Posted by Last Part on 9/9/2004, 20:05:48, in reply to "For Allah and the Caliphate" Unlike al-Qaeda, which operates on a loose, "franchise" basis, Hizb is rigidly controlled by its central leadership, based in Palestine. Below that, national organisations or wilayas, usually headed by a group of 12, control networks of local committees and cells. New members must spend at least two years studying party literature, under the guidance of mentors, before they take the party oath. A parallel, separate structure exists for women, who are encouraged to become fully active members. Last year, the British party, headed by a 28-year-old Indian IT engineer, Jalaluddin Patel, attracted 10,000 Muslims to a conference, entitled "British or Muslim?", at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. It was Britain's biggest Muslim event to date, and the organisers plan to make this year's conference, due to take place in London at the end of November, even bigger. Fridays are when Hizb members work hardest. At the end of prayers each week, they distribute 100,000 leaflets to the faithful as they emerge from mosques. Up and down the country, from Edinburgh to Essex, the organisation's smoothly run, PowerPoint-presented meetings draw in those who are fed up with the bland, sterilised sermons of most imams post-9/11. In Bradford, Hizb hires a room at a business centre a stone's throw from the central mosque. The 48 chairs are quickly taken mainly by middle-aged men, some suited, others in more casual attire. Some have children with them who run around making quiet mischief during the meeting. The laptop, projector and software, provided by one of Hizb's many IT-savvy members, have been set up for a talk entitled "The drugs epidemic in the west". The video begins and a close-up of a small, frail-looking white boy - a 12-year-old heroin addict - appears. His harrowing tale is intersected with shots of Muslim children playing merrily in the streets. At the end of the video the speaker, tubby, bearded and well-spoken, admonishes not only capitalist society but also the Muslim community for failing to care for non-Muslims. After all they, too, are the victims of western values. Hassan Mujtaba, a national committee member and an IT lecturer at a college in East Ham, London, explained to me afterwards Hizb's big solution for Britain: model Islamic communities. "What it is really about," he said, "is maintaining our identity as Muslims, living by the Islamic sharia rules in this country and showing the British public that we share their problems: the problems of the upbringing of children and caring for parents when they're old, or drugs or crime or education." He continues: "We feel that what we are providing is something better than what is already here and perhaps we'll become a model." So what exactly will Hizb do to turn the drug-ridden Muslim slums of Bradford and Leeds into beacons of social improvement? "As a political party," says Mujtaba, "we wouldn't engage in action that would divert us from our main aim, which is the establishment of the caliphate. We wouldn't go around building a school or a mosque or setting up a drugs project. We would collate the information, really closely observe what is going on in British society, and then provide a template that would assist those people to go and establish an Islamic community." In other words, Hizb doesn't do elbow grease. It is no Hezbollah, with a large network of schools and hospitals. Nor does it condone suicide bombing. Its route to power is the peaceful coup, in which a general or politician seizes control of a state in the name of the caliphate. No arms would be used, because the Prophet Muhammad never raised arms to establish his state. This does not impress the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen. "Hizb is what Lenin would term as 'the open-ended organisation'. It is indoctrinating tens of thousands of Muslims, enabling the creation of an environment for armed struggle. The caliphate is inimical to democracy and human rights and women's rights. Its goals are, in essence, totalitarian. Let me tell you something else," he says, before rushing off to take part in a debate on Fox TV. "A few years back, I talked to very senior government figures in the UK about al-Qaeda and Abu Hamza [the jailed extremist cleric] and they said, 'Oh, don't worry, they have rights and we can't just throw them in prison', but after three years they have come to the same conclusion: that these people are dangerous." The spokesman of Hizb's British branch, Imran Waheed, agrees that the party is the biggest player in this newly declared ideological war. He has just passed his psychiatry exams and is in buoyant mood. We talk about Francis Fukuyama. "There's a quote of his where he says we've reached the end of history because there's a lack of a viable alternative ideology to capitalism and western civilisation. We view our work as a direct challenge to that statement: we have to prove him wrong. We believe Islam has a history of world leadership, and [that] Islam is a comprehensive ideology which is an alternative to western civilisation . . . We don't believe that it is a threat to the people in the west . . . You know, there are many people who are disenchanted with their lives under the western system, but at the moment there is no practical alternative. Islam is an alternative . . . We are increasingly looking to interact with western thinkers, academics and the masses to illustrate to them what type of a state it is that we want to establish, so that when it is established, western regimes won't find it so easy to undertake military action towards it." So when will this state arrive on the world stage? "Ah, this is the question which everyone asks me and it is not one I can really answer. We believe that victory is not in our hands; it is in the hands of the Creator. Our obligation is to create a suitable environment for that change to come about . . . While al-Nabhani probably imagined a small state . . . in Jordan or Syria, I can now imagine a giant being established throughout a large part of the Muslim world due to the strength of feeling that exists." Here lies Hizb's greatest achievement: to have shifted the debate in the Muslim world from rule by nationalist authority to rule by Islam. But even with its draft constitutions to hand, it seems laughable that Hizb, armed only with the righteousness of its ideas, could overpower some of the most ruthless regimes in the world. Yet when Osama Bin Laden talks about the caliphate, it can justifiably credit itself with being his inspiration. After two and a half hours on that summer Sunday near Heathrow Airport, we are finally finished. The group has managed to discuss to death four simple paragraphs of al-Nabhani's book The Economic System in Islam. At this rate, it will take them a year to get through the whole thing. So why have the leaders of Hizb, a usually secretive organisation, allowed me to spend a month with them? Why have they bothered to ferry me around, meticulously organise my every visit, give up hours of their time to answer my every inquiry? Imran Waheed tells me it is because they want to get their message across. Since 9/11, they have been afraid they will be branded as a terrorist organisation. All they want to do is to carry on their debates with intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and George Carey. After all, if they're not violent, can their ideas be so dangerous? To quote: "Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?" Good question, Stalin.
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