January 21, 2011

How to Find a Bible in Muslim North Africa

Fez, Morocco
Christians have found it difficult trying to get booksellers to sell the Bible in North Africa. Bookstores usually do not sell Arabic Bibles because they were too afraid they would be shut down. Creative ways needed to be found to get literature out to the people. One way of doing this was through used booksellers. Used booksellers tend to congregate around the universities and run their business out of "shacks" or on a blanket on the sidewalk.

One Christian man nervously approached the used booksellers with several bags of Arabic Bibles and offered them for sale. They said they would take them all!  This went on for several years and during the course of that time, they asked for more and more Arabic Bibles and New Testaments. Asked why they wanted so many Bibles, they said they wanted  Bibles because the students in the universities were encouraged by the professors to read the Bible as a piece of literature. So they were encouraged to go out and look for Bibles and the first place they went were the used book sellers.

The used booksellers would buy them and put them out and take the risk that the people at the bookstores would not take. They didn't care if they were shut down, because they would just open up in another shop, stall or blanket somewhere else. That was a great ministry and isn’t being done anymore today because there’s no one who wants to do it.  This is a HUGE opportunity for someone to take on to sell Arabic Bibles to used booksellers in all of the major cities of North Africa. 

This could be accomplished by people who embark on short term missions trips to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and many other Muslim countries. 

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