GORAP — The Basic Dawah Conversation · Initiation

Initiation 2 — starting from nothing on the street or the bus

Handle with care. Do not corner someone who is clearly in a hurry, and do not follow a person who has disengaged. A bad street encounter costs more than a missed one.

In short

• 1.**Rapport before religion.** Introduce yourself, ask their name, shake hands if same gender.
• 2.**Open-ended questions only.** ‘What do you think is the purpose of life?’ cannot be answered with yes or no.
• 3.**Ask permission to go deeper.** ‘Can I get your opinion on something I have been thinking about lately?’
• 4.**Then step into G.** ‘How do you think the universe came into existence?’

The claim being examined

There is no question to answer. You have to open a conversation with a stranger and take it somewhere meaningful without being strange about it.

The Islamic position

Build a human relationship first: name, small talk, something you have in common. Then ask permission to raise something you have been thinking about — and let the first GORAP question do the work.

Analysis

The manual gives a worked example on a bus: a seat, a laugh about rush hour, ‘are you from around here?’, a shared university, names exchanged — and only then, ‘I know this is a bit out of the blue, but can I get your opinion on something?’ Nothing in that sequence is religious. Its whole function is to establish that you are a person, not a leafletter, so that the question that follows is received as curiosity rather than recruitment. Trust is the precondition of any transmitted message.

From the Qur'an

From the Sunnah

Sources

iERA, Pocket Dawah Manual — Initiation Two · iERA / Mission Dawah, Pocket Dawah Manual, pp. 10–12

More in Initiation

• Initiation 1 — when they open with a hard question