him. This gave rise to the report that he was mad, and certainly his eccentricity in this respect was sufficient to give colour to the report. I feel sure, however--and I knew him well--that his devotion to Christ was very real, and amounted to a real pa.s.sion to suffer for His sake.

In the summer of 1907 he was taken with an intense desire to enter Afghanistan, and preach the Gospel there. He crossed over the frontier at Chaman, and was seized by some Afghan soldiers. These finally brought him before the Governor of Kandahar. He was offered rewards and honours if he would recant and accept Muhammadanism, and, when he refused, he was cast into prison loaded with eighty pounds of chains. He was examined by H. M. the Amir and the Amir's brother, Nasirullah, but remained firm in his confession of Christianity.

Finally, he was marched off to Kabul under very painful conditions. As far as could be gathered from the reports that filtered down to India, he had to walk loaded with chains and with a bit and bridle in his mouth from Kandahar to Kabul, while any Muhammadan who met him on the way was to smite him on the cheek and pull a hair from his beard. After reaching Kabul, it was reported that he died in prison there; but another report, which purported to be that of an eyewitness, and seemed worthy of credence, related that he had been set at liberty in Kabul, and had set out alone for India.

On the way the people in a village where he was resting found out who he was--probably one of them had heard him preaching in India--and they carried him off to their mosque to force him to repeat the Muhammadan Kalimah, "There is no G.o.d but G.o.d, and Muhammad is the Prophet of G.o.d." This is the accepted formula of accepting Islam, and if a convert can be persuaded to say this publicly, it is regarded as his recantation.

Abdul Karim refused. A sword was then produced, and his right arm cut off, and he was again ordered to repeat it, but again refused. The left arm was then severed in the same way, and, on his refusing the third time, his throat was cut. There is no doubt that, whatever the details of his martyrdom may be, Abdul Karim witnessed faithfully up to the last for his Saviour Christ, and died because he would not deny Him.

There are many secret disciples in Afghanistan who honour Christ as we do, and make His teachings their daily guide, but are not yet prepared to follow Him even to the death; and there is no doubt that, at the present time, a public acknowledgment of Christianity would mean death, and probably a cruel death. At the same time, I believe that the Church in Afghanistan will not be established till there have been many such martyrs, who will seal their faith with their blood.

When the news of the death of Abdul Karim reached Bannu, more than one of our Afghan Christians offered to go over into Afghanistan and take his place as herald of the Cross, and bear the consequences, but I pointed out to them that the time was not yet.

CHAPTER XXIV

DEDUCTIONS

Number of converts not a reliable estimate of mission work--Spurious converts versus Indigenous Christianity--Lat.i.tude should be allowed to the Indian Church--We should introduce Christ to India rather than Occidental Christianity--Christianizing sects among Hindus and Muhammadans--Missionary work not restricted to missionaries--Influence of the best of Hindu and Muhammadan thought should be welcomed--The conversion of the nation requires our attention more than that of the individual--Christian Friars adapted to modern missions--A true representation of Christ to India--Misconceptions that must be removed.

I have completed these sketches of mission work, and I wish to summarize in this chapter some of the conclusions that I have been led to draw from the experiences of the last sixteen years, and then in a concluding chapter to point out what I think to be the most promising lines of advance.

It has too long been the habit to gauge the results of mission work by the number of converts or baptisms, but this is wrong both by omission and by commission: by omission, because it takes no count of what is the larger portion of mission work--the gradual permeation of the country with the teachings and example of Christ; by commission, because it encourages missionaries to baptize and register numbers, chiefly of the lower cla.s.ses, who have no right to it, because they come from egregiously unworthy motives. Such converts not only are a dead weight on the mission to which they are attached, but too often utterly discredit Christianity in the eyes of the non-Christians around them by their greed and unworthy conduct. It is well that we should sometimes stop and think what it is that we are desirous of doing, and then face the question: "Are we really accomplishing that, or doing something altogether different?"

Are we desirous of planting in India a Christian Church on the lines which we see developed in England or America? If so, I sincerely hope that we shall never succeed. Are we desirous of binding on Eastern converts the same burden of dogmas which has disrupted and still distresses the Western Church? Again, I sincerely hope not. Are we desirous of giving India the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of living Him before the people? There we have a worthy object--to compa.s.s which no sacrifice is too great--worthy of the best and most devoted of our men and women, and claiming the spiritual and material support of the whole Western Church.

Now, it is quite possible--in fact, we have seen it enacted before our eyes--that, having given India Christ and the Bible, India's sons and sages may not interpret everything as we have done, but may do so in their own mystical and transcendental way. We may not always be able to admit such by baptism into the fold of the Christian Church--they may not themselves desire it--but are we to say that our mission has not been accomplished? Accomplished it a.s.suredly has been, but perhaps not on the lines which we desired or imagined. If, again, after studying the life and words of Christ, and comparing them with the Christianity which they see practised in the West, or in the Westerns who reside among them, they are not drawn to Western Christianity while yet having a devotion to Christ; if they do not feel they can consistently join any of our Western Churches; and if they form a Church of India, are we then to be disappointed and think we have failed of our mission? A thousand times, no! Let us rather praise G.o.d that, instead of a number of hothouse plants requiring careful watering and tending lest they sicken and wither, we have a harvest of indigenous growth nurtured on the native soil of India, and ripening to a fruitful maturity under its own sun, and fed by the natural showers of heaven without the aid of the missionaries of a foreign clime.

