Parenting & Family Quote by Abu Bakar Bashir

The line is a blunt attempt to turn faith from conviction into compliance, and it does so by collapsing religion into a disciplinary system. Bashir isn’t debating Islam’s merits or inviting devotion; he’s asserting jurisdiction. “If they do not behave” frames belief as behavior management, something measurable and correctable. “For instance” is doing quiet work here: prayer isn’t presented as a sacred act but as an easy test case, a visible metric of loyalty. The real subject isn’t prayer. It’s power.

The subtext is a blueprint for how an ideology reproduces itself: not through persuasion but through enforcement inside the family, where authority is intimate and consequences are immediate. Parenting becomes the first courtroom, the home the first state. “Punish them” lands with calculated severity because it refuses euphemism. There’s no talk of guidance, teaching, or love. Just sanction. That starkness signals to followers that harshness is not an accidental excess but a virtue, proof of seriousness.

Context matters because Bashir has been associated with hardline Islamist politics in Indonesia and with rhetoric that treats religious discipline as social order. Read in that light, the quote functions as more than a personal parenting preference; it’s a miniature of a broader program. If you can normalize coercion at the level of children and prayer, you can scale it upward: neighbors, communities, laws. The sentence is short because it wants to be repeatable, a rule you can carry into everyday life - and use to justify cruelty as duty.