Last week I blogged about the alleged attack on Maajid Nawaz by a British member of Hizb ut Tahrir. It happened while he was touring Pakistan, warning students about the dangers of Islamism. The Guardian covered his trip at the weekend and also revealed that:
[Maajid] used the lecture tour to make an allegation against HT. He said the organisation had launched a covert mission to recruit serving Pakistani officers to help foment a military coup. Its focus was officers visiting Britain for military training at Sandhurst. Nawaz said the group managed to recruit several officers. “We sent them to Pakistan to infiltrate the army. They were recruiting for three years and tried to mount a coup,” he said.
It confirms what we had all feared: that Islamist groups are exporting terror and subversion from this country. What is most worrying about this is that HuT remains legal in Britain and is actively plotting to undermine our allies abroad. Worse still, that ally is highly unstable, a failing state (if not failed already) and, lethally, a nuclear power.
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Of course, all of this is perfectly in line with the modus operandi of HuT who promote the idea of military coups and armed revolution to achieve power. They don’t test their ideas at the ballot box because they say democracy is ‘kufr’ (pdf) but one suspects that if they did, their support would soon be found wanting.
Elections held in Pakistan’s lawless and conservative North-Western Frontier Province last year revealed as much. Although the conservative Islamist alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) capitalised on a surge of anti-American sentiment in 2002, after a few years of having them in office the voters of the NWFP removed them from office. Similarly Bangladesh, which has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, also decimated the Jamaati-Islami during elections in December 2007. They were left with only two seats in the 300-seat parliament, while the secular Awami League romped to victory.
Of course, it is not just the Muslim masses that have deserted these groups – even their own children have abandoned them.
So, HuT favour a coup instead. They couldn’t dream of taking power legitimately so they hope to impose their version of Islam (which is closer to Marx than Mohammed) on Muslims everywhere. To do that, they try to recruit soldiers from Muslim armies to their cause, as Maajid revealed.
HuT isn’t the only group to have exported Islamist terrorism from this country. In the 1990s Abu Hamza’s group ‘Supporters of Shariah’ were allegedly involved in a plot to kidnap western tourists in Yemen. Hamza has now been ‘de-hooked’ while he is detained courtesy of Her Majesty.
Then, shortly after 9/11, Omar Bakri’s al-Muhajiroun sent a number of its recruits to terrorise our allies abroad. For a while they enjoyed a high profile in Pakistan (pdf) and, worse, some of their British supporters also managed to kill 3 people at a Cafe in Tel Aviv. After 7/7 the government rightly banned them and expelled Omar ‘won’t the Royal Navy please save me?’ Bakri from Britain.
Hizb ut Tahrir is no different to either of those groups. They pose a real threat to the very freedoms which Britain extends them, using our values against us. Muhajiroun and Supporters of Shariah are both banned, so the question is: why are HuT still legal?
15 Comments
I think this is a really interesting point – it does seem as if HT has a similar eschatology to Marxism, in terms of explaining why the revolution hasn’t come. Is there a decent academic study of Islamism v Marxism out there?
Excellent point Shikwa. However, if they are banned, wouldn’t that just drive them underground? Wouldn’t people still be espousing the same ideology over and over again through front groups and individual’s? Hitting Institute and Hamza Tzortzis is one example where they pretty much say the same thing as HT, ‘liberalism bad, (political) Islam good’.
HT have also posted something interesting on their website, where they are thinking of going underground in Bangladesh because their activities are being hindered by the Bangladeshi government. http://www.hizb.org.uk/hizb/news-watch/ht/khelafat-come-what-may.html
If that were to happen here, wouldn’t they be dificult to monitor, but more importantly to counter?
It is Hittin Institute not Hitting as spelled in my previous comment.
Houriya – I take your point about groups going underground, but isn’t it more important to send a message that groups who tolerate, support and assist violent extremists are not acceptable, even in a tolerant pluralist society?
At present it seems like we’ve got stuck with the worst of all situations; a government which has promised proscription and yet done nothing.
If you speak to people who used to be members of that group like Ed and Maajid then they’ll tell you that HuT are already underground – everything is done in secret anyway, so that argument doesn’t work for me when we’re talking about proscription.
PBLB – I think, as a society, we are starting to send those signals – that such totalitarian ideologies purported by Islamists will not be tolerated in a pluralist society. And I think this comes across stronger when we can denounce and dismantle the crap they purport. The more we say this, the less attractive groups like HT will become. Besides, in a pluralist society we should allow horrible opinions to exist, hence, plural.
Shikwa – One argument against banning is that they may go underground. If they operate underground anyway, then again what’s the point in banning?
From the article Houriya links to:
That’s one reason why banning or proscribing is advantageous.
Hizbut Tahrir have been very active and very successful in expensive well-heeled private universities in Bangladesh where they have succesfully indoctrinated any number of young men and women. The kind of people who can afford these universities are usually the relatively well to do. There is a reason why HT has done so well in these swanky new universities. Because potential recruites who are normally middle class men perceive an element of anti-elitist elitism in HT’s advocacy. The recruiters speak in British accents and yet disavow democracy and western decadence. This rings true with these potential recruits.
So what happens when HT are forced to go underground? Well they will lose their shiny western appeal and become forced to share the same ideological space as local “salt-of-the-earth” Islamist revolutionary grunts such as the Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and the Harkatul Jihad al Islami (HuJI) – whose members really are regarded as hardcore jihadi neanderthals whom even HT wouldn’t invite home for tea and sympathy.
So I don’t think HT are really relishing the thought of being officially proscribed or banned. They know they will be associated with bona-fide militant jihadi terrorists, which is not the image they want to portray. Yet.
