by Ed Husain
My nascent conviction and increasing commitment to Hizb ut-Tahrir was not based on mere teenage naivety, although that played a role. There were other, more important factors at play. At Hizb events they argued that Bosnian Muslims were white, blonde, and blue-eyed and had coexisted with Serbs for centuries, yet Serbs massacred Muslims in their thousands. What chance of survival did we have in Britain? The British government had played a key role in colonizing Muslims in India, Egypt, and other countries: it was a sworn enemy of Islam. It would not tolerate a strong Muslim community in Britain. Among second-generation immigrant Muslims, that was a powerful argument.
Hizb ut-Tahrir activists narrated grisly tales of Muslim men having their scrotums roped to motorbikes by Serbs who then sped off, leaving the castrated men to bleed to death. We were told of pregnant Muslim women being raped by Serbs, who then cut their unborn babies from their wombs. Television news bulletins reinforced the message of Hizb ut-Tahrir: 200,000 people lost their lives in the conflict, millions more were made homeless. The Hizb organized meetings and demonstrations right across the UK on the theme of Muslim slaughter in Bosnia. I admired their passion about the killing fields of the Balkans and their desire to halt the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia. Hizb ut-Tahrir, unlike Islamic Forum Europe, had a clear idea of where it was headed.
Without seeking permission from YMO leaders I attended the conference at the LSE, where a procession of speakers variously proposed that we should lobby parliament, write to MPs, and put pressure on Muslim governments to force the UN Security Council to take some sort of action. Omar Bakri - the charismatic, pugnacious leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, not yet demonized by the Sun - wasted no time in condemning the proposals of those who had spoken before him. His solution was at once radical, historical, and practical: an Islamic state with a powerful army. He took the main lecture theatre at the LSE by storm. No Muslim country, not even Saudi Arabia or Iran, was a true Islamic state. None implemented Shariah law in its entirety, so did not qualify as ‘Islamic’. They did not fight Serbs and Jews, sworn enemies of Muslims. A tired crowd, bored after listening to mundane political speeches, suddenly jumped to its feet, shouting ‘Jihad for Bosnia!’ Omar Bakri knew how to rouse people.
Where others cited UN resolutions, Omar Bakri cited history. He spoke about the power of the Abbasid and Ottoman caliphs to protect Muslims against non-Muslim aggression, and poked fun at the regimes of King Fahd, Hosni Mubarak, Colonel Qaddafi, King Hussein of Jordan, and Saddam Hussein. The then Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was a Coptic Christian, a lifelong adversary of Muslims. How could we expect help from our enemies?
In the eyes of the Hizb, there was no point in fundraising for charities operating in Bosnia - the Bosnians needed military support, not money. Omar Bakri famously declared that it was halal, or permissible, for Bosnian Muslims to eat Serbs, because they were at war, so there was no question of sending money for food. What Bosnia’s Muslims needed was the assistance of the army of the Islamic state.
At college we had not looked beyond sending individual and usually poorly trained fighters to join the jihad. David and others from the Hizb now explained to me that Muslim armies around the world were sitting in their barracks, polishing their guns, while fellow Muslims were being slaughtered. It was not the responsibility of individuals to go and fight, but the duty of the Muslim armies to unite under a single state, the caliphate, and then declare a jihad on the Serbs. We had the guns, we had the military capacity, and we had the wealth of the Gulf States. What we didn’t have was a centralized political leadership. This was more like it, I thought.
Omar Bakri and many of his contemporaries in Hizb ut-Tahrir had entered Britain as Arab political asylum seekers. There was not a non-Arab Muslim in the land who could argue with the wit and articulacy of Omar Bakri. I witnessed how easily he overran the arguments of his opponents. As for the other Arab asylum seekers, limited in numbers and grateful to Britain for shelter from their oppressive regimes, they had heard Islamist rhetoric in their home countries and did not have much time for Hizb ut-Tahrir. It was mostly second-generation British Muslims and converts who were seduced by the ‘Tottenham Ayatollah’. His mastery of the Arabic language, his ready and seemingly relevant quotes from the Koran and other sources, silenced us impressionable Muslims of Britain. Moreover, a particularly effective stratagem of Hizb ut-Tahrir was to convince its members that ‘working towards establishing an Islamic state is an Islamic obligation’, on a par with five daily prayers and the Haj. Not only were we trying to help the Muslims of Bosnia and establish an Islamic state, we were also fulfilling our religious duty, a wajib. Arab Islamists, products of the repressive political cultures of Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, succeeded in Britain. Who dared question the mighty Omar Bakri and suggest he had misunderstood the Koran? After all, Bakri and the Hizb were true Muslims. The few who disagreed were swiftly branded as lackeys, lap dogs, or puppets of the British government.
