AXLING, William.

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Nasīr al-mazlumīn. Qissat haīāat Kagawa al-za'eīm al-īābānī. First edition in Arabic of William Axling's "highly influential biography" (Tao) of the Japanese Evangelical Christian activist, Toyohiko Kagawa - "a sort of Presbyterian Francis of Assisi in Japan" (Old, p. 566). We have traced just four institutional copies, all in the Middle East. After learning English from American missionaries as a boy, Kagawa (1888-1960) converted to Christianity and studied in the United States. In 1916, he published his first sociological research on "the psychology of the poor", inspired by his missionary work among the destitute in the slums of Tokyo, Kobe, and Yokohama. He campaigned for labour activism and women's suffrage and held a pacifist stance during the Second World War. For his activism, he was often imprisoned.In the 1930s, Kagawa's supporters in Japan began to cooperate to widen the impact of his Japanese works, by translating them into English. In 1932, William Axling, a long-time American missionary and collaborator of Kagawa, published "the first book-length treatment of the Japanese evangelist in any language" (Tao, p.63). Here translated into Arabic, by Habib Said in cooperation with the Monastery of St George, Jerusalem, Axling's biography celebrated him as a "quiet fighter", "warrior of faith", and "modern mystic".

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