Last year, in collaboration with the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society, the Acton Institute and Lexham Press teamed together to publish On Islam. The latest in the 12-volume series Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology details Kuyper’s observations while traveling in the Mediterranean.
At Providence magazine, Tim Scheiderer reviews On Islam and considers Kuyper’s Christian advice for foreign policy:
In the book On Islam, the Acton Institute has translated into English for the first time portions from Abraham Kuyper’s larger work, Om de Oude Wereldzee (Around the Old World-Sea). The two-volume set was originally published in 1907 and 1908. In the translated excerpts, the Dutch Presbyterian theologian and politician provides meticulous details, keen observations, and insightful analysis about the Muslims’ lands and culture as well as Islam’s core and numerous outworkings. His unvarnished honesty is refreshing. In certain passages, he praises an aspect of Islam. Then in the next paragraph, he critiques a different portion of it without partisanship, passivism, or animus. To have critiqued Islam in such a manner would have not served him well. In addition to fulfilling a lifelong goal of visiting this region of the world, Kuyper was striving to understand Islam because of its “growing influence” in the Dutch East Indies. In his time, the European powers saw a danger rising in the East, and the Dutch archipelago would be a strategic area if conflict ensued.