6.
Inside Hizb ut-Tahrir
The Islamist does not flatter the people, is not courteous to the authorities or care for the people’s customs and traditions, and does not give any attention to whether people will accept him or not. Rather, he must adhere to the ideology alone.
Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir
My interest in Hizb ut-Tahrir came at a critical time. At college there were others who were also coming under its influence. From outside, Hizb members ensured that our interest was not a passing phenomenon. There were seven of us, all members of YMO or sympathizers, who wanted to know what the Hizb was really about. Wahhabis had put out information that the group was ‘deviant’ in creedal matters. Many in the East London mosque believed that they were Shiite, and Sunni Islamists believed them to be infidels. Arab Islamists familiar with the Hizb from the Middle East suggested the Hizb were American agents. Who were they really? I had liked what I heard from David about Bosnia. His refutation of Mawdudi’s Islamism had been pungent. Omar Bakri at the London School of Economics was the only speaker who offered what seemed like a practical solution to the conflict in Bosnia. Now, I wanted to make up my own mind.
From its literature and by asking members of the Hizb I learnt that in 1952 Taqi Nabhani, founder of the Hizb, had applied to the Jordanian Interior Ministry to establish ‘a political party with Islam as its ideology’. The Hizb was, from its inception, committed to establishing an Islamic state dedicated to propagating its ideology. The Jordanian monarchy rejected the application on the grounds that the Hizb was committed to overthrowing the king. Right from the outset, the Hizb was banned. Uncowed, it gained momentum in neighbouring Arab countries and was eventually outlawed in every country in which it operated. Its aims were considered seditious, its plans destructive, and its politics iconoclastic. And yet the Hizb survived and thrived in the prisons of the Arab world, filled with political detainees of various Islamist groups.
Nabhani, born in 1909 in Ijzim in Ottoman Syria, now known as Palestine, came from a noble family of Arabs who were close to the imperial hierarchy. Unlike Mawdudi and Qutb, Nabhani was a trained Muslim scholar from al-Azhar, though he later broke ranks with traditional scholarship. He read widely and his writings were of a deeper nature than Mawdudi’s. He adopted Mawdudi’s idiom of ideological Islam, but developed it to suit the milieu of 1950s Middle East in which Israel seemed like a temporary reality, new kings and presidents appeared transient, and the birth of political movements ranging from Bathism to Nasserism was the norm. Amid this kerfuffle, Nabhani researched and preached the need for a political party with Islamism as its core.
Nabhani and other founders of the Hizb were convinced that the organization would secure political power within their lifetime. They were making history. That mindset of immediacy, urgency, political desperation was visible in the conduct of the Hizb members I associated with in London.
Nabhani in his wildest dreams had not envisaged that the Hizb would one day function in London, capital of
the reviled British Empire that had handed over Arab territory to the Israelis in 1948. Hizb members had requested political asylum in London during the 1980s. A member had been shot dead by the Libyan secret service outside Regent’s Park mosque late in the decade. Their primary zone of activity had always been the Middle East - until the early 1990s.
Falik noticed my fascination with Hizb ut-Tahrir’s ideas and literature. ‘You have important duties in the Islamic Society and YMO and you should continue with those,’ he admonished. ‘You shouldn’t waste your time with these people.’
Falik was a YMO stalwart. Under no circumstances did he wither. When successive Muslim groups came on campus, and many of us took an interest in what they had to say, Brother Falik stood firm, always believing that the way of Jamat-e-Islami was the only path to his personal salvation and that of the Muslim world too. I found that sort of certainty mind-numbing.