We see, therefore, that the gathering in of converts is not the first or most important work of the missionary. His work is rather, first, to live Christ before the people of the country; secondly, to give them the teachings of Christ by giving them the Scriptures in their own tongue, and preaching and explaining the same to them. We often find in practice that when some Indian has been captivated by the Gospel, he is hurried on to baptism, and thereby cut off prematurely from his old stock and grafted on the new--prematurely because he is often insufficiently grounded in the Christian faith to withstand the torrent of persecution which is his lot the moment he is baptized, and because the leavening influence which he would otherwise be exerting on a wide circle of his relations and acquaintances is at once destroyed.

Christians at home encourage the missionary to think that nothing has been accomplished till the inquirer is baptized, and that, once baptized and recorded in the church register and the mission report, the work, as far as that individual is concerned, is completed, and the missionary may leave him and turn his attention to someone else. Fatal mistake! Injurious to the convert because, left only half grounded in the faith, he falls into worldly and covetous habits, or may even apostatize outright; injurious to the unevangelized remainder because, instead of being attracted for a time longer to the study of Christianity by the influence of the inquirer, they are thrown into a position of violent antagonism by the secession of the convert, and are no longer willing to give the claims of Christ any hearing at all.

Herein lies the inestimable value of the much-maligned mission schools and colleges. They do not produce a great crop of immediate baptisms, and so are belittled by some as barren agencies; but nothing else is more surely permeating the great ma.s.s of Muhammadan and Hindu thought with Christian thoughts, Christian ideals, and Christian aspirations.

We see all around us in present-day India attempts to reclothe Islam and Hinduism in Christian habiliments, or else ardent reformers, hopeless of that Augean task, creating new little sects and offshoots, in which Christian ideas are served up for Muhammadan and Hindu consumers thinly disguised in a dressing of their own religions. These sects sometimes affect a display of hostility to Christianity, lest those whom they wish to draw should mistake them for being only missionary ruses for catching them with guile; but, all the same, they are steps, and I think inevitable steps, in the gradual permeation of the country with the religion of Christ. India has been surfeited with philosophies and dogmas and rites and ceremonies from the h.o.a.ry Vedic ages down, but she is hungering and thirsting for a living power to draw her G.o.d-ward, and such a power is Christ. She cannot have too much of Him, whether this life be set forth in the devoted service of Christian men and women, in hospitals, and schools, and zenanas, and plague camps, and leper asylums, or in the daily preaching and teaching of Him in town and village, in the crowded bazaars, or in the hermitages of the sadhus and faqirs.

This is not a work restricted to those who have been set apart as missionaries, but one which claims every professed Christian in the land. Every European Christian, be he in civil or military service, in trade or profession, or merely a temporary visitant for pleasure-seeking, can and should be doing this essentially Christian missionary work if he is living honestly and purely up to the tenets of his religion; and many of the best converts in the land have been first drawn to Christ by watching the consistent private and public Christian life of some such un.o.btrusive Englishman or Englishwoman, who never was or tried to be a missionary in the usual sense of the term.

On the other hand, the Christianizing of the country has been made all the more remote and difficult by those Englishmen who contemn or discredit the religion they profess, or live lives openly and flagrantly at variance with its ethics.

We do not gain anything from a missionary point of view, and we dishonour G.o.d, when we speak of everything in Islam or Hinduism as evil. The Mussulman has given a witness to the Unity of G.o.d and the folly of idolatry which has been unsurpa.s.sed in the religious history of the world, and he has qualities of devotion and self-abnegation which the Christian Church may well desire to enlist in her service rather than to ignore or decry. The Hindu has evolved philosophies on the enigmas of life, and sin, and pain, and death, which have for ages been the solace and guide of the myriad inhabitants of India, and he has attained heights of self-abnegation and austerity in the pursuit of his religious ideals which would have made the Christian ascetics of the early centuries of our era envious. Religion has been to them a pervading force which has coloured the most commonplace acts of daily life. Here we have qualities which have prepared the soil for the implanting of the Christian faith, and which, when imbued and enlightened with the love of Christ, will reach a luxuriance of Christian energy worthy of the religious East, in which so many of the religions of the world have had their birth. India, indeed, wants Christ, but the future Christianity of India will not be that Occidental form which we have been accustomed to, but something that will have incorporated all the best G.o.d-given qualities and capacities and thoughts of the Muhammadans and Hindus.

It is a great pity that missionary energy is still largely destructive rather than constructive. In the earlier days of mission work it was popularly supposed that missionaries were to attack the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, which were considered to be the great obstacles to the acceptance of Christianity by the people of India, and it was thought that, those once overthrown, we should find a Christian country. Much more probably we should find an atheistic and materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and Worldliness had become the new G.o.ds. The real and most deadly enemies with which the missionary has to contend are infidelity and mammon worship. We may well try to enlist the religious spirit of all the Indian creeds in the struggle against these, the common enemies of all faiths, or we may find, when too late, that we have destroyed the fabric of faith, and set up nothing in its place. The old Islam, the old Hinduism, are already doomed, not by the efforts of the missionaries, but by the contact with the West, by the growth of commerce, by the spread of education, by the thirst for wealth and luxury which the West has implanted in the East. All the power of Christianity is required to give India a new and living and robust faith, which shall be able to withstand these disrupting forces.

Some of the Christian attacks on Eastern religions are painful to read, because one cannot help seeing that the same weapons have been used in the West, and often with success, against belief in the Christian Scriptures, and the missionaries are only preparing tools which will one day be used against themselves. They may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory against the forces of Islam and Hinduism, but they are at the same time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the unquestioning devotion, which have been the crown and glory of India for ages. Let it rather be their endeavour to present a real, living, pulsating Christianity, capable of enlisting all these divine forces in its own service without weakening or destroying one of them, and all that is best in Islam and Hinduism will be drawn into it. The product will be nearer to the mind of Christ than much that pa.s.ses by the name of Christianity in the West, yet has lost the power of the living Christ. Do not destroy, but give something worthy of acceptance, and be careful of the type.