Christian missionary activity and the dearth of conversions in the Arabian Gulf, 1800–1970: a comparative study with the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa

Between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Christian missionary organizations invested considerable resources in the Arabian Gulf, the broader Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa, with dramatically divergent outcomes. Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa grew from roughly nine million adherents in 1900 to over 380 million by 2000; missions in Egypt produced no more than 200 documented Muslim converts in a century; and in the Arabian Gulf, nearly a century of organized Protestant labor produced fewer than fourteen documented conversions among the Arab Muslim population across all stations. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship and primary missionary sources, this paper assembles the quantitative conversion evidence for all three regions and advances a multi-causal explanation centered on six factors: the social cost of apostasy operating through communal rather than judicial mechanisms; the fusion of Arab ethnic and Islamic religious identity; the political association of Christianity with Western aggression; the institutional resilience of Islamic scholarly networks; the enforced shift from evangelism to humanitarianism; and the Gulf’s pre-Islamic Nestorian Christian heritage and voluntary seventh-century transition to Islam. This final factor, largely absent from previous comparative analyses, constitutes the study’s most distinctive contribution.