Two men, Farid Kasim and Jamal Harwood, were now central figures inside the Hizb. Farid was a Sheffield University-trained town planner and worked for Islington Borough Council. Jamal was a Canadian who had converted to Islam and worked as an accountant with J. P. Morgan in the City. Along with Salim Fredericks, another longtime member, these were the men who introduced the Hizb to British Muslims. Under their leadership, and Omar Bakri’s guidance, the Hizb targeted Tower Hamlets with steely determination. For the Hizb, Tower Hamlets was no ordinary borough: it was Britain’s most densely populated ‘Muslim area’.
The Hizb had three members studying at the Whitechapel-based London Hospital Medical College (LHMC). One of them, Patrick Ghani from Southend-on-Sea, was particularly active. Every week he organized talks with titles such as ‘The Hidden Pillars of Islam’, ‘The Economic System of Islam’, or ‘Solution for Bosnia’ at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. Students from Tower Hamlets College attended in large numbers and some of us started to realize that the Hizb was of a much higher intellectual calibre than affiliates of the Jamat-e-Islami in Britain, YMO and Islamic Forum Europe in particular.
At one meeting Jamal Harwood, the Hizb’s in-house economist, offered solutions to government debt in the Muslim world, suggesting that Muslim countries should withdraw from the World Bank and arguing for nationalization of Saudi, Kuwaiti, Iraqi, and Qatari oil wealth. The ‘Muslim oil argument’, in which oil is used not as an economic lever by OPEC but to increase the wealth of the ummah, was developed by Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Seven years later Osama bin Laden and his assistant, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, were to make the very same arguments (failing, incidentally, to attribute their ideas to their ideological teachers at Hizb ut-Tahrir).
I found the talks Patrick organized at LHMC enthralling. I could see that at college we had created a certain emotional hype about Islam, but here was a strategic vision, an alternative to the Jamat-e-Islami’s nebulous Islamism. After the talks I would spend hours in discussion with members of the Hizb, questioning them on matters ranging from the dialectical materialism of Marxists to abstruse points in Muslim jurisprudence. Whatever questions I asked, Hizb members always had answers. Nothing was unknown to them.
I was responsible for the Hizb ut-Tahrir entering Tower Hamlets College. Although its members had addressed the students before, their reception had been lukewarm until I, as Islamic Society president, offered them direct access to the Islamized youth on campus - a fact that escaped me at the time.
Sensing a fertile recruiting ground, the Hizb moved key members into a flat in Chicksand House, a two-minute walk from Brick Lane.
Within weeks the flat became the Hizb’s headquarters in Tower Hamlets, housing members of the Hizb such as the Kenyan radical Abdullah Hameed, who studied at Brunel University, and the SOAS undergraduate Burhan Haneef as well as others from Greenwich University.
Burhan, whom we called Bernie, was studying politics at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Originally from Slough, he was an exceptionally warm, witty, and wayward member of the Hizb. His door was always open to us. At college I was emerging as an ardent supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, increasingly dissenting from the YMO disciplinarians, not advertising YMO events and displaying little reverence for YMO leaders.
At East London mosque, they were aghast. Who were these people? How had they so successfully undermined YMO’s recruitment drive at Tower Hamlets College? How could they be stopped? Unable to counter the Hizb with ideas, Siraj Salekin even told Patrick ‘to go and fish in other waters’. I learnt later that such protectionism stemmed from a spate of defections. Several leading lights in YMO had departed for various other organizations, unable to accept YMO’s intellectual simplicity and obsession with Mawdudi.
Soon YMO members were holding briefings about the ‘devi ation of Hizb ut-Tahrir’. Warnings were thrown at me from all sides about why I should avoid them.
Azzam Tamimi and others from the Muslim Brotherhood advised YMO to leave Hizb ut-Tahrir alone and it would disappear of its own accord, as it had done in the Arab world. But Azzam Tamimi and his Muslim Brotherhood comrades had missed one key point: Britain offered the Hizb the freedom to express its ideas freely and recruit uninhibitedly. The Hizb was legal in Britain, but illegal in the Arab world. It would not disappear unless the British state wanted it to disappear. In the absence of governmental disapproval, the Hizb would continue to recruit and campaign unmolested for another decade.
