Jesse Armstrong is currently employed at the Missionary Training Centre in New Zealand, and thought he was pretty ‘missionary savvy’. That was until he met the missionaries in San Diego, California.

These missionaries didn’t have recognisable name badges and they certainly didn’t sound anything like any of the missionaries he trained back in New Zealand. These, very interesting missionaries were speaking Arabic and are assigned specifically to teach Arabic speaking ‘friends of our faith’ in approved missions.

Jesse said:

“Check this out…I’m sitting here watching missionaries being taught the Arabic Language. They are teaching the Chaldean people who descend from Abraham! These are the people whom the Saviour walked amongst in his day…How cool is that?!?! They told me that there are less than 100 of them [Arabic speaking missionaries] around the world”.

The missionaries teaching an Arabic man

The man in photo is Ghassan Seba, he is a convert to the church and has been assigned by the mission president to teach the missionaries Arabic in his home. He reports that there are around 50,000 Chaldean people living in San Diego. The missionaries have a special assignment to work with these people.

According to a former missionary, there are also “Arabic speaking missionaries in the Uganda Kampala Mission, which includes Sudan and South Sudan” (if you know of anywhere else, just comment below)

A book entitled “Into the Desert: An Arab View of the Book of Mormon” by Ehab Abunuwara, informs that “The Middle East remains one of the few areas in the world where the reach of missionary work continues to be very confined”.

He continues, “Currently, small Arabic-speaking branches exist in Lebanon and Jordan. On the other hand, a large number of people of Arab origin have joined the church outside the Middle East; so even though it would be hard to speak of an Arab LDS culture in the Middle East, members of Arab or Middle Eastern origins can provide insights into understanding and reading the Book of Mormon from a Middle Eastern point of view”.

In 1986 the first Arabic Book of Mormon was published. It was translated by Sami Hanna. By that point the Book of Mormon had been translated into 39 languages. Anderson, Kai A. (June 1997), “In His Own Language”, Liahona: 29

An Arabic Book of Mormon

Elder Russell M. Nelson spoke of this Sami’s incredible Book of Mormon conversion story at the 1992, Mission President’s training seminar.

“Sister Nelson and I have a close friend and former neighbor, Sami Hanna, who was born in Egypt. He is a scholar with special expertise in Semitic languages. As a linguistic exercise, he translated the Book of Mormon from English into Arabic. The exercise converted him to the divinity of the Book of Mormon. Among the many linguistic features that convinced him of the book’s divinity was this unusual sentence in Helaman, chapter 3, verse 14. [Hel. 3:14] This would hardly be an expression of a 24-year-old man from the New York frontier:

“But behold, a hundredth part of the proceedings of this people, yea, the account of the Lamanites and of the Nephites, and their wars, and contentions, and dissensions, and their preaching, and their prophecies, and their shipping and their building of ships, and their building of temples, and of synagogues and their sanctuaries, and their righteousness, and their wickedness, and their murders, and their robbings, and their plundering, and all manner of abominations and whoredoms, cannot be contained in this work”.

That single sentence has eighteen ands. Now, if you were a teacher of English you might tend to downgrade the composition of that sentence. Yet my scholarly Egyptian friend said that every one of those ands was an important element in the construction of that sentence, allowing his translation to flow smoothly back to a Semitic language”.

President Kimball Said, “We want the leaders of the Arab nations to understand we believe that the Arab people are children of Abraham and as such are entitled to the blessings of Abraham”.

Arabic missionary badge

Maybe this is the start of something incredible. Perhaps this moment will one day be compared to the waves of converts from South America and the Philippines.

Just maybe, like for Sami, the Book of Mormon will fulfil it’s promise of “convinc[ing] Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ” and resonate with Arabic speaking people as a “whisper out of the dust”. Isaiah 29:4

And hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot more of those really cool Arabic missionary name tags.