This is bound to drive down their recruitment.
To disrupt and hinder their public activity.
Houriya – I’m completely sympathetic to your approach of getting these ideas out into the open where they can be shown up for what they are. But surely groups like HT constitute an actual danger to the state?
Then there is the question of maintaning consistency – how would you deal with Shikwa’s point that Muhajiroun and Supporters of Shariah are both proscribed?
Re: the circular argument about banning, your argument seems to be that if you accept they operate underground, then there isn’t any point banning them? Surely the whole point of banning them is being able to apply the offence of belonging to a proscribed organisation? It comes back to being able to send a strong legal and political message, that these kind of organisations are unacceptable.
The underground argument is not applicable here at all. HT have a public face and a private face in the UK. Most of the indoctrination does take place underground in secret halaka sessions where your not allowed to tell anyone where you are going and you must remove you battery from your mobile, just to add some extra Mystique and make their sad recruits feel they are really a part of something special. So you can’t drive them further underground.
But I think HT are paper tigers anyway. They have had so many members leave in the last few years that they are not worth worrying about any more. Also how can anyone take a party seriously when it calls for unity of the Ummah yet is split into 4 seperate factions itself. Furthemore, how can you decry greedy capitalists when your leader is a gluttonous obese himself, sorry Imran didn’t mean to get personal.
Lets take a brief look at the founder of HT – Taqiuddin al-Nabhani.
Nabhani was an independent thinker and a revivalist. Formerly a Ba’athist (an Nationalist Arab Socialist Party), he maintained his Arab centric socialist agenda but presented it in Islamic language by enveloping his Arab super-nation state concept for a super “Islamic” State which must concentrate on the Arab speaking Muslims. He challenged the status quo. He attacked mainstream Islamic beliefs, such as the spiritual dimension of life, as being nothing but a mystic concept influenced by Byzantine beliefs and nothing to do with authentic Islamic teaching, which maintained the that man was purely material in his view. Some have commented on him being Mutazilite in this regard. The ramification being not recognizing, but rather criticizing the orthodox and Sufi teachings of his heritage such as the famous Sheikh Yusuf al-Nabhani the orthodox Shafi’I and Sufi.
The founder of HT was critical of the ‘irrational’ dogma of Sheikh Yusuf and considered along with orthodox Islam’s other beliefs in God ability to intervene in natural laws for the sake of righteous (karamat), and Sufism as a whole – all of which was influenced the Persian and Hellenic culture. He was not afraid to challenge orthodox doctrine, such as the faith in Islamic eschatological beliefs such as purgatory in the grave (Azab ul-Qabr) as being contradictory to Quranic teaching; therefore the masses of literature pertaining to the subject should be rejected as ‘isolated’ reports (khabar ahad).
Nabhani (the founder of HT) was not afraid to criticize all of the scholarly class, he was famous for damning them all as having abandoned God’s judgment and denied orthodox Sunni belief in infallibility of the Muslim nation and the collective weight as scholars (known as the doctrine of Ijma – or scholarly consensus). He considered this superfluous and all of the scholars of his age not only declined, but sinners who had abandoned the apparently obvious obligation to establish an expansionist Caliphate as they had all rejected this ‘religious duty’ and therefore there was no value to the scholarly class (Ulema). He was not afraid in this regard to issue bold Fatawa (legal edicts), whether it was regarding the Islamic validity of suicide bombing, hijacking Israeli planes, using military force to prevent the independence of countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh.
As a Palestinian, a revolutionary ideologue of former Communist mindset, an Arabist and graduate from al-Azhar university – it is easier to understand the influences which made up his originally Arab centric, anti-Israeli, Islamo-communist conception of an Islamist Super-state. His modernist tendencies and criticism of traditional Islamic teaching, and extremist rhetoric and ideology have given rise to many militant extremism movements, not only Palestinian Jihad (Asad Tamimi former Leadership member of HT), Saleh Sirryah of Egyptian Jihad, the assassins of Anwar Sadat the Egyptian president, and others.
According to Micheal Aflaq (founder of Baathism) the best way to unite the Arabs was through their religion and the the best way to take power (nusrah) was through military coups. Nabhani basically mixed these Baathist ideas with his interpretation of Islam and created HT. A movement who wants to come to power through a military coup and impose its version of Islam on everyone. Then it wants to fight a violent Jihad until it has conquered the world, even if millions of Muslims have to die.
So HT is nothing more than a mixture of Arab Socialism and a medieval interpretation of Islam.
Should it be banned?…………YES!
Hizb Ut tahrir is resiliant to no matter what is being done to him : Banning or not banning , We must realize that HUT has Inner power derived from The Creed Of Islam : an ideology wherby it’s held intellectually and so deeply thought over by the members and individulas who have formatted their being as a whole around this believe . No force on earth can defeat an Idea such as This , Islam being this Idea is then Invincible . Hizb Ut tahrir is successfull across all sectors of societies not Only the Highly educated , It is truely an Ummah Hizb . .
Khilafah is inevitable and Inshallah imminent , It is too late for any one to abort HUT march for Khilafah ,,
so many myths are said here such as Imam Taqi Al din was Bathis ?? any proof for that ?
and The Nawazi can cash on their Books as much as a parrasite thrive cash on a suage drain .. HUT Hot ,And will debut,
the Khilafah is a Must
Again slogans and catch phrases, no substance, no sustantiation, no common sense. Let me know if you want to debate any serious issue.
Thanks for writing this great blog I really enjoyed.
yes, i think that’s pretty evident from your post.
b’shalom
bananabrain