Posted by NEWS on 9/9/2004, 20:05:27 Shiv Malik [New Statesman] It's a hot summer Sunday and I am stuck in a strip-lit hotel room five minutes from Heathrow Terminal One. All I want is for someone to pass me the freezer-cold bottle of water from the end of the table. I stare at the shaven-headed solicitor on my right, hoping, just hoping, that he will notice me, but he is speaking. "Where," asks Basharat Ali, "is the initiative for the individual to enter into his own economic undertakings in a communist system? In the Islamic and capitalist systems the initiative is upon the individual." Sajjad Khan, an accountant, pushes his glasses back up his nose: "Now that's not totally fair. There is no incentive on the individual, but there is incentive in doing something for the collective good." These and two other middle-aged, middle-class people are members of the worldwide Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir (Hizb for short), and I am sitting in on one of their normally private study circles. Marxist economic thought is just the sort of thing they do on a Sunday, and any university professor would die for this kind of enthused, informed debate. But not everybody thinks Hizb is so inoffensive. Far from it. "Hizb produces thousands of manipulated brains, which then graduate from Hizb and become members of groups like al-Qaeda," says Zeyno Baran, director of international security and energy programmes at the Nixon Centre, a think-tank based in Washington, DC. "Even if Hizb does not itself engage in terrorist acts, because of the ideology it provides, it acts like a conveyor belt for terrorists." It was the then leader of Hizb's branch in Britain, Omar Bakri, who called for Muslims to assassinate John Major on the eve of the first Gulf war. "We will celebrate his death," Bakri told the Daily Star. He was arrested and detained for 48 hours. Since that PR coup, this once obscure organisation has become a major source of radical Islamic thought. And since 9/11, it has been caught in the cross-hairs of Washington's big-gun think-tanks; Hizb has given them back what the end of the cold war took away: a war of ideas. Not liberal, soft-whip, Monbiot-mush ideas, but the kind of high-calibre ideas for which people are fighting and dying. "The west," says Baran, "can no longer ignore the deadly impact of Hizb ideology, which reaches millions of Muslims through cyberspace, the distribution of leaflets, and secret teaching centres. It is time to name the war correctly: this is a war of ideologies, and terrorist acts are the tip of the iceberg." Ariel Cohen, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the richest of the right-wing US think-tanks, compares Hizb to the Trotskyite wing of the international communist movement. He sees Hizb as offering an alternative form of globalisation. "This ideology," he has written, "poses a direct challenge to the western model of a secular, market-driven, tolerant, multicultural globalisation." Hizb ut-Tahrir translates as "party of liberation". It was set up by a Palestinian court clerk, Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, in 1953. In a Middle East awash with pan-Arabism and the politics of nationalism and race, it adopted Islamic teaching and scripture as its ideology, Leninist organisation as its method of action, and the re-establishment of the caliphate as its aim. The caliphate, or khilafah, dates back to the seventh century, when all Muslim lands were under the governance of a single elected caliph, and were subject to a single system of Islamic law. Hizb wants to recreate something similar now for the whole of North Africa and the Middle East and for much of central and south Asia. Al-Nabhani's party proposed a constitution of 187 articles for an Islamic state, detailing everything from Islamic economic and education systems to relationships between men and women (women being an "honour to be safeguarded", but having rights to own property, to vote and to do business). The Jordanian authorities then responsible for the pre-occupation Palestinian territories arrested al-Nabhani as soon as he tried to register his fledgling organisation. He was eventually forced underground and the party has remained there ever since. In the past 50 years, Hizb has spread its message to more than 40 countries, from Malaysia to Scandinavia. It refuses to give membership figures, but estimates hover around the million mark. Its support is thought to run much higher - roughly ten million in central Asia alone, according to the Arab news magazine al-Majalla. Although it has never been directly implicated in an act of violence, Hizb is banned in nearly every country in which it operates. Between 7,000 and 8,000 members are thought to be in prisons in Uzbekistan: it was over their treatment that the British ambassador to that country, Craig Murray, protested last year - they were being boiled alive, electrocuted and raped, he said - and got himself disciplined by the Foreign Office. Egypt, Syria and Libya are among the many other countries where Hizb members are imprisoned, sometimes for membership alone. Three British members were sentenced to five years in jail in Egypt this year for being in possession of Hizb literature. The party's activities were outlawed in Germany in 2002, when it was found guilty of distributing anti-Semitic material. Last year Russia arrested 55 members of the group. The idea of the Hizb "graduate" is not without foundation. According to intelligence sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's man in Iraq, is a former member of the Jordanian branch of Hizb. According to the same sources, the al-Qaeda commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also spent time with the party. When MI5 searched the home of Omar Sharif, the Derby father-of-three who committed suicide after failing to blow himself up in a bar in Tel Aviv in April 2003, it found plenty of Hizb literature.
For Allah and the Caliphate
Monday 13th September 2004
Hizb ut-Tahrir, with its millions of Muslim followers, is accused in the US of being a conveyor belt for terrorists. But how dangerous is it really? Shiv Malik reports
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