On 12 June 1938, two men came to the market town of Duhok from a distant village to visit Presbyterian missionary Roger Cumberland in his home. Roger had just finished Sunday worship while Harriet, his wife, was downstairs with their two young daughters.
After a fruit drink and the customary greetings and chatter, Selim Mustafa, one of the visitors, moved the conversation to weightier things and enquired about Christianity. As Roger turned to fetch some literature from the bookcase, Selim then pulled out a revolver and shot Roger several times. The two men then raced downstairs and made good their escape, but not before firing again to mortally wound Musa the servant. A frantic airlift to Mosul ensued but ten hours later Roger was pronounced dead – from severe internal wounds – and he was buried early the following morning by a grieving cohort of mission workers and friends.
Harriet hastily packed their belongings and left Duhok, relocating the following year to California with their daughters, never to return to Iraq. Sadly, the Cumberlands were not replaced in Kurdistan by their mission board; the gathering of believers dissipated, their house and meeting room became a health centre, and following the building of a modern hospital, the Cumberland house was once again requisitioned, later a rather ramshackle bureau of the municipal postal service.
While Roger is widely saluted as a farsighted and good man, whose most notable achievement was to pipe fresh water uphill for a quarter of the town, including – Kurds themselves are quick to point out – the town’s central mosque, his winning of converts to Christ was bitterly opposed. Even though only a few in those years came forward as Christian converts, many zealous Kurds still believe Selim the agha (headman), did the right thing by killing Cumberland and stamping out what they saw as a dangerous challenge to the hegemony of Islam.
And for more than fifty years it appeared that the fanatical opponents of Roger’s evangelistic work had won the day. Cumberland, however, remains a household name across the Duhok Province. Their house is one of the oldest in the city and interest in his life continues to grow, not least because of a video, broadcast rather surprisingly on an Islamic TV channel – viewed later 147,000 times on Facebook – which mixes praise with censure.
More significantly there is a docudrama in the offing, directed by a sympathetic Muslim Kurd, which undoubtedly will be widely watched and discussed. And 85 years after Roger’s martyrdom, the city authorities honoured his granddaughter’s formal request that her parents’ house be restored as a centre for peace and reconciliation.
My experience is that many Kurds feel remorse for the brutal treatment meted out to such a gifted and kind-hearted friend of their people. And although opposition to converts can still be fiery, churches made up of ex-Muslims are more tolerated than they would have been in the 1930s. On a recent visit to Duhok, I preached at two Kurdish gatherings in the province. ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’ was Tertullian’s famous aphorism; but sometimes that seed takes generations to germinate.
Having served as a teacher and language consultant in the region for a decade, Rob* is based in the UK and engaged in a research project documenting Roger’s life and ministry in both written and videographic form.
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*Name changed for security reasons.