A question of audience...

[qatarperegrine]

I found myself staring at the bookshelf in a hospital waiting room this morning, while waiting for a routine appointment. The bookshelf said something along the lines of:
Missionary Materials
Missionary and Guidance Department
For Reading Only
After I finished congratulating myself on reading the Arabic, I started wondering more about the books on that shelf. It held one copy of the Qur'an and a handful of pamphlets and booklets on the amazingness of Islam -- I recognized them, because I have the English versions. But the ones in the state hospital here are all in Arabic.

This leaves, as I see it, two options:

1. In a stunning market research blunder, the Missionary and Guidance Department failed to notice that the Qataris are already Muslim, OR


2. All these missionary materials exist for the sole benefit of Doha's Lebanese Christian population, at a rate of approximately one missionary book per Lebanese Christian.

I daresay they need to rethink their target audience a little. Perhaps they could learn from the Al Qaeda missionaries....

Comments

[dachte.livejournal.com]

Does Qatar have many people who are officially muslim (that is, at least are not kafir) but are slack enough in their observance that missionaries might want to pull them closer into the fold?

apart from the obvious

[andreas_schaefer]

bringing the straying lambs back into the fold - and correcting erroneous interpretations - what I wonder is what other uses for books had the poeople in mind but reading ?

[y-pestis.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should hook them up with the Summer Institute of Linguistics which, despite its name, is an organisation of Christian missionaries who learn other languages in order to translate the Bible into those languages and convert the heathens.

Surely they would play well together, wouldn't they? I mean they have such similar goals...