IGNORANCE REGARDING EASTERN FAITHS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."I
SIR,—My attention has been called to the following passage in your issue of October 21st. Your reviewer quotes it from
"Behind Turkish Lattices," by Hester Donaldson Jenkins. It is supposed to be a description of a Moslem funeral :— " The Imam in long, wailing tones, sometimes of piercing sweet- ness, relates the life, apparent death, and resurrection of Jesus, for, curiously enough, the Moslems regard Jesus as their hope of immortality, and think that He will preside over the Last Judgment.'
The possibility of such an absolutely wrong account of Moslem belief on such a subject appearing, not only in a twentieth-century book, but without criticism in the columns of the Spectator is a striking proof of the crassness of our general ignorance regarding Eastern faiths. Moslems' ideas of the life of our Lord are based on the Apocryphal Gospels and a vivid imagination. They do not believe in His "apparent death," but that someone else was crucified in His stead by mistake, and that He was taken up alive into heaven without dying. His death they (with few exceptions) indig- nantly deny. They do not consider that their " hope of immortality" is connected with Him in the very remotest degree. Instead of His presiding over the Last Judgment, their traditions declare that He will be offered (in common with other prophets) the position of Intercessor, but will decline it in favour of Mohammed. I have dealt with these matters in my "Religion of the Crescent" (S.P.C.K.) and in a measure in an article on " The Moslem View of Christ" in the "C. M. S. Review" for the present month.—I am, Sir,
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