Dubai: Stay-at-home mums are not only housewives but ‘house engineers’ whose main responsibility is to rear their children according to the teachings of Islam, a prominent Islamic scholar said on Saturday at the Dubai International Peace Convention (DIPC).
Mohammad Salah, a famous TV presenter and religious adviser, described women’s role in the home as crucial in creating a peaceful society.
“I don’t like the word housewives but rather ‘house engineers’ [for mothers]. The mother plays the most important role in forming an ideal family because she’s the one who spends most time with the children at home,” Salah said during the lecture ‘The Mother and the Ideal Family’ on the last day of the convention on Saturday.
The three-day event was held under the patronage of His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.
“The women’s role to catalyse world peace is extremely essential to society. She holds 90 per cent of the family structure together and can instil good manners in her children by being the ideal instructor and educator.”
Salah discouraged homemakers from competing with their husbands in building their careers if it means that the women have to abandon their roles as hands-on mothers and instead leave their kids in the care of nannies.
He said an ideal family invests in their children, especially in rearing them in knowledge of the Quran. Although he admitted that school eat up the majority of a pupil’s time, Salah said there is no excuse not to expose them to studying the Quran.
“We don’t have to produce MP3s or MP4s [sound recordings] of the Quran out of our children. The most important thing is for them to understand the teachings of the Quran, to convey them to others and to live them as a true Muslim,” Salah said.
More than 450,000 visitors attended the three-day convention at the Dubai World Trade Centre as of Saturday afternoon. Tens of thousands more were expected to attend the last session to be led by renowned Islamic scholar, Dr Zakir Naik, on Saturday evening.
At the conference, a Smart Peace Dome complete with three-dimensional animations on the teachings of the prophets in the Quran was available for public viewing.
