School funding to pay for radical Muslim preachers

A RADICAL Muslim organisation has opened a new community centre on Melbourne’s rapidly growing south western fringe.

A  RADICAL Muslim organisation that has boasted of plans to use school funding to pay full-time preachers and train children as young as five to spread the religion to non-Muslims has opened a new community centre on Melbourne’s rapidly growing southwestern fringe.

The Islamic Research and Educational Institute officially opened its Hoppers Crossing “iHub” on Saturday, touting the institution as “a youth centre in the western suburbs to be a hub for dawah (conversion) activities throughout Australia”.

IREA intends to establish a dawah TV channel and call centre at the hub, as well as provide space for “dawah material to be distributed across Australia” and training for children and adults in the practise of dawah.

In a recording of a December 2012 supporters’ meeting obtained by The Australian, IREA president Waseem Razvi discussed the centre as part of an Australia-wide system of Islamic schools and dawah centres he hoped to establish, using school salaries to pay for dawah.

“If we run the schools, we will have a lot of dawah into it, and we want to run a lot of dawah centres from it, so we can take out from the Islamic school and ... we all can have full-time dawah, we all can do full-time dawah with salaries coming out from the Islamic school and the dawah centres,” he told the supporters.

Mr Razvi intends to set up 20 schools nationwide, with four planned for Melbourne.

In the recording he claimed the Islamic schools would teach ­material from Arab countries, and have “the entire course of the ­Islamic University of Medina, al-Azhar University in Egypt and many other universities embedded into the school curriculum”.

Classes would include Islamic doctrine, sharia, the Koran and Hadiths. “So a kid who comes out of that school in Year 12 will ­almost be a scholar, a very well ­educated person,” Mr Razvi said.

“We will be training brothers and sisters as young as five to give talks, to do dawah … to propagate the Islamic message to non-Muslims … We need kids as young as five, anyone who can walk, anyone who can talk.”

Finances for the new centre are in place. Mr Razvi has recently returned from a fundraising lecture tour of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, during which he addressed the World Assembly of Muslim Youth in Riyadh. A Commonwealth Bank account has been set up to receive local donations.

The school system was publicly touted at IREA’s Australian ­Islamic Peace Conference, held at Melbourne’s showgrounds in March last year. A series of posters at the conference designed to clear up “misconceptions’’ about Islam included one entitled “Hijab: A ­solution for rape”.

IREA was last year forced to cancel a public “interfaith’’ event at the University of Melbourne after it insisted on being allowed to enforce gender segregation of audience members. Mr Razvi had not responded to The Australian’s requests for comment yesterday.