Samuel Zwemer was born on April 12, 1867, in Vriesland, Michigan, the thirteenth of fifteen children of a Dutch immigrant pastor. He grew up in a home of simple faith, surrounded by siblings who would go on to become teachers and pastors, an environment that shaped his sense of calling from an early age.
In 1887, at Hope College, he heard the appeal of Robert Wilder, of the Student Volunteer Movement, to carry the gospel to peoples who still had no access to it. Ordained as a pastor by the Reformed Church in America in 1890, he set sail for the Middle East determined to reach the Muslim world.
Alongside James Cantine, he cofounded the Arabian Mission in 1889, while still a seminary student, and spent years in Basra and later on the island of Bahrain, then under British rule in the Persian Gulf. There he combined street preaching, distribution of biblical literature, and simple medical care, seeking to earn trust where Christianity was virtually unknown.
In 1896 he married Amy Wilkes, a nurse who shared his calling and the hardships of the field. Eight years later, in 1904, two of their young daughters died of dysentery in Bahrain, a sorrow that deeply marked the couple without turning them away from their calling.
Zwemer saw few Muslims publicly profess the Christian faith, a fact acknowledged by mission historians: in nearly four decades of direct work, the number of visible conversions was small. He himself recognized that his greater role would be to awaken the church, not to count converts.
It was this conviction that led him to found, in 1911, the academic journal The Moslem World, and to write dozens of books on Islam and the challenge of evangelizing it, among them Arabia: The Cradle of Islam and The Glory of the Cross.
After years of service in Egypt, he became professor of the history of religions and Christian missions at Princeton, from 1929 to 1937, training a generation of missionaries and researchers. His writings from that period, marked by the polemical tone common to his era regarding Islam, are read today with recognition of both his zeal and the limits of interfaith dialogue in that generation.
Amy died suddenly of heart trouble in 1937, after more than forty years of marriage. In 1940 Zwemer remarried, to Margaret Clarke, who fell ill in the early years of their marriage and died in 1950.
He died on April 2, 1952, in New York, two years after Margaret’s death, shortly after speaking three times in a single day at an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship gathering, when he suffered a fatal heart attack, still speaking about what he called the unoccupied mission fields. His legacy endures in study centers that bear his name and in the renewed call to the church to think about missions among Muslims with rigor and love.
