A Muslim imam who speaks out against radicalisation has slammed for an Islamic fundamentalist for saying parents should ban their children from listening to music in the car.
Adelaide-based Shia leader Mohammad Tawhidi has taken aim at western Sydney Sunni fundamentalist morals campaigner Nassim Abdi’s rant about children ‘drowning in music’.
‘These children will have problems growing up without a doubt,’ Sheikh Tawhidi told Sydney radio 2GB presenter Ben Fordham on Tuesday.
‘It’s more segregation, it doesn’t allow the Muslims to integrate anymore.’
A Muslim imam (pictured) who speaks out against radicalisation has slammed for an Islamic fundamentalist for saying parents should ban their children from listening to music in the car
Muslim morals campaigner Nassim Abdi says parents shouldn’t play music in front of children
Sheikh Tawhidi, who has lived in hiding, said Muslim fundamentalists were bringing Sharia law to Australia, with sermons against music.
‘It has a demanding tone, authoritarian, and it doesn’t allow any sort of discussion or debate,’ he said.
‘Opposing means you deserve punishment. It’s not for Australia. It’s not something we need here at all.’
Mr Abdi, from the hardline Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association, told a mosque at Auburn this week parents should ban their children from listening to music in the car on the way to or from a mosque.
‘We have children who are drowning in the listening of music, day and night, to the extent where we have parents taking their children to learn the book of Allah, learning the Koran … but on the way there, and on the way back, the children are in the car listening to music,’ he said.
The Islamic teacher, who has previously criticised Muslim women for showing their ears and necks in public and plucking their eyebrows, also said it was wrong for parents to allow their children to listen to music at home.
‘When they get home, the parents are listening to music,’ he said.
‘The parents encourage them to listen to music and to dance and to make videos and to make a joke out of it and to make fun out of it and to post it online.
‘What is going to be bred into the heart of this child: the love of the Koran or the love of music?’
Nassim Abdi, from the hardline Salafist Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association, opposes music
Sheikh Tawhidi mocked how he proposed to prevent Muslims from hearing music.
‘That means that can’t even go to the bank because they’ve got music now playing at the bank,’ he said.
‘They can’t even walk in a shopping mall because there’s music.
‘When the phone rings, what does he listen to? The Koran?’
Mr Abdi preaches an ultra-conservative Salafist form of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia.
His sermon, delivered at Auburn in Sydney’s west, said parents were ‘lacking Islamically’ because they were unwittingly teaching their children to overlook Sharia law, a Muslim legal system.
‘This breeds in the child extreme confusion to the extent many a time, they look towards the Shariah with disrespect, maybe not at the young, tender age but as they get older,’ he said.