he case against them is that the fact of these regions being once
Christian and now Moslem shows, if anything, that the latter religion is
more suited to local requirements and conditions; Islam is naturally
favoured in a Moslem country, though many Christian missions have been
given facilities too, and have mostly failed owing to climatic
conditions: the Egyptian Army is Moslem and under a Moslem Government;
the conversion of pagan recruits to Islam is encouraged for the sake of
discipline and soldierly conduct; missionaries themselves admit that
even in civil life a Christian convert from Islam must be segregated or
he will lapse under surrounding pressure--perhaps they will explain how
that is to be done in a barrack-room or native infantry lines, or would
they prefer such recruits to remain pagan? Presumably they would, as one
of their complaints is that "it is a thousand times harder to convert a
Moslem to Christianity than a pagan." Comment is superfluous; nothing
could portray their attitude more clearly. As for Islam getting ahead of
them in the race for pagan souls, it is so and will be so always among
the black races unless Christian missions are bolstered up by all the
resources of local authority; the reason is that Islam offers equal
privileges and no colour-line, imposes easy spiritual obligations and is
propagated fervently by its followers without the encumbrance of an
organised priesthood. Just as commercial travellers consider a district
neglected where a rival firm has got ahead of them, so missionaries are
piqued at conditions in the Sudan; but even that does not excuse such
statements as that women in the Sudan are free and not badly treated as
pagans, but slaves and oppressed under Islam. Every student of the
Islamic code knows that the status of women has been enormously improved
thereby as compared with any pagan system. Missionaries must know this,
for they are much better educated about Islam than they were a quarter
of a century ago, yet they do not scruple to raise the partisan cry of a
debased womanhood under Islam wherever local conditions involve domestic
hardship. Such tactics are unworthy of them; an intellectual Moslem does
not reproach Christianity because he has visited districts in the poorer
quarters of our big towns and seen women lead lives of drudgery or being
sometimes knocked about by their husbands.

Outside the Sudan and Nigeria we must keep to the eastern side of Africa
in or