I had many, many questions about Hizb ut-Tahrir to ask Bernie. Allegations that were made against the group by others, I clarified with him during late-night meetings at Chicksand House.
At the same time Patrick visited me regularly at college. Occasionally Bernie would speak at our events too. Now I began to ride roughshod over the structure imposed on me by YMO: the committee, the minutes, the organizational framework. All this I saw as a way of trying to control my behaviour.
To me, it became crucial that we explain to Muslims at college that they had an important role to play in the world. We were not little Tower Hamletters, as YMO had made us, with links only to the Indian subcontinent. The Muslim nation was a global nation, and we all had a religious obligation to establish a global state that would rival the United States and Europe. This was not fantasy. Not all that long ago the Ottoman Empire had roared at the gates of Europe; we would not only repeat history, we would make it.
Following long sessions with Bernie and Patrick, I and seven members of the Islamic Society had created a separate Hizb faction at college. No longer was I just the president of the Islamic Society, I was also the local leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Patrick had given me some literature to read, including The Way to Revival written by the founder of the party, Taqi Nabhani. Like me, Nabhani had once been a member of a less radical Islamist organization. I was with YMO; he had been with our Arab counterpart, the Muslim Brotherhood. However, he left the Brotherhood disillusioned and soon started Hizb ut-Tahrir as a result of his own independent analysis of the Muslim condition in the 1940s. I related to Nabhani. Like him, I was a member of another Islamist organization and felt disillusioned by their ossified thought.
My taleemi jalsa sessions and other training programmes at East London mosque had always been lacking in evidence or substance, and too centred on Bangladesh. After all, I had never even visited Bangladesh; why should I concentrate simply on supporting Jamat-e-Islami in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt? Mawdudi’s writing had instilled in me a deep commitment to ‘Islam as a way of life’, but what did that mean in reality? We believed that if only Jamat-e-Islami could win elections in either Pakistan or Bangladesh, then the whole country would become an Islamic country and gradually we would solve its people’s problems. We were committed to gradual Islamization, and being pragmatic and gradual was crucial to us. This, on the whole, was based on realpolitik, and had no scriptural support.
In my discussions with David, Patrick, and Bernie, ideas I had accepted at taleemi jalsa were ripped to shreds. Sami had ta
ught me, before my sixteenth birthday, that democracy was first developed by Muslims in seventh-century Arabia. Now, under Hizb tutelage, I firmly located democracy in the Greek city-state of Athens. And not only was it Greek, at the Hizb we considered democracy as idolatrous, since it did not allow for the One God to control mankind, but allowed human beings to choose their own destiny. How was it possible for Jamat-e-Islami educators to make such terrible mistakes?
Patrick pointed out to me that Jamat-e-Islami and its Arab counterpart, the Muslim Brotherhood, had strayed from the ideas set out in Milestones. Qutb, Patrick explained, had written his book under the influence of Hizb members he had met during his imprisonment in Egypt. Indeed, Qutb referred to being in discussions with a certain group of Muslims in prison in the first letters he wrote to his family. Those letters, later published as Milestones, were the ideas of Hizb ut-Tahrir: that Arab governments should be forcibly removed, that Muslims had no nationality, and that no other civilization had anything to teach us. Qutb adopted the same repertoire of expressions as Nabhani: ideas, intellect, thought, challenge, systems, concepts, destruction, construction.
I had graduated from studying the works of Mawdudi and Qutb and was now ready to receive the wisdom of the last ideologue of modern Islamism: Nabhani. In The Way for Revival Nabhani outlined three key stages through which Hizb ut-Tahrir wanted to lead the Muslim nation.
The concept of the ‘Muslim nation’, as opposed to a number of disparate ethnic communities, was key. To the Hizb, Indians, Malaysians, Turks, Indonesians, Arabs, Africans were all part of a single, global Muslim nation, an ummah. We were weak because we were divided. Muslim lands (not countries) were poor because the Muslims of Sudan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Kashmir did not share in the oil wealth of the Gulf countries. Oil, we argued, was a gift from God to the Muslims, all Muslims, and not just the Gulf Arabs. Muslims were ‘One Nation, under One